Surfing was easy, everything else was hard; but he had been blessed. He was the luckiest man he knew, a success as a teenager doing something he loved, later living on endorsements and on the inheritance from his dead mother’s investments, in the most beautiful place he’d ever seen—and it was a surfer’s privilege to know the loveliest coastlines of the world.

He’d come with his parents to Hawaii as a ten-year-old, after bumping from one army base to another. His father, who had risen through the ranks, was promoted to colonel when they arrived at Fort Shafter, and was soon assigned a regiment and sent to Vietnam to command them as advisers, arming and training ARVN soldiers and Montagnard irregulars—the Degar people—in the Central Highlands to fight the Vietcong. Two tours, with frequent trips home, and on the second he’d been wounded, not by the enemy but in an accident, a hard chopper landing in Danang that crushed his spine. He was treated in Saigon, then airlifted to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu, where he died of liver failure.

“A sad memory,” Olive had said.

“He was someone I didn’t know anymore. Not the big intimidating colonel but a thin yellow man connected to plastic tubes, gasping to breathe.”

By then Sharkey had been in and out of two schools and was failing at a third.

His father’s death confused him, angered him, made him reckless. He found refuge in the waves. His mother, distraught, collected the insurance and, unexpectedly, a large inheritance from her husband’s family—cash, a stock portfolio, real estate on the mainland. There was money now where once there had been a man.

Her money kept his mother suspicious of suitors, and single. She had boyfriends, but she steered them away from her teenaged son, who was doing so poorly at school. Yet the boyfriends persisted in trying to befriend the boy, as a way of ingratiating themselves with his mother. They were either too stern or too indulgent, and Sharkey found them ridiculous in their attempts to interact with him, as though auditioning for the role of father and husband. It was known that Sharkey’s widowed mother was wealthy. She moved to a bigger house in Manoa, but by then Sharkey had been expelled from Punahou School and was struggling at Roosevelt High.

It had never been easy for him to be the son of an army colonel; it was even harder to be the son of a rich widow.

“I’m not going to marry again,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Joe. I wouldn’t do it to myself. A woman with money would be a fool to get married.”