e asked, "The Tahiti Nui, do you know it? In Hanalei?"

"A restaurant, bar?"

"Yup. With a porch. I want to have a beer on the porch." Mo looked at
her watch. "Plenty of time," Joe said. "Which flight are you on?"

"Four-thirty," she said.

"Mine is quarter to six . . . We still have time. Maybe I can get on
the early one." They drove over a stream that curved through sparkling
green rice paddies. Shortly afterwards, they stopped by the Tahiti Nui.

They sat on a wooden porch and looked across the humpy patched blacktop
road to a steep hillside, densely green and silent. "Happiness," Joe
said, touching Mo's glass with his. "By some accounts, Hawaii is the
most isolated land mass in the world. Kauai is the farthest out of the
inhabited islands, and here we are at the end of the road. It stops
right over there, can't make it around the Na Pali coast." He drank his
beer and waved at the view. "Isn't it great, Mo? End of the road. Can't
go any farther. How relaxing can you get? Nowhere to go but back--when
we feel like it."

"At three o'clock," Mo said. She took a picture of the road and one of
an orange cat curled on an old sofa next to the table.

"I had a cat like that once--'Jeremy,'" Joe said.

She turned and took one of him. "Joe Burke, at the end of the road,"
she offered in explanation.

"A long way from where I started."

"You were from Woodstock, right?" Joe nodded. "Were you at the
festival?"

"No. I was running a laundromat that year. I leased it from an old
friend whose wife was sick of cleaning it. I couldn't get away. It was
no big deal. There had been little festivals for years--'Soundouts,' we
called them--music all night, sleep in a field. I had no idea it was
going to be so huge. And anyway, it wasn't actually in Woodstock; it
was about forty miles away. Did you go?"

"I couldn't," Mo said. "I was in Vienna in a convent school. My father
was on sabbatical. It was awful. My sister Beth was already in college.
I wish I could have heard Jimi Hendrix's _Star Spangled Banner_."

"A major moment," Joe said. "When Hendrix died, the hot radio station
in Honolulu scheduled that piece for twelve noon. They asked everyone
to open their windows and crank up the volume. That was when I was
driving a cab; you could hear Hendrix blasting all over the city."

Mo looked at her watch again. "It's that time, Joe."

"Damn shame," he said. They said goodbye to the cat, and Mo drove them
back to Lihue where J