“Only the one leg, though.”
“Cool.”
Satisfied that his father’s friend is superhero adjacent, Miles runs outside to play. Desmond and Keane step out to the side porch with bottles of Guinness—“the proper beverage for liming”—while I help Sharon unpack.
“How long have you been together?” she asks.
“We’ve been sailing together for a little more than a month,” I say. “But we’ve been together for about … sixteen hours.”
Sharon laughs. “That’s very specific.”
“It took some time for us—for me, actually—to figure things out.”
“He’s a good man.” She takes a couple more bottles of Guinness from the refrigerator, opens them, and hands one to me. “Let’s go outside. We’ve got people coming over after the festival, so we’ll worry about the food later.”
The four of us sit on chairs overlooking Margarita Bay while Miles turns somersaults in the grass and plays with Queenie. Desmond tells me how, seven years ago, he met a drunken Keane urinating along the side of the road. “I was going to arrest him, but when he said his name was Sullivan, I brought him home and sobered him up.”
“What he’s not telling you,” Keane says, “is that after he got me sober, he took me out for goat stew and Guinness, and we got drunk all over again.”
Sharon tells me she’s a stylist in a hair salon in the neighboring village of St. John’s, and when she asks me what I do for a living, I don’t mention the pirate bar. I share our plan to start a nonprofit organization. I feel embarrassed by how privileged it is to want to raise money for a high-tech sailboat when Montserrat has been rebuilding for more than two decades, but her smile is generous. “That would be good for him. He needs a purpose.”
As afternoon turns into evening, friends and family trickle in, including a girl dressed in a hot-pink gown with a sparkling tiara on her head and a Miss Montserrat sash draped over her shoulder. She is Sharon’s sister, Tanice, straight from the festival.
“You needn’t have brought out the royalty on our account,” Keane says. “We’re regular folk.”
Sharon straightens her shoulders and gives a small head toss. “But I am no regular folk, Mr. Sullivan. I am sister to the queen.”
Tanice rolls her eyes and goes for Desmond’s CD collection to put on music, removing her tiara and kicking off her high heels. A group of men start barbecuing chicken on the grill, and some of the women come inside to unwrap their potluck side dishes. I wander between the two groups, Guinness in hand, listening to them lament about how long it’s taken to turn Little Bay into a proper town and catching snippets of gossip about people I don’t know.
I walk around to the west side of the house to watch the sun go down. Keane comes up behind me, slips his arms around my shoulders, and rests his chin on top of my head. “If you keep your eyes just above the sun as it slips below the horizon, you may see the green flash.”
We watch together and I try not to blink, but as the sun sinks, I see nothing but sky. “I missed it.”
“Next time, then,” Keane says, kissing my cheek. “We’ve got many sunsets to come.”
the real world (26)
Sharon drops us off in the village of St. Peter’s the next morning at the Fogarty Hill end of the Oriole Walkway, a trail that runs through the island’s center hills to Lawyers Mountain. Queenie stays behind to play with Miles, while Keane and I go hiking in a dense forest of trees, roped with vines bearing leaves as big as our heads, and ferns growing thick along the trail. Keane points out a large iguana crawling through the branches of a tree and we hear—but don’t see—the croak of mountain chickens, a once abundant frog, endangered since the eruptions.
The climb is steeper than we anticipated and when we reach the summit, our shirts are damp with sweat. But at an elevation of more than 1,200 feet, we can see in every direction. To the north, my boat is a blue dot in Little Bay. Beyond it are the Silver Hills, remnants of a dead volcano. In the south, clouds of steam and gas hover above the dome of the quiet Soufrière Hills volcano and the pyroclastic flow cuts across the green island like an angry gray scar. Nevis and Antigua are rocky blue shadows on the horizon.
“After listening to the talk last night about