The gift alone was a help; the fact that Wilfred was being friendly eased Sharkey’s mind, and the weed itself, which he smoked behind his house on the bench under the avocado tree, was all he needed to spend the night with his mother, who held a framed photograph of the Colonel in her hands and sobbed—a long night, but the weed lightened his mood, made him patient, took away the pain, and helped the time pass.

“How’s it?” Wilfred asked the next day.

Sharkey said, “It was good stuff. Like medicine.”

“Geev ’um,” Wilfred said to Fonoti, and another firm, fat, well-wrapped joint was handed over, palmed to Sharkey.

“Anything for you, brah.”

Wilfred and the others seemed relieved that they were able to help Sharkey—more than relieved, they took pleasure in supplying him with pakalolo. And the boys who’d made his life at school miserable now seemed like rescuers. So, he reasoned, maybe they were maddened by strangeness and wealth and the sight of happiness, but they understood misery and loss and death, and now Sharkey was one of them, in pain.

He sucked in the smoke, shut down his breathing, and held it in his lungs, where it glittered in his blood, bubbled to his head, to his muscles, and he was uplifted and calmed—as though he’d just heard something unusual, to make him laugh and ease his mind, news he’d just forgotten, but good news that tickled him. And the odor too was a tang he came to savor, like the fragrance of green grass smoldering in a great thatched heap, slowly cooking, never bursting into flames, the smoke he could taste, smoke he could swallow, smoke he could eat, that filled his body with a burr of warm light, glowing in his eyes, taking the pain away and somehow inflating him, summoning the image of his father and inspiring forgiveness.

The joints that Wilfred gave him were thick enough that he could smoke half after school and prepare himself for consoling his mother, and in the morning, before school, he smoked the other half, improving his mood so that he could face the other boys, and in this frame of mind he was confident enough to ask Wilfred for another joint. Wilfred always shook his hand—that complex local handshake, hooking thumbs—and directed someone in his little gang, the kanaka ohana, to comply.