Mr. Family. Margot Early
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more. To everyone. Erika was coming to live in his house, maybe for good.
Sitting on the porch swing while Hiialo played in her room, Kal remembered his phone conversation with Erika just that morning. He had asked if she’d told her brother what they were doing. “I wrote to him,” she’d said, and Kal had wondered if she knew she wasn’t answering the question. He was pretty sure she did.
He was pretty sure she’d told her brother almost nothing.
Kal talked to her once a week, always calling Thursday at seven in the morning. It was his day off, Hiialo usually wasn’t up by then, and it was around ten in Santa Barbara. Making the call was agonizing every time. The cultural gap between them was bigger than Waimea Canyon. But Kal wanted to know all he could about Erika Blade before she arrived, before he brought her into Hiialo’s life.
She was hard to know. She turned conversations away from herself and tuned into him, perceiving his difficulties as a single father almost as though she’d been one herself. Or had known one, which she had.
Her brother.
He left the swing and went inside. It was already one o’clock, and he had things to do. He’d recently enclosed the back lanai, creating a new room—for Erika. It still needed finishing touches. But Danny and Jakka had stopped by that morning, and a jam session had eaten half the day. “Hiialo, let’s go to Hanalei. I need something from the hardware store.”
Kal heard a rustling from his room and took a step down the hallway, pushed aside the beads in his doorway and looked in. Hiialo peered up from where she crouched beside his open desk drawer, photos spread out around her. The portrait of a naughty girl.
Kal saw a photograph of Maka under the leg of his folding metal desk chair. Entering the room, he picked up the chair. The surface of the photo was marred, across Maka’s face.
“What are you doing, Hiialo? Those aren’t yours.”
She began a cry he knew would rise to a full-throated wail. She looked at a photograph in her hands, a snapshot of her mother, and ripped it in half.
“Hiialo.” Kal scooped her up, and she hit him with her fists and kicked him, screaming. “Don’t hit. I don’t hit you.”
Her small arms and legs struck a few more times, to prove that she didn’t care what he said, before she subsided to screams. He carried her through the beads and out into the main room and then through the curtain door of her room. Her voice had reached a high continuous sob, and she cried, “It’s your day off! You’re supposed to spend it with me! You’re supposed to spend Thursday with me!”
Kal couldn’t speak. Even as he left her on her bed, kicking the wall and crying, he wondered what he’d done that had made her that way.
Not enough time at home.
He should have skipped the music, told Danny and Jakka it was his day with Hiialo.
Listening to her shrieking, he wondered if all parents felt trapped. Guilty for wanting their own time. For wanting…
Music spun inside him, trying to soothe. “Rock Me on the Water…”
He went back into his room and saw the photos scattered on the floor, including the one that had been ripped in half. In the next room, Hiialo’s cries reached a crescendo, and Kal crouched down to pick up all the Makas from the throw rug.
HIS FATHER CAME BY late that afternoon to look at some bad siding on his rental property, the blue oriental house in front of the bungalow. Kal was caretaker of the vacation home. He cut the grass and cared for the plants and cleaned after tenants left. The blue house had been rebuilt after Iniki; he’d just discovered that the siding was poorly installed.
Leading Raiden, one of the Akitas, up to the porch, King asked Kal, “Where’s the keiki?”
“Taking a nap.” They stood together under the porch awning with the rain pounding the roof and the garden, and at last Kal said, “Yeah, it’s been a great day.” He told his father about the photos.
King shook his head. He’d seen Hiialo in a temper, too. They all accepted her moods as part of her nature, but everyone hated the sulks and the screaming.
Together the two men toured the back-porch room, scrutinizing the construction. King had never asked the reason for the project; the house was small. When they’d examined the new room, Kal offered him some juice—he seldom bought beer, which he liked but which made him sick—and they sat on the veranda with Raiden exploring the yard nearby.
The Akita had a pure white coat and double-curled tail, and Kal studied the dog with admiration and envy. His parents’ stud was immaculately bred, intensively trained, utterly trustworthy. Kal knew the time that went into raising an animal like that.
He didn’t even have time for his daughter.
Watching Raiden lift his leg against the heliconia, Kal said, “I’ve made friends with an artist in Santa Barbara. Erika Blade. We write letters. Talk on the phone.”
His father tipped back his cup of guava juice. “She’s a big artist. How’d you meet her?”
“I placed a personal ad. She’s coming to Kauai this summer. She’s going to stay here.”
Lazily King stretched out his legs and rocked the porch swing. “With you?”
On the top porch step, Kal shrugged. “Here.” His house, not his bed.
The rain drizzled, creating waterfall sounds all around the lanai, and Raiden came over to lie at his master’s feet.
“Is this romance?”
No, thought Kal. It’s practical. “Something like that.”
The rain poured from the gutter and splattered on the ground at the corner of the house. As Kal stared out at it, his father said at last, “Well, we’ll look forward to meeting her.” He stood up and so did Raiden. “I’m going to take a look at that siding.”
Kal glanced toward his own house. All was quiet indoors, Hurricane Hiialo sleeping. Watching the Akita follow his father down the steps into the rain, he drew a quiet breath. King hadn’t criticized, hadn’t shown any disapproval at all. Kal knew that when his father had said they’d look forward to meeting Erika, he meant it.
His parents always kept things in perspective. They’d survived Hurricanes Iwa and Iniki.
And Kal had cried in his dad’s arms after Maka died.
Iune: June
HIIALO KICKED HER SEAT in the Datsun. Thud, thud, thud, in a mindless rhythm. Her lips were tightly sealed, her eyes nervous. In her lap was a plastic bag containing a braided lei hala lei, made of flowers of the pandanus tree, and a second lei made of braided red ti leaves.
“Stop kicking the seat, Hiialo.” He ate a Turns. “You okay?”
She nodded.
She’d been up half the night, coming out of her room every five minutes for another drink of water. Must have picked up on his mood. All he’d told Hiialo was that he’d placed a want ad to meet a woman; he was lonely without her mom. His daughter had reacted as though what he’d done was sensible. But did she suspect the truth about Erika? That if all went well she would stay for good, as Hiialo’s stepmother?
Kal saw the sign for the airport and manually worked the Datsun’s broken turn indicator, flipping it back and forth as an Aloha Airlines plane flew in over the sea, descending to the terminal.
“Is your pen pal on that plane?” asked Hiialo.
“I