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suckers on the vine whimpering in pain as they popped off the wood rails.
    “I think you’ll like your roommate next year,” Mary said, panting a little with the effort of yanking the stubborn vine from the fence. “She’s from the Big Island. McCully went to school with her uncles.” She passed one end of the vine along to Mamie. “And Lily Shields is there, too, a few years ahead of you. Such a strange girl. I saw her the other day in Lihue dressed all in black and wearing white rice powder all over her face. I’m surprised her father lets her go out looking like a ghost.”
    “That’s what she is.”
    Mary looked up from her work. “What?”
    “She is a ghost.”
    “What
are
you talking about?” Mary was irritated. Mamie should have been more cautious. It was well-known that Mary loathed anything fanciful.
    “In the school play,” Mamie said. It was a lie, but she would rather protect her best friend than ever explain The Mothers Club to Mary.
    “Her mother was strange, too.”
    Mamie turned back to the weeds. There seemed to her to be many things that she could never explain to Mary. She had loved Lily’s mother.
    “Did you see Auntie Emma in Honolulu?” she asked to protect Lily and her dead mother.
    “Twice. We went to dinner at George Brown’s and she made him play the ukulele and she danced all the old hulas.”
    “Father must have been happy.”
    “I’m afraid he danced, too.” Mary gave a last, mighty tug on the vine, and she almost fell over backward as it finally gave up and came fast off the fence. The word “too” came out of her like a shout.
    “I love when Daddy does the hula.”
    Mary roughly coiled the vine in an unruly, leafy circle.
    Mamie saw that she had lost her attention. “Can’t you see how terrible that is for the vine?” she asked quietly. “Can’t you hear what is going on around you, what Mr. Griep, my science teacher, calls the ‘music of the spheres’?”
    “What, Mamie?”
    Of course, the question that Mamie most passionately yearned to ask, and the question that was implicit in all of the others, was, Why do you not love me? But she merely said again, “the music of the spheres, the music of the—”
    “There!” Mary said with satisfaction.
    She had subdued the heavy vine, like a snake charmer. Heedless of the child who sat motionless in the grass, watching her solemnly, she went off to spray the fruit trees.
    Exhausted by the effort of trying to keep her mother’s interest and failing, Mamie walked listlessly back to the house.
    McCully was sitting in the library in his leather chair, Benjie Furtado’s leather chair, and he looked up when he heard Mamie on the veranda. He came outside. Mamie could hear Sousa marches on the record player.
    They sat down in chairs facing the ocean. Behind them was an old bookcase with glass doors. It was filled with the dark,gleaming
koa
calabashes given to Mamie’s ancestors by the Kings and Queens of Hawai‘i. Heavy stone poi-pounders sat in rows on the bottom shelf, next to thin sheets of brown-and-white
kapa
cloth. McCully had been asked several times to donate these artifacts to the Bishop Museum, but he withheld his decision. He liked the idea of giving them to Mamie some day. He always said that she would know what to do with them.
    When Mamie was younger, McCully would hold her in his lap in an old
koa
rocker and she would watch the changeable sea, the birthplace of the moon, as he told her the heroic tales of Kaua‘i, the oldest, most verdant, and most sacred of the islands. He told her the legend of the young woman, Pele, who begged permission of her mother and father to leave home. She took with her an egg in which her sister was hatching. Pele carried the egg carefully under her warm arm until the egg broke open and her sister was freed. Although Pele was blessed with the gift of magic, she did not foresee the sorrow her sister would someday bring her. Pele was too distracted. She was looking for fire,