Those waves, so many rides on the sea and on land. He saw that he had surfed through life and that he had trained himself to overcome the opposition of so many people—school and home and the casual assaults of locals. He’d done nothing but surf. Roosevelt High School was a wave, girlfriends were waves, debt was a wave, guilt another wave, sex was a fun wave, his brief marriage a junk wave, his mother one of the trickiest waves, and he’d sometimes wiped out or suffered a hold-down, but he had always made it to shore and gone on surfing. Me and my stick: there is no other way I know how to live. Every ride prepared him for the next one, until it seemed the whole of life involved surfing from one wave to another.

That drunk homeless guy on the old bike at Waimea that Olive kept mentioning—he was a wave that Sharkey had ridden to safety, and he was onshore again, contemplating another wave.

Introspection wearied him, like the shudder and rumble of an engine running. He was unused to it, his head heavy with the weight of these reflections, and he was out of words. He lifted his eyes to Olive, yet his eyes said nothing.

But Olive was grimly satisfied. It seemed that he had lapsed into his old indifference, because it helped prove her point.

“Don’t you see that since then—since killing that poor man—nothing has gone right?”

He still eyed her, his head at a slight angle, and she knew it meant defiance and doubt: I don’t see what you’re seeing, and therefore you’re mistaken.

“Maybe you don’t see it,” she said, replying to the expression on his face. “I don’t blame you. I think it was traumatic for you, killing that man. But I see it and I think I’m losing you. You’re suffering some kind of weird hangover, like you’ve been on an epic bender. You seldom go out, though you say you do. You sit staring at the trees. Half the time you don’t feed the animals, and I do it, or I get Moe Kahiko to do it.” She thought a moment, breathing hard. “You repeat yourself, the same stories, none of them new—and I mean, I’m sorry, but it’s horrible to hear you repeat them.”

She kept herself from saying, “And it’s a flaming bloody bore,” though the words were in her mouth.

“So what?” he said.

“The same stories.”