“Tchrouble,” Sharkey said. “Funny. He’d really wanted the car.”

“You reckon it strange that he had respect for the dead? Fancy that.”

“Maybe. But the guy’s in a garage, with a wrench in his hand.”

“For most people on earth—don’t you know this?—the dead don’t die. They’re always with us.”

Sharkey smiled at her seriousness. “He was afraid.”

“Fear is one way of showing respect,” she said. “But you’re Joe Sharkey. ‘No fear’ is your motto.”

“I’m getting me a new car.”

“You so deserve it,” Olive said, then looked away, shaking her head.

That became his mission for a week, going from dealership to dealership, Olive joining him on the afternoons when she was free, talking to salesmen, taking test drives, and assessing the suitability of the car to take a roof rack for his board. Some of the salesmen knew his name, and Olive stood aside and watched with distaste as they smiled, glamoured by the visit of the big-wave rider. They were older men, some of them surfers themselves, eager for the boast of Joe Sharkey buying a car from them.

Buying a car was a novelty, and a diversion. He’d believed that his old well-maintained Lexus would last another few years, or longer. He had not contemplated replacing it. But the accident had changed everything, and he found himself the object of attention, the experience he’d known in bazaars around the world, hawkers calling out, “Look, look, sir,” and appealing for him to buy. He enjoyed the attention for the power it gave him to look or to turn them down.

He settled on a sleek, black, bullet-shaped SUV, the chrome grille set like a scowl, the rear end rounded and buttocky and businesslike, the whole vehicle hunched forward, nose down, as though for speed, with a roof rack that could accommodate two boards, a head-turner, unexpected and welcome, a gift.

“Another toy,” Olive said when he drove it home.

She would have said more in mockery, except that on arriving he complained of a severe headache. And then instead of driving it, cruising to Hale‘iwa, he left it parked in the garage. For two days straight she found him lying on the sofa, his hands on his face. Back spasms, he said. Insomnia.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, talking into his hands, and explained that it was too painful for him to drive.

“I was expecting something like this,” Olive said. “You keep forgetting you were in a serious accident.”

But, his back knotted, his neck throbbing, he remembered now: the gouts of rain, the splashing windshield wipers, the bright blobby glare and in that glare the explosion of sound and light and shattered glass, the broken bike and the baglike form flung forward against the window.