He surfed until the sky was sunless and purple and a smudge like a dust haze gathered low in the sky, and darkness fell. He reluctantly swam ashore, feeling clumsy, his board heavy, stepping over the rocks to the clay at the base of the cliff, stumbling a little.

The first of many days.

His mother seemed to realize that he was steadier now, sober, more careful in the way he dressed, tidier too—and perhaps this was what created a distance and a sobriety in her. After so long alone, stubborn and inert in her chair, drinking to face the day, drinking to get through the day, drinking so that she could sleep, she stirred from the house, accepted the invitations of some officers’ wives she’d known at Fort Shafter, and went to parties. “Just for grins,” she said, so as not to seem as though such outings mattered in the least.

Within weeks she was being escorted.

“Imagine, Joe,” she said. “What a hoot. I’m dating.”

He hated the teasing way his mother spoke the word, he was embarrassed by the girlish way she used it, as Nalani had; and whatever it meant, he did not want to know. She no longer drove herself, and Sharkey was glad of that—she’d never been a good driver, and her drinking made her dangerous. So Sharkey was relieved that she was escorted, reassured that she had some sort of masculine friendship, and bewildered by her happiness—seeing these men brought her a kind of joy and protection that he had never been able to provide. He wondered if at heart he did not want to make her happy but instead contrived to upset her, or to take revenge by sneaking Nalani to his room. She seemed to know this, sometimes muttering, “Why do you do this to me?” but never specifying.

He missed the Colonel, who had occupied the roles he was not able to fill—father, husband, friend, support, fellow drinker, lover. But the Colonel was gone.

The men dating her were her age or older, nearly all of them military, he could tell; even when they wore an aloha shirt, they were stiff-backed, heads up, the shirts tucked in, and she showed an intuitive sense of rank in choosing to see only senior officers. They picked her up, usually in the early evening, not long after Sharkey got home from surfing or school, and they dropped her off before eleven, both of them a bit tipsy, whispering, giggling, but the men didn’t linger, except to exchange a few words with Sharkey, the usual greeting: “And this must be Joe!”