The Descendants (6 page)

I look at her mother, a thin version of what’s on the couch, which brings hope, and I see that Lani’s eyes are a beautiful blue, her skin white and smooth. In a few years she could be gorgeous, or not.

“Scottie,” I say. “Do you have something you want to say to Lani?”

“Sorry,” Scottie says.

“It’s okay,” Lani says.

“Great,” I say. “Well, it was nice meeting you both.”

“Scottie,” Mrs. Higgins says. “The things you said were simply evil.”

I look at my daughter, trying to convey a look that says
Just go with it.

“I don’t know what’s going on in your life that has led you to become such a nasty young girl.”

“Hey now,” I say. “She apologized. Kids are mean. They’re mean to show other kids that they shouldn’t be messed with, right?”

“She needs to learn to be the same person online as she is in real time,” Mrs. Higgins says.

“I agree.”

“She needs to know not to fight online. It’s one of the school’s rules.”

“Do you understand that, Scottie?” I say. I get down on my knees so that I’m at eye level with her, something Esther said she learned from a show about militant nannies. “You have to speak to people to their face.”

Scottie makes exaggerated nods, her chin craning to the sky, then coming down to her chest.

“She doesn’t get it.” Mrs. Higgins wears an angry smile that I don’t like. “She’s going to keep doing it. I can tell.”

“No,” I say. “It will be all right. It’s like the time Lani locked Scottie out of the house at her birthday party. It was a cruel thing to do, and you probably did it to show off, right?” I say to Lani.

Lani nods, then catches herself and remains still.

“Scottie sat out there the entire day,” I say.

“I didn’t know about that,” Mrs. Higgins says.

“You brought me cake,” Scottie says.

“You brought her cake,” I repeat. “Perhaps Lani should be the one to apologize, as it seems this incident was the catalyst for all this…‘evil’ was the word you used.”
You’re dealing with an attorney, lady. I can go on and on, even in mismatched socks.

“I’m sorry,” Lani says.

Mrs. Higgins stands with her arms drawn tightly across her chest, frustrated by how the world has turned, as Scottie says.

I slap my thighs. “Good! Terrific. Lani, you should come over sometime. Come for a swim or a hike or something. Or scrapbook.”

“Okay,” Lani says. Scottie looks at me and scowls, but I know she’ll be appreciative of it later. You need friends who make you feel totally superior. “Again, Mrs. Higgins and Lani, sorry for the anguish and the tears. I hope to see you both again on better terms.”

Mrs. Higgins turns and walks back to the door.

“SYL,” Scottie says.

“SYL,” Lani says.

See you later. I get it. We walk to the screen door and I look at Scottie, for clues, perhaps. Just when I think I’ve figured her out, she surprises me with something else. While we’ve dealt with the technicalities of this problem, the problem is still here. Scottie was cruel and I don’t understand it completely. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of girlhood or a symptom of something much larger.

“I need to work on some things at home,” I say to Scottie as we put on our shoes, “but Esther says you have some class to go to. Voice class or something.”

“Voice class sucks,” she says. “She can take me to the beach. You said.”

I look around for Mrs. Higgins so we can say goodbye. I kneel down to tie my laces. I’m down here in a sea of shoes. Mrs. Higgins has a lot of sandals with scuffed soles. All of them have short heels the length of half a thumb. What’s the point? For some reason I hold a little heel in my hand. Some of Joanie’s heels are the length of a hand.

If Joanie dies before me, I wonder if I’ll ever be with another woman. I can’t imagine going through all of the preliminary stuff—the talk, the chatter, the dinners. I’d have to take someone places, explain my history, make jokes, dole out compliments, hold back farts. I’d have to tell her I’m a widower. I’m convinced Joanie would never have an affair. It just seems like too much trouble.

Mrs. Higgins stands over me. I let go of her shoe. She stares at me so fiercely, I worry she may kick.

“Good luck with the sale,” she says, and I stand and shake my head. I realize she’s not even angry with Scottie for what she did. She’s angry with Scottie for who she belongs to.

“So what happens?” she asks. “Why do you get all this money again?”

“Do you really want to know?” I stand and face her, and she takes a step back.

“Sure,” she says.

“Dad,” Scottie whines. “I want to go.”

I clear my throat. “Well,” I say. “My great-grandfather was Edward King. His parents were missionaries, but he went in a different direction. He became a banker and later the chief financial officer for King Kalākaua. He managed the estate of Princess Kekipi, the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha.”

I stop talking. Hopefully, I’ve lost her interest, but she raises her eyebrows and waits for me to continue.

“Should I get my scrapbook and show her?” Scottie asks.

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” Mrs. Higgins says.

Scottie opens the screen door and walks to the car.

“Okay, then what happened…Kekipi was supposed to marry her brother, a weird Hawaiian royalty tradition. Yikes. Just when they were about to tie the knot, she had an affair with her estate planner, Edward, and they married soon after. Annexation happened soon after, too, so marrying a haole businessman was pretty ballsy. Anyway, they had a lot between the two of them, and when another princess died, she left three hundred thousand acres of Kauai land to Kekipi as well as her estate.

“Kekipi died first. Edward got it all. Then Edward set up a trust in 1920, died, and we got it all.”

Scottie comes back and opens to the first page of the album. She ripped out a few pages from three local history books before I caught her, and she’s glued these in, making the album smell like cedar trunks. There’s Edward, hollow-eyed and serious. He has on knee-high boots, and his top hat rests on a table behind him. There’s Kekipi, which means “rebel,” her brown and flat, chubby face. Her bushy brows. Whenever I see her picture I think we would have hit it off. I can’t help but smile at her.

Mrs. Higgins leans down and looks at the pictures. “Then?” she asks.

“My father died last year, marking the termination and dissolution of the trust. And now, land-rich and cash-poor, we, the beneficiaries, are selling off our portfolio to…someone. I don’t know who yet.”

“And your decision will have a major impact on Hawaii’s real estate world,” she says in a tone of mock importance. I figure she’s quoting something she read in the paper. It bothers me that everything I just said, she probably already knew. I close Scottie’s book.

“Lucky.” Mrs. Higgins opens the screen door. I look over at the empty bench and picnic table and imagine Scottie sitting there alone.

“Can Esther take me to the club instead of voice?” Scottie asks. “You said we’d go to the beach. So can she?”

I look over Scottie’s head at Mrs. Higgins. “It’s what I inherited. Like it or not.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

I wait to see if I can be excused, and when she doesn’t say anything more, I start to walk with Scottie to the car. I feel exhausted, as though I’ve just delivered a sermon, but my speech has put me in the right frame of mind. I’ll look through the buyers’ portfolios with the images of Edward and Kekipi in my head. And then I can stop thinking about it. I feel cold, with my mind preoccupied in business when Joanie’s lying there on a kind of long and uncomfortable red-eye flight.

“Can she? Can Esther take me to the club?”

“Sure,” I say. “Good plan.”

We get in and I start the car. “Are you going to be good to Lani?” I ask. I think of Tommy Cook, a pale boy with psoriasis; we used to tie him to a chair with bungee cords and put him in the middle of the road, then hide. Few cars would actually come down Rainbow Drive, but when they did, it always surprised me that the drivers would slow their vehicles and swerve around the chair. None of them ever got out of their cars to help Tommy; it was as though they were in on the prank. I don’t know how Tommy managed to let us catch him more than once. Maybe he liked the attention.

“I’ll try,” Scottie says. “But it’s hard. She has this face that you just want to hit.”

“I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of Tommy, but realize I’m not supposed to empathize. “What does that mean?” I ask. “The kind of face that you want to hit. Where did you get that?” Sometimes I wonder if Scottie knows what she’s saying or if it’s something she recites, like those kids who memorize the Declaration of Independence.

“It’s something Mom said about Danielle.”

“I see.” Joanie has carried her juvenile meanness into her adult life. She sends unflattering pictures of her ex-friends to the
Advertiser
to put in their society pages. She always has some sort of drama in her life, some friend I’m not supposed to speak to or invite to our barbecues, and then I hear her on the phone gossiping about the latest scandal in an outraged and thrilled voice. “You are going to die,” I’ll hear her say. “Oh my God, you will just die.”

Is this where Scottie gets it? By watching her mother use cruelty as a source of entertainment? I feel almost proud that I have made these deductions without the blogs and without Esther, and I’m eager to tell Joanie about all of this, to prove that I was capable without her.

6

I STUDY THE
bids—the plans, offers, histories, credos. I’m on our bed, and the house is quiet without Scottie and Esther. I thought I could just pick a buyer, but it’s not as simple as that. I want to make the best decision. I’ve got those pictures in my head and feel I have to choose on their behalf as well. The plans for the land are virtually the same: condos, shopping centers, golf courses. One wants a Target, the other a Wal-Mart. One wants a Whole Foods, the other a Nordstrom.

Michael Nasser, our attorney, wants us to accept an offer from Holitzer Properties. I know that a few cousins are pissed off because Holitzer didn’t make the highest bid, and Michael Nasser’s daughter is married to Holitzer’s chief financial officer. A few of the cousins balk at what seems to be an insider deal, but I’m thinking it would be good to choose a buyer who has a history here. I remember Joanie thought this as well. She surprised me by bringing it up frequently. She knew a lot about the buyers and the numbers, which shocked me. She was never interested in anything I was working on. When I tried to talk about cases at work, she would cover her ears and shake her head.

Many nights, when she would ask me what was happening with the sale, so uncharacteristically interested, my appreciation would turn into paranoia, and this was before I found the note. I wondered if she was planning to divorce me after I sold my shares. But if that were the case, she probably would urge me to sell to the highest bidder and not Holitzer.

“Just sell to Holitzer and move on,” she said one night. We were on the bed, and she was flipping through a magazine about kitchens. “The others could back out. And Holitzer is local. His family is from Kauai, comes from a working-class background. Holitzer’s your man.”