Barefoot with Professional Assistance

Prologue: It Won't Always Be

Her father liked to stand on a rise of sun-cracked red volcanic dirt, exactly where the reception desk would eventually go. Salt-scrub grass gave way to drifts of pale sand further down the slope. Warm trade winds drifted in off the water behind him. Nothing in the bare stretch of land around them gave any indication of what it would become. 

He described, with his hands, walls that did not yet exist.

"Here," he said, "will be the doors. Timber, thrown wide on both sides, so the sea air moves straight through without ever needing a fan's help." 

He turned, tracing an arc she was meant to follow with her eyes. 

"And there, running low along that ridge, so low they'll look like they grew straight out of it, will be the villas. Yours will be the highest one, and the best one, though you're not to tell the guests that. It'll be our secret."

Rosalind was eight, and had learned to nod at the right moments regardless of whether she could actually see any of it. Mostly what she saw was red dirt cut into rough terraces, a scatter of heavy equipment, excavators and dumper trucks parked at odd angles where the workers had left them for the day. The machinery had gone quiet sometime before they'd arrived, and the island's own sounds had already crept back into the space it left, birdsong, the shift of wind through what remained of the trees, the sea somewhere behind all of it. Her father stood in the middle of it all, sunburnt and delighted, standing in the middle of a building that existed only in his head.

"It's very sandy," she said, which was true, and made him laugh, a laugh he made for nothing and no one else, the one that meant he thought she was cleverer than she'd intended to be.

"It's sandy now," he agreed. "It won't always be."

He crouched down beside her, close enough that she could smell the sweat and sun on him, and drew a rough rectangle in the dirt with a stick.

"The Naivalu, your grandmother's family, have been on this island longer than anyone can properly account for," he said. "My own mother's people. I lived in Australia for so long, I wasn't sure they'd still want me." 

He straightened the rectangle's corner absently. "They took me in anyway, when they didn't have to. I'm the luckiest man alive, that they'd have me back at all. I like to think, some mornings, that this is the one thing I've done in my life your mother would have actually approved of."

He said would have the way he always did when he meant her mother, carefully, the way a person handles something with a crack already in it. Rosalind had been young enough when she died that she mostly remembered her in pieces rather than as a whole person. The house had gone quieter since then, the way houses do once somebody's stopped living in them. Her father kept a handful of photographs of her, though he almost never let Rosalind catch him looking at them. She understood, without needing to be told, that today was one of the days he was looking at them anyway, just somewhere she couldn't follow.

It was, she would only understand years later, family money two generations deep, finally given somewhere he actually believed it belonged. A good portion of it was already quietly finding its way into his mother's people's hands rather than staying in his own.

He said it lightly, the way he said most difficult things, and didn't look at her when he said it. Rosalind, who understood even then that some sentences weren't actually invitations to respond, said nothing at all.

He was recovered a moment later, entirely, and pointed the stick back at the ridge as if nothing had happened.

"Go on then. Tell me what you actually think."

"I think you're going to need a lot more doors than that."

"That," George said, delighted all over again, "is precisely the sort of thing I intend to charge people a great deal of money for eventually."