She’d earlier dismissed the latter as unimportant. Now, in mentioning it, she felt as though she was making up reasons for her husband not to come home.

‘Doing okay. Keep on working for us if we keep a share, or just appoint a manager.’

‘You were low.’

‘I’ll talk it over with Ishy, Malia and their daughter. Janet did a good job while I was away.’

‘There in the hospital.’

‘I saw myself.’

‘You were leaving me.’

‘I saw. There I was, afloat, my back bumping up against the white ceiling of the hospital ward. Looking down there was my other self on a stretcher, stretched, dressed in white as though for my own funeral, skin as blue as maomao. Leaving that self. But there was a voice, Paa’s of course, yelling at me to get back, you can’t come with me, get back home.’

‘To the warmth of Hawai‘i, maybe?’

‘To the warmth of my wife and family, to the warmth of the land. The voice didn’t say that, but I knew what it meant. I knew it was Paa. There was a scent of flowers. Those ones which smell lovely by the door.’

‘Stock. Carnations and roses.’

‘I breathed them. Stole every breath, used it and let it go, slow, slow. Had to. Took another, slow, and let it go. All the way back.’

Home.

So, home was where Chappy wanted to be, and working on the land was what he wanted to do. He thought he could have their stall again, where motorists could stop for fresh fruit and vegetables and drop a few coins in a box. Just a small stand. They wouldn’t need a real income from it.

Oriwia didn’t want to return to the days of roadside vegetables, not for herself anyway. There was time to think about it, still a process to go through before Chappy could come home to live. Until then, she decided she would return every winter to Hawai‘i to be with her husband, provided she could make a suitable arrangement for the shop and bakery.

In the meantime, how good it was to have evenings together, and what a relief to be sleeping with her husband again, coiled, uncoiled, or lying back with covers folded down, his cool skin, his bony frame. She imagined his ankle and wrist bones incandescent in the dark.

Sleeping alone was an abomination. From ever since she could remember, until Moana-Rose had married at nineteen, Oriwia and her sister had shared a bed where, at the end of the day, sitting on the edge of it practising hairdos, brushing down, pinning up, plaiting or curling, they would spell long words, sing rounds and duets, stop and make faces at their hair achievements. They’d giggle on and on because their teacher had tube legs and no feet and there was a woman at the market with lipstick missed by miles.