On the other hand. When I look upon these pictures of my father, taken by some untaught finger pressing down on the shutter release of an amateur camera, I have the uncanny feeling that he’s looking back at me from his monochrome eyes in his monochrome face. This one, for example. He looks a little sideways at me, eyebrow cocked the way I remember it, and his hair falls on his forehead. He’s leaning on a surfboard against a wide, pale ocean, upon a beach I recognize as the one nestled under the cliff nearby, the beach where Irene and Doris and Wesley taught me to surf. In another one, he’s holding a baby Doris, and you can’t see much of his face because it’s turned toward this tiny infant, but that little sliver of him is soft with wonder. There are eleven others, no more, but each one captures him in a different mood, a different moment, a different piece of his soul, so that when I hold them together in my hands, I feel as if I’m holding my father safe and whole.

I no longer live in the guest cottage at Coolibah but in my own little house on the other side of Hanalei, from which I can bicycle daily to surf with my brother and sister when they get home from school or to greet Leo when he returns from the sea. He comes home with me most nights. Before you ask, we’re not married or even engaged, but Hanalei is tolerant of these things. Sam and Irene never married, you know.

This morning is a Sunday morning, so Leo stays in bed while I make coffee. I have my own darkroom and also my own study in the spare bedroom, although I prefer to work in the airfield cafeteria. I like the hustle and bustle, for some reason. I get antsy when it’s too quiet. Anyway, Leo thanks me for the coffee and tries to pull me back into bed, but I’m having none of that. Today I have important plans, I tell him.

“But it’s my birthday,” he says. “What could be more important than that?”

“My gracious, what are you? Seven?”

“Twenty-four,” he says with dignity.

I admit he’s got a point, and allow myself to be pulled back into sin. Leo is impossible to resist most of the time, and especially on a Sunday morning, even though we have already made love a thousand times in a thousand ways, because there is never enough of this. You do not come to the end of your life and say to yourself, Gosh, I wish I hadn’t slept with my lover so much.