The year before she dies, widowed, estranged from her daughter, missing her old life in the islands, and still struggling, four decades later, with the guilt over having given up her daughter for adoption, Eleanor Bennett decides one bleak afternoon she knows what she has to do. She “had always taken pride in being a survivor. She’s been raised to be strong” (202), but her heart is too heavy, hope too distant. She will take her longboard and head out into any dangerous wave in the Pacific and stage her own suicide. It does not work—a lifeguard who notices the elderly woman heading out into the risky surf pulls her to safety. When Byron rushes to the hospital, he suspects the truth even though his mother claims it was an accident.

Determined to become more involved with her mother’s day-to-day life, Byron, his own oceanographer career at full tilt, moves back into his mother’s home and begins to take her out, to dinners, to museums, to concerts, and even to see one of those inspirational, motivational speakers at a conference center in Anaheim. The speaker is Etta Pringle, an internationally known long-distance open-ocean swimmer, a woman from the same Caribbean islands as his mother and herself now approaching 70.