Saving his money—the prizes, the endorsements, the annuity from his father’s life insurance—he was able to buy a house by the sea on Pohakuloa Road, and saw Jock Sutherland’s first ride on the break that he bestowed his name upon. With a house, his girlfriends stayed longer, weeks at a time. He grew fond of one, who called herself Sugar, because her Hawaiian name, Kaleoikaikaokalani—the Mighty Voice of Heaven—he found unpronounceable. Hawaiian-Chinese-Filipino, she was a beauty. He met her at a club in town.

“Not a surfer,” he told his friends, “but she has other talents.”

“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.