Sometimes Michael is wise beyond his years. Together we turn our gaze back to the golden-green tree tops of Lana`i City, fading now to a russet brown. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

        In the spring the larvae hatch, and the cycle begins again. Here it is, throwing off the larval envelope . . .

        I'm still not sure why the scenes I keep recalling from Fargo are moments when the characters are watching television. Perhaps it's because in the intervening years my memories of Lana`i have grown flat and opaque, like decaying reels of acetate shelved in some forgotten vault in my mind. But the images of that summer don't appear flat when I replay them now, when I picture you snoozing in your stroller next to our table in the Blue Ginger two evenings before our departure from the island, drinking up the dim yellow light of the small dining room, absorbing the admiring gazes of the other diners: Jennifer Hera, Junior Miss Hawaiian Island Beauty 1995; Bobby Amaral, a retired fisherman who once used his boat to ferry rice and other foodstuffs to plantation workers and their families during the great pineapple strike of 1951; and a round cinnamon-colored Hawaiian woman whose name I can no longer recall. Your brothers are sitting around the table with the red and white checkered cloth, finishing up their burgers and fries. Your mother is at the Lana`i Laundrette three doors down, putting a load in the dryer.
        “Oooo, da keiki, she a good sleepah, yeah?” the Hawaiian woman says, giving me a wink.
        Behind her, a whoosh of steam escapes the curtain behind the register counter, followed by the clatter of plates and pots from the kitchen. I look down at you before replying.
        A bubble swells on your slightly parted pink lips, then pops like an interrupted dream. The small violence does not disturb your slumber. “Most of the time,” I say.
        You slept through most of what happened that summer, my long-awaited one. I wouldn't want it any other way.
        “Can I drive tomorrow?” David asks, swirling a french fry in a mound of catsup. He says this just loud enough so that Miss Junior Miss Hawaiian Island Beauty, finishing her own burger at the next table, can overhear.
        “Sure,” I reply, careful not to smile. David is fourteen, just a few weeks short of the minimum age for a Kansas learner's permit. Over the summer I've given him lessons in our landlord's battered four-wheel Bronco, sitting in the passenger seat beside him as he raised clouds of red dust on the old plantation roads crisscrossing the Palawai Basin. In just a few weeks David has become a skilled, confident driver. Yesterday, in the ultimate gesture of trust, your mother allowed David to drive the entire family part of the way back from our picnic ground at the abandoned fishing village of Lopa on the windward side. With six of us, there was no room in the Bronco for your infant's car seat. Your mother clutched you securely in her lap, strapped between Michael and Daniel in the middle of the bench seat in the back, as David guided the Bronco around rocks and bumps on the dirt road that snakes its way along the seashore. When she urged him to slow down as we approached the old church at Ke-o-muku, David replied in his lowest, most adult voice: Relax, Mom. I'm only going fifteen miles an hour.
        “When can I drive?” Daniel asks now, his mouth full of fries.

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