Olle does the honors, because Leo’s his son, after all, and because he went to the trouble to fetch this present all the way from the other side of the island early this morning, from a certain fellow we know who lives near Lihue with his wife and two kids. Olle sets the box in front of Leo, and the box topples over, and out pops a startled beagle puppy, eight weeks old.

Leo starts to cry.

The three of us ride home on the moped, Leo and me and the puppy on my lap. Leo’s named her Frankie and already loves her more than me. We’ve agreed she should stay at my place, because it isn’t right to keep a respectable bitch in a bachelor apartment above a tavern, and as we pull into my driveway, Leo casually suggests that maybe he should just give up the apartment altogether, since both pieces of his heart are living here. I hand him the leash and tell him to walk his dog.

While they’re outside seeing to business, I light a few candles and open a bottle of champagne and slip into something less comfortable. The cottage is small, as I said, but Irene keeps coming by with lamps and cushions and books and frying pans to fill it up like some kind of permanent residence. Each time she does this I think of a mother bird dropping worms in a nest. Outside, Leo’s talking to the puppy. The thought of Velázquez flashes across my mind and is gone, leaving behind a vapor of peace.

The door opens. Leo says, “I think a newspaper might not be a bad . . .”

I turn around. “A bad what?”

He closes the door and drops the leash. “Nothing.”

When Leo is fast asleep, I climb out of bed and develop the film from the birthday party. A gentle Hawaiian rain falls outside. Once the negatives are dry, I select a few I like best. There’s a beautiful one of Doris and Wesley carrying out the cake; you can’t even tell that Doris was yelling at Wesley because he was going too fast. I also caught Irene from the side while she watched Olle make one of his rambling, heartfelt toasts. The fire makes a fascinating pattern on her scarred skin. You can see the affection in her gaze, the tolerance that—it seems to me, anyway—is the heart of any marriage. I sometimes wonder if my father gave himself permission to go because he knew Olle was waiting in the wings, adoring Irene from afar, and that while Olle wasn’t perfect, he was kind and true, and he wasn’t going to leave.

Or maybe a wave is just a wave, and it was Sam Mallory’s time to die.