So she swung her hips as she walked by him in the bar and had proceeded to let him flirt, and the next morning she found herself riding in Selfer’s convertible DeSoto out the front gate. He drove her along the narrow roads that delivered them down the hills heading makai, toward the sea. A road below crossed the old 1871 Trail and led them to the water. They could hear it once Selfer parked the DeSoto and put up the top, and they could smell its salty freshness. They walked a path to a flat open strand punctuated by solitary palm trees and spans of sandy earth and walkable black lava. A cozy inlet had a beach no wider than a football field, framed by short walls of black stones.

“This is a sacred area,” Kanani told him as a breeze stroked their foreheads. “The Place of Refuge. In old days, Hawaiians who broke the ancient laws could avoid certain death by gaining entrance to this sacred place. But, you first had to swim across that bay out there called da Shark Den and if you made it without dying, then the kahuna—that’s like a priest to you, haole—he had to offer you sanctuary and absolve you of any wrongdoing.”

“Now, if I’m not mistaken there’s another small bay nearby,” Selfer said. “There the explorer Captain Cook got pummeled and dismembered—and baked—by the natives for the ‘mana’ the priests believed was contained in his bones. Mana, that’s like a person’s mojo?”

“Ho, that’s not bad. Yep, that happened over in Kealakekua Bay.”

Selfer thought of everything. His picnic basket contained shrimp-and-cucumber sandwiches, mango salad, and a white wine from France. She spread out the blanket and propped up the large umbrella just so. She sunk her toes in the beach sand and so did he, smiling at her as if being tickled.

“If you don’t like the wine? I have rum in the trunk—that or basi.”

“Basi?”

“It’s Filipino. Wine made from sugar cane. Has bark and leaves in it, can be rather bitter.” Selfer added a scrunched-up face.

“Why don’t you take your hat off so I can see you?” she said.

He was wearing a white panama hat. He removed it.

“Now you look less like one plantation owner.”

“Is that what you all think of me?” he joked.

She shrugged. He also had bags under his eyes. That was new. Maybe he stayed up late burdened by the worries of managing a camp he didn’t actually run. Or maybe he’d only had a late night with that fresh nurse he was pursuing.

“Wine sounds good,” she said.

He pulled it from the basket. It was still cold, wrapped as it was in a thick hand towel. They drank from paper cone cups. The wine was sharper than she thought it would be, but it went down nice.