“All the wahine got those,” was the usual response.

“Not like Sugar.”

He could not imagine a future without her. “I’m done dogging chicks,” he told himself. He married her in a ceremony on the beach, both of them draped with leis, flower crowns on their heads, all their friends attending—his were surfers in T-shirts and shorts, hers were from town, men in jackets, women in dresses. Their friends stood apart, and he could see at the reception afterward at the hotel in Turtle Bay that his friends, awkward in the formal gathering, kept together, got drunk, and left early.

A week later Sharkey called his mother from the pay phone at Foodland and told her his news. She said, “Oh, God,” and sobbed, and he knew it had been the right decision not to invite her to the wedding.

Sugar wanted a baby. She said so, soon after they were married, indicating that there was plenty of room in the beachfront house at Jocko’s.

“If we have a baby, we won’t be able to travel,” Sharkey said—he intended that summer to go to South Africa for the waves at Jeffreys Bay, their winter swell.

Sugar said, “I don’t want to go.”

“To South Africa?”

“To leave Hawaii.”

She had been once to the mainland, to Las Vegas, and hated it. Las Vegas was the world. Hawaii had everything—why go anywhere?

Sugar and her friends and family distrusted the weather elsewhere, were comforted by their own food, reassured by the trade winds, and did not believe their sunshine could be duplicated anywhere else on earth. “Lucky we live Hawaii.” Her family lived in Wahiawa; her father had once picked pineapples at Helemano and was now a civilian employee at the officers’ mess at Schofield Barracks, her mother a cashier at the city tax office near the Wahiawa Police Station. They were proud of their haole son-in-law. They wanted a baby too, their first grandchild. No one had mentioned any of this beforehand: so much was revealed now.

Having grown up in a town in the middle of the island, Sugar was ill at ease living on the beach. The sound of surf kept her awake, and she told Sharkey about her fears of being flooded and drowned, imagining a wave rising up and breaking over the house. She was a poor swimmer, she never sat in the sun, she said surf meets were too long, she didn’t drink or smoke. She yearned for a child.

An island girl, a simple girl, he’d thought; then he knew—no one is simple. Had she been a surfer, they might have spent their days together. Now even their nights were fractured by arguments, by silences, to the sound of the waves on the rocks in front of their house. In her sadness, and sometimes grief, it was as though a baby had been stolen from her, a phantom child she longed to possess.