"Yes, a small town. It was so great to be in Honolulu where we didn't know anyone. My feet didn't feel the pavement for a year. But we had a hard time. Food stamps and all that, even welfare for a while. Things settled down when I started driving a Charley's cab and Sally cleaned houses. Cleaning houses isn't bad work--cash--anybody gives you a hard time you just go somewhere else. Here's looking at you." They touched glasses. "Sally had a couple of steady gigs where she liked the people and knew what she was supposed to do every week." His mind was moving back. "Some amazing things did happen . . . " "Oh, good," Alison said. "One afternoon I went over to Kahala to pick up Sally at a cleaning job. She was disturbed. Sally was a sweetheart, but she didn't talk much; after six years of marriage I knew I had to ask if I wanted to know what was going on. "She described a scene between her boss, heiress to the Cannon towel fortune, and her boss's daughter. The daughter told her mother that a nice man had come into her room during the night, had sat on her bed and talked to her. The mother explained that dreams sometimes seemed real. The daughter said that it wasn't a dream. They argued. There were tears, and the daughter ran upstairs." Joe paused. "Sally thought that the mother had handled it badly." "What did you think?" Alison asked. "What did I know? Anyway, time flew by. I got nervous; I thought maybe I would never do anything but drive a cab. I got a job managing a tennis club on the other side of the pali--a good job--a house, a truck, a pool in which Kate could learn to swim, acres for her to run around in. "Sally operated the snack bar; Kate went to kindergarten. Mornings, I walked into Kailua to drink coffee and write." "Just like this morning," Alison said. "Yes. I was trying to understand Honolulu . . . as though it could be grasped and set, presented, like a pearl." Joe sipped his whiskey. "I became friendly with a regular at the Rob Roy Coffee Shop, an ex-machinist who had fled Chicago to start over in Hawaii. 'You gotta meet Mike,' he told me one day. 'You guys would get along.' I asked him about Mike. 'Mike's the cat burglar. You know, the one they're always writing about in the paper."' "I didn't want any trouble with the law, but, as usual with me, curiosity won out. Several nights later Mike and I were seated at a table in Crazy Horse, a topless bar that catered to Marines. He was short and stocky, intense. After a couple of beers, I said, 'So, I heard you were the cat burglar. That right?'. "'Guess so,' he said. I asked him how that had happened. "'It's so damned easy,' he said. He had been adopted by a well-to-do couple. The relationship hadn't worked out as they had hoped. He told me about robbing Aku over and over. Aku was a radio personality. Mike said he couldn't stand him. Mike had never been caught, even though the cops, by this time, knew. The island is small; word gets around.