Irene’s father taught her how to surf when she was eleven or twelve. This was before the war, before the California beaches began to fill with people surfing or learning to surf. He woke her before dawn one morning and told her to put on her bathing costume, and the two of them drove south from the city until they reached Santa Cruz. Just the two of them. Mrs. Foster stayed abed in their house on Balboa Street; she was by then in the last stages of the sickness that would kill her. Foster smelled a little of whiskey, but then he usually smelled of whiskey. He told Irene to go back to sleep until they got there, so she settled down on the seat and closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep. How could she? She listened to the rattle of axles and the burr of the engine, to Hank Foster’s whistle. Once or twice another car swept by, and the headlights illuminated the air, but otherwise it was as dark as night, as dark as only the hour before dawn can be.

They reached the bay at last. Foster pretended to wake her and Irene pretended to wake. She made a show of rubbing her eyes like a baby, and Foster laughed. The air had begun to lighten. She saw the stubble on his jaw, the blond disarray of his hair, the creases along his eyes and cheeks. He was wearing his own bathing costume, well used. He untied something from the roof of the car, and that turned out to be a surfboard. It was enormous and ungainly, so heavy (Irene grabbed one end of it to help her father carry it down the beach) it couldn’t possibly float. But it did. Foster explained how he had carved it himself from a local redwood, under the instruction of a Hawaiian fellow who had come to California for surfing demonstrations a few years ago. He’d gone to watch—did Irene remember that afternoon?—and thought it looked so grand, he ended up trying it himself. That was Hank Foster for you.

They found the edge of the ocean. Even in later years, Irene still remembered the rough sand on the soles of her bare feet, and the chill salt mist that rolled off the sea. She remembered how frigid the water was, how it squeezed the breath from her lungs. She didn’t remember the surfing itself. Probably she never quite made it to her feet on that ungainly board that first morning. But she remembered her father’s strong arm, she remembered the wildness of the surf, the freedom, the understanding that they were doing something forbidden, that Mrs. Foster would be furious when they got home.

But Irene also remembered the drive back north. The morning sunshine dried her wet skin and Foster told her about the Hawaiian princes who attended boarding school in San Mateo twenty years earlier and used to come down to surf at Santa Cruz. How surfing wasn’t just a sport or a hobby, it was like a religion for them, a ritual of kingship. You couldn’t rule over other men unless you could master the giant waves of Waikiki and Kahalu’u. To test yourself against the ocean was to test the essence of your human spirit.

They didn’t go surfing every morning, Irene and her father. But they went often enough that Irene soon needed her own surfboard, and the muscle to manage it on the Santa Cruz coastline, both of which she acquired pretty quickly. Irene was tall and athletic, a natural at surfing and pretty much any sport, really. But mostly she had human spirit. That was it, Foster used to say, as they drove north from Santa Cruz toward home, damp and exhausted. That was what made Irene such a natural. She yearned to be free of the earth.

Anyway, that’s why Irene woke up every morning at four o’clock and drove from her small house beneath the Hollywood Hills down to the beach at Santa Monica. She was the only woman there, but nobody seemed to care. Out there, she was treated—to the extent she was treated at all—like any other surfer. Your sex was irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was to surf well. Today she surfed exceptionally well. The waves were big and slow, the way Irene liked them. She rode them for an hour or so, and emerged from the cold foam tired and exalted, like a warrior from battle. As she walked up the beach to the cliffs, carrying her heavy surfboard, she passed a man, bent down to examine something inside a clump of dune grass, who looked up at her and smiled. She recognized him. He surfed here often; first man on the water, most mornings. As acceptance went, it was a small gesture. Still, it was something. He was what she thought of as a typical California specimen: wide shouldered and underfed, earnest and deeply tanned, couple inches taller than Irene, wet hair slicked back from a hollow-cheeked face, the kind of face that stuck in your mind, that made you think you had seen him somewhere before. Every time she saw him, she thought he should eat more. She hoisted the board more securely on her shoulder for the climb up the path.

“Hey there! Miss!”

Irene swung awkwardly, bracing her foot on a firm patch of sand. The fellow stood a few feet below, looking up at her. One hand shaded his brow from the rising sun and the other hand cradled some object next to his chest.

“I don’t mean to bother you or anything, but . . . well, you don’t happen to be looking for a cat, maybe?”

“A cat?”

He moved his hand to reveal a small feline head, white fur and pink nose, crisp triangle ears. A patch of gray-brown tabby spilled down its forehead, and a ginger patch surrounded the right eye. “Well. Kitten, I guess. Not yours, is it?”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“Found it huddled in the grass there.” He nodded at the nearby dune. “Must’ve got lost from its mother or something.”

“Of all places for a kitten.”

“Or else some bastard dumped him here.” He turned the kitten to face him, revealing a skinny, delicate rib cage and ragged fur. The white patches were immaculate, as if bleached. The head was so absurdly large for that emaciated body. The man rubbed his nose against the tabby patch on its forehead and addressed the tiny kitten face with just enough volume so Irene could hear him. “How’d you get here, little guy? Beach is no place for you.”

The kitten yawned. Irene shifted her weight, because the surfboard was heavy and dug into her shoulder, but she made no move to leave. The sight mesmerized her, the frail calico belly encompassed by those bony hands, the thick nose caressing the minuscule feline nose. Kitten in relief against dark serge bathing costume, tanned surfer’s skin. From the look of that wet, heavy hair, this man had already encountered the ocean this morning. The drops still rolled down his temples and neck and forearms; the sleeves of his bathing costume were rolled to the elbows.

“He’s awfully fetching,” she said.

“Yeah, a real heartbreaker. What am I going to do with you, fella?”

“Can’t you just take him home with you?”

“I just might.”

The kitten leaned into his cheek and closed its eyes in a delirium of relief. Irene’s foot began to slip; the sand dissolved beneath her. She scrabbled a bit and the kitten opened its eyes to regard her.

“Oh,” Irene said.

The eyes were lighter than Irene expected, pale amber. The kitten blinked and gathered itself. In a single athletic spring, it soared from the man’s grasp to the sand next to Irene’s left foot and wound itself around her bare ankle.

“Well,” the man said.

“Oh, he tickles!”

“That’s gratitude for you.”

Irene choked back a giggle.

“Say. You all right? Let me give you a hand with that board.”

“No, thanks. I’m perfectly—perfectly fine—”

“You sure?”

Well. The board was heavy. The path was steep. The man was attractive. On the other hand, while he had that kind of face that stuck in your mind, it was also the kind of face that said he might be trouble. Irene couldn’t say why. He seemed straightforward enough. Kittens adored him. His chin was sturdy and all, his smile was sincere. His voice made an easy California rumble. Behind him, the waves roared in from across the Pacific, keeping time to the beat of the universe. The kitten rubbed its cheek on the round bone of her ankle.

“I guess I’m all right,” Irene said. She pulled her leg free from the kitten, swung forward again, overbalanced the eighty-pound surfboard on her shoulder and toppled back into the sand at Trouble’s feet.

Trouble had a name, it turned out. “Mallory,” he said, sticking out his hand, when Irene’s surfboard was safely secured to the roof of the Model T and they had both visited the huts to change into dry, respectable clothes. The kitten now nestled in the crook of Mr. Mallory’s arm, purring like a motorboat. Irene stuck out a finger and rubbed its forehead.

“Irene Foster,” she said.

“You know, you’re the only girl who comes out here mornings.”

“I’m no girl. Twenty years old last month.”

“Still and all. Who taught you to surf like that?”

“My father.”

“You don’t say. Surfs out here too?”

“No,” she said. “Just me.”

Mr. Mallory squinted his eyes a little, like he was trying to figure out what she meant by that. He wore a newsboy’s cap over his damp hair, and he grabbed the brim and pulled it lower on his forehead, while his face turned away to observe the western horizon, the grand Pacific. He tickled the kitten’s chin, and it stretched out obligingly, eyes closed.

Mallory, she thought. He had a name, Mr. Mallory, and as she repeated the words in her head, some bell dinged. Some ring of familiarity.

She nodded to the kitten. “What’re you going to name him?”

“I don’t know. Sandy?”

“I guess that makes sense. My father used to say you should never forget where you came from.” She reached out again and smoothed the fur between its ears. “Besides, it’s practical, isn’t it?”

“Practical? How so?”

“Why, if he turns out to be a she, you can keep the name.”

Mr. Mallory looked a little shocked. He held up the kitten and peered underneath. “I’ll be damned. You might be right.”