Makes herself a nice life.

They drive up the coast to Freddie’s by the Sea.

It’s an old San Diego place on the beach in Cardiff, and sometimes, like tonight, the water laps right up against the restaurant. The hostess knows Frank and shows them to a table by a window. With the storm front coming in, the waves are already approaching the glass.

Donna looks out at the weather. “Well, it will give me a chance to catch up on inventory anyway.”

“You could take a couple of days off.”

“You first.”

It’s a constant joke between them, and a constant hassle, two business-minded people trying to find time to go off for even a few days’ vacation. She doesn’t really feel comfortable with anyone else running the boutique, and Frank is, well, Frank. They made it to Kauai for five days three years ago, but since then, they’ve managed one overnight in Laguna and a weekend at Big Sur.

“We need to stop and smell the roses,” he tells her now.

“You could start by having two jobs instead of five,” she says. Still, she has a sense that maybe one reason their relationship works so well is that theydon’t have too much time for each other.

The waiter comes back and they order a bottle of red and then, in the interest of time, go ahead and order their appetizers and entrees, too. He goes for the seafood soup and the shrimp scampi; Donna orders a green salad-no dressing-and the baked halibut with tomatoes.

“The scampi is tempting,” she says, “but butter shows up on me the next day.”

She excuses herself to go to the ladies’, and Frank takes the opportunity to scamper into the kitchen for a hello call to the chef, for the usual: How’s the fish been? Any complaints? Wasn’t that yellowtail terrific last week? Hey, just to let you know, I’m going to have a good supply of shrimp next week, storm or no storm.

When he gets to the kitchen, John Heaney isn’t there.