He mocked himself for looking like the boys at school, but he did not feel so bad when he saw that his mother too was rumpled and neglected and either drunk or else pickled and sleepy. Drinking made her cranky, and when she fell—stumbled because she was drunk—and injured her hip, only more drinking eased her pain. She sat in a wheelchair instead of the armchair and waited for Sharkey to push her from room to room. The doctors found nothing more serious than a bruise on her hip, but she claimed they were mistaken.

“I have internal injuries, like Dad,” she said when she was drinking, and using the Colonel as an example, she threatened to die.

She never guzzled whiskey. She drank half a cupful first thing in the morning—seeming to assuage herself by using her old coffee cup, as though drinking whiskey from a coffee cup represented virtue. Then to maintain the buzz she sipped through the day, tipping the bottle into her cup with exaggerated care. Drink made her ponderous and cautious, as if in her deliberate gestures she wished to prove that she was unaffected, as judicious as ever. But her slow hands and her halting head shakes proved she was drunk—saturated, deaf, unable to stand up, irrational when she was challenged by the simplest question.

In that state she had no idea that Sharkey was high, though now and then when he smoked, finishing a roach, she made a face. “What’s that smell?”

Mother and son, each slumped in a chair in the hot shadows of a Honolulu bungalow on a late afternoon, the blinds half drawn, the sun slanting into the valley and burning on the back wall. Sharkey was soothed by the flutter of his mother’s light snores. She might wake up and say, “Tell me something,” or “When’s Dad coming home?” or “Where have you been?” and fall back to sleep.

It was only the drunks on the street who fell down and swore and flailed their arms; his mother was a genteel indoor drunk, sleepy when she was not drinking. Perhaps the whole reason for her drinking, for anyone’s drinking, was to sink their worries and be stupefied enough to sleep.

Sharkey did not smoke pakalolo to sleep; he smoked to be bright, to take away the dull ache of his anxiety, and to pass the time; he smoked to be a friend, he smoked to be himself—he did not like the person he was when he didn’t smoke. And always when he smoked it was as though he was in the water, buoyant but adrift.