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like a gourd. In ancient times the word for wealth was
waiwai
, double water, for it was the fundamental element in their lives. Now elders stood in fields, praying to
Kāne
, keeper of water. But no rains came.
    Instead, a letter from her mother. A word that always silenced her. Through the envelope Ana smelled the woman’s perfume. She heard her smoky voice. Rosie read the letter to her through a closed door, so it would not mark her. Afterwards, she burned it. Watching the pages curl to embered rags, she recalled her mother’s visit two years earlier. On that day folks had rushed out to the
lānai
. A woman stood there in a silk suit that flowed down her hips and legs like water. She was wearing toe-pinch high heels, a matching handbag.
    Rosie had put her arms round Ana protectively. “Your mama.”
    Her vision blurred, she felt her heart pulsing in her shoulders. “What’s her name?”
    “Anahola. Same as you. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let her take you.”
    As the family moved indoors, the woman gliding in the midst of them, the girls had run to their bedroom and shut the door. Yet she could smell her mother’s perfume breaking down the walls.
    “What does she want?”
    “Nothing. She just came back to look and see.”
    For hours they listened to rags of conversation, imagining blue smoke coiled in the air as uncles sucked on cigarettes, exhaling audibly like runners at the tape. She heard her mother’s voice, a strange and foreign-sounding voice from which all Pidgin-richness had been rinsed. She heard the sharp staccato of her mother’s high heels. She had not removed them at the door.
    Hours had passed, a half-moon rose. Rosie dragged her off to bed. When Ana woke, the woman was sitting beside her, studying her face. She had whispered something soft. Hello. Ana pulled back, terrified.
    “They say you’re smart … a good girl … one day you will understand. When you’re grown, you’ll see things differently … the world is always waiting to ambush a woman.”
    She looked beautiful, unreal. She sat in the dimness smoking, turning the room into a dream.
    “You’re better off here, with family …”
    She had crushed the cigarette, then bent to kiss Ana’s cheek, but the girl recoiled, scrambling under the sheet. Her mother had sighed and patted her foot like a little paw. She left her cigarette case behind. When Ana found it on the bed, she stroked its buttery-soft leather, reading tiny gold words in a corner.
Genuine calfskin
. Ben mailed the case back to San Francisco, and for years Ana thought of her mother as a woman who carried her cigarettes in a former calf. And she thought of San Francisco as a place women went to who did not want to be mothers.
    N OW, WATCHING THE LETTER TURN TO ASH, SHE HEARD A SUBTLE whispering, felt a dampness on her back. At last, at last, the rain. A gentle rain, like mist, that brought earth back to life gradually, almost thoughtfully. In the months of the Dry, taro leaves a full foot in diameter had knotted up like papery fists. Now they slowly unfurled, stretching out like great green hands. Ana reached out to them, letting her body go.
    The rains continued for three days while folks ran through the fields with their faces up, mouths open like flowers, their ankles socked in wet red clay. Only Rosie moved alone, her big body steaming in the wet, arms lifting dreamily like something adrift on the ocean floor. Then she seemed to pivot and go rigid, aiming her body and her profile at some distant point.
    At fifteen she had discovered dancing, that when she danced, shedid not limp. She began to smell of aftershave. Someone was teaching her to tango.
    One night she knelt beside Ana’s bed. “I’m in love. With Gum, father of little Taxi.”
    Ana sat up scared. “You crazy? What about your mama?”
    “She never loved him. Or anyone.”
    Gum, the tango dancer, tried to explain it to Rosie’s mother, Ava. Hearing her screams, both girls ran up the road, on