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.

Sugar’s disappointment at their divorce was mixed with relief. He was not the sunny guy with money that she’d married but a selfish haole who cared only about surfing with his friends, nothing else. Her parents were angry: he’d let them down, he’d misled their daughter, and the divorce was a humiliation for them.

“And now all the paperwork,” Sugar’s father said.

But Sharkey hired a lawyer and gave them the amount of money they asked for, and his car, the furniture from C. S. Wo, and the cat. He kept his house at Jocko’s, emptier now.

Sharkey’s mother seemed grimly satisfied—perhaps she’d hoped he’d fail. The divorce was proof that she could not be replaced. And when he began avoiding his mother, in what seemed a self-destructive act of revenge—but it could have been a result of her drinking—she broke her hip, became housebound, insisted on a wheelchair until her hip healed, drank more, and demanded that he leave her alone.

“Go ahead, do what you want. I have Milly.”

Milly was a middle-aged Filipina in green scrubs, who declared at the outset, “I am a licensed caregiver.” She was gracious, attentive to the point of being a fussing hoverer, and she assured Sharkey that she would look after his mother as though she were her own mother. She moved in, slept in Sharkey’s old bedroom, took charge, cooked, and cleaned, dragging a mop from room to room over the hardwood floors. Her cousin Orlando—Sharkey suspected him of being her lover—became a live-in handyman, bunking in the shed behind the garage.