This Is Paradise (23 page)

“Good you neva tell Dad. Fo’ once you tink of us and not yoaself first.”

“I never think of myself first,” Pili protested weakly.

“Bulai you,” she snapped. “Who flew to California? Who wen college? And who wen come hea in time fo’ meet Albert?”

“I didn’t know I was going to meet Albert here.”

“You don’ know what it’s like fo’ me.” She bent over the sink as if an explanation lay in the pile of plastic lids. “All dis time, I take his jokes and his criticism and I neva complain because if I do den maybe he go turn on you and he question you and den it all gon fall apart.”

“What would fall apart?”

“Us. Da tree of us. You, me, dad.”

“You think I would make us fall apart? If I were myself, if I were out, we would all collapse?”

Maile stuck her chin out at him, defiant.

“How dare you. All these years you’ve thought if I came out, was open with him, it would be the end of everything. But you know what? I think you’re wrong. I think Dad would have accepted it and we would have been
better, stronger. Him and me. Maybe not you, but I don’t care. If I could come out to Dad right now, I would.”

Maile threw a lid across the room and it sailed like a Frisbee, landing on the floor beside the kitchen table. “Yeas ago, one ting. But now? What, you tink he want accept dis now? Good ting you no can tell ’im.”

Pili slammed his fist on the countertop. “Can. Right now.” He marched from the room. In the study, he lifted the turquoise blanket from the foot of the bed and held it in front of his father, as if Harrison could see it. Albert stood up from his chair, confused, and when Maile appeared in the doorway, he looked from Pili to her and back.

“Dad,” Pili said. “You know how much this blanket means to me. Mom’s blanket, the blue one. And I remember what it once meant to you and her.”

Pili paused. He sensed his anger with Maile was driving him to act, and he wondered if he should give greater thought to the moment, but he suppressed these doubts. “I’d like to give this blanket to Albert. I want him to have it. I am giving it to him.” Pili rested the blanket in Albert’s arms.

“Why you gon do dis?” Maile whispered.

“Thank you,” Albert said to Pili. He sounded surprised but pleased. After a moment he took Harrison’s hands between his and pressed gently. “Thank you,” he repeated, speaking this time to Harrison.

Maile remained in the doorway. “How can you?” She
looked stricken, more shocked than angry. “Not even yoas fo’ give away.”

Albert looked at her, confused and scolding at once. He clung to the blanket proudly. “Your dad means so much to me,” he told her, and she shook her head. She looked ashamed or embarrassed or both, and Pili wondered if she felt guilty, or if the embarrassment was for him and Albert alone.

Pili no longer cared. He walked to the right side of the bed and rested his head on the pillow beside Harrison’s. “I love you, Dad. You were a good father and a good man. And you have taught me to appreciate the goodness in other men.” Pili didn’t move then for some time, but remained with his head beside his father’s. Albert continued grasping Harrison’s hand, the blanket tucked beneath his arm.

Pili listened to his father’s labored breath. He smelled his father’s skin, redolent of Old Spice and age and death. He hadn’t felt this much love for his father since he was a boy. He looked across the bed at Albert and smiled.

At last Albert smiled back. “I’m so proud to have helped your dad these last few months. This blanket is such a gift.” Albert reached across the bed with his free hand and rested his hand on Pili’s wrist. “You’ve been a good son.” He spoke as if giving a benediction. Pili saw Maile turn and leave the doorway, but Albert never noticed.

The plastic lids were still strewn across the kitchen table when Harrison died. Eventually Pili put them away, not in any particular order, though he did try to keep the small lids stacked together because they were so easy to misplace. Maile wasn’t speaking to Pili or Albert except to give them orders: call Auntie Inez, visit the mortuary, confirm with the florist. If Albert had thought his employment would end as soon as Harrison passed away, he had been mistaken.

Pili tried several times to apologize to Maile, but she only answered with more demands. “Need call Uncle Kawai in California,” she said when he asked if she had wanted to keep the saddle blanket for herself, or “Dad like hea some Hawaiian songs, so bettah choose ’em,” when he attempted to tell her he hadn’t meant to be so angry.

Pili didn’t feel remorse for coming out, but he knew his argument with Maile had driven him to it, and for that he was sorry. Her protection of him had hurt. In the end, both Maile and Albert were right. His coming out had less to do with his father than he had expected.

On the day of the funeral, family members flew in from Honolulu or drove over from Hilo or up from Kona. Joe and Keo were both pallbearers. Joe’s middle daughter sang “Kuʻu Home O Kahaluʻu,” and her clear, youthful voice lilted over her dad’s guitar picking.

Keo hosted the reception—for once Maile could not bear to put the house in order—and the party lasted well
into the night. Everyone wanted to meet Albert, who was a kind of hero, and many of the older women wrapped their arms around his neck and cried softly on his shoulder. He held them. He wasn’t shy with the family or embarrassed, and he let himself be kissed and questioned and patted on the cheek.

At one point Maile turned to Pili and smirked, “Well, I guess he gon be a hit if you decide fo’ marry.” They were the first personal words she had spoken to him in six days, and they felt oddly good.

Sometime around midnight Albert said he had to drive home, but Pili could tell he had had too much to drink. Maile was asking to return home too, exhausted from the day, so Pili urged both of them into her truck. Keo was reluctant to see the three of them leave, and when Pili pulled out of the dirt roundabout that served as a driveway, the elder paniolo walked alongside the car. Finally, he shook Pili’s hand and told him to drive safe. When Pili looked in his rearview mirror, Keo was watching them. He looked small in the glow of the house lights, standing alone in the center of that dark road. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets and he was hunched into himself. Pili and Maile weren’t the only ones who had lost a father today.

Albert was laid out in the back of the cab, his head resting against the window and his legs slung on the bench seat while Maile curled up on the front passenger side.
Albert fell asleep, but Maile stayed awake, staring at the car’s ceiling. “Dis day wen jus’ how he like it.” Her voice echoed in the cold cab. After a moment, she said, “I happy it’s ova now.”

“The funeral?”

She shook her head.

“Dad’s dying?”

“Us, I mean. Da way we had fo’ be. Das ova now.”

Pili wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but she turned her face away from him and pressed her forehead against the window.

When they pulled into their driveway, all the lights were off, even the porch light, and the darkness emphasized the emptiness of the house. Maile said something about the horses needing to be fed, and as if on cue one of them whinnied, but neither she nor Pili made the move to head down to the barn. Pili knew the horses would have to wait to be hayed and watered until the morning. At least they had eaten well earlier in the day.

Inside, Pili pulled back the quilt on his bed and laid Albert down. Only three months ago this was Harrison’s bed, before he’d become too weak to move and the hospital bed had been ordered.

Pili stepped into the hall. Maile was in the bathroom with the door closed. He flipped on the hall light: he was afraid to walk past the study when the lights were off. The hospital bed had already been removed, sent back
to the hospice center from where they had rented it, and the two chairs that had once flanked the bed were now pressed into the corners of the room. The desk had yet to be moved back, and the room looked empty of life.

Maile stepped out of the bathroom, her face scrubbed clean except for the remnants of mascara that ringed her eyes and emphasized their redness. She came to stand beside Pili and stared into the dark study with him. He rested his hand on the small of her back and left it there, and eventually he realized she was crying quietly to herself. He drew her to him then, and her tears soaked through the thin cotton of his undershirt.

Pili was set to fly back to San Francisco in two days. He had invited Albert to join him, but Albert was hesitant and Pili suspected, despite their hopes for the future, that Albert would fail to depart the islands. Still, for some reason Pili couldn’t articulate, he felt generous in the face of losing Albert. He hoped Maile and Albert would remain friends, or maybe he felt he owed Maile that friendship as some kind of apology. He wondered if, in time, Maile’s allegiances would shift, and she’d tell Albert how Pili had betrayed him to Harrison.

Pili wanted to believe he would one day return to Big Island to stay. Perhaps by then Albert would be ready to come out to his family, and Maile would have remarried. Her kids would fill the barn with their laughter and their games and their thumping as they leaped from the hayloft
rafters into the hay. Pili smiled to himself. His and Harrison’s dreams for the ranch weren’t different at all.

“Time fo’ get some sleep,” Maile said, pulling away from Pili. She patted his cheek, then took a step toward her bedroom.

He wanted to follow her, to sit beside her and lightly scratch her back. She had done this for him after their mother died. For weeks she remained with him until he fell asleep, even though he felt himself too old for such pampering. Years had passed since he had remembered her devotion during that period in their lives, but now he could suddenly feel her nails on his shoulder blades, the slow circles she drew as the heaviness of sleep overtook him.

“Have I helped you at all?” he asked. “At least sometimes?”

“Sometimes.” Her face was puffy and flushed, and she looked older than she had a month ago. Still, she smiled at him. “Enough times.” He wanted to ask if she had forgiven him or just stopped counting the myriad ways he had disappointed her. Maybe they were the same thing.

He wrapped his hand around her upper arm, gently, and felt there the muscle. She was strong, always had been. He imagined her strong arms holding a baby. He imagined her child in his own arms. He thought of the hayloft, of laying a blanket on the hay and showing her kids how to jump onto it from the rafters. He would describe foreign cities to them until their eyes shone with
the possibility of travel, and then he’d tell them of the joys of returning home.

His hand dropped to hers and she squeezed it. “When you come back?” she asked.

“Soon,” he promised. “As soon as I can.”

I am deeply thankful for my cohort at the University of Michigan and my fellow writers there, especially Sterling Schildt and the tireless Kodi Scheer, who has been as much an editor as a friend. I am grateful also to my mentors: Peter Ho Davies, Michael Byers, Eileen Pollack, and Nicholas Delbanco. The ideas for a couple of these stories first appeared in Joyce Carol Oates’s class at Princeton University, and I owe a debt to her, April Alliston, and A.J. Verdelle for their encouragement.

The support I received from the Santa Fe Art Institute, Hedgebrook, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Ragdale, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts allowed me to complete this book. My wonderful agent, Markus Hoffmann, lent his vision and insight to these stories. And at Hogarth, my editor, Lindsay Sagnette, along with Christine Kopprasch, buoyed me with the ideal combination of editorial precision and deep empathy.

My community in Hawaiʻi continually inspires and humbles me, and my interpretation of the islands is shaped in no small part by my friends and ʻohana on Oʻahu and Maui. Tyler Noesen has left his indelible mark on each of these stories. Moreover, I would not be the writer or person I am without the friendship and support of Emily and the entire Essner clan. Mahalo nui loa.

I have been fortunate that I am descended, on both the Kahakauwila and Loy sides, from a long line of storytellers. These pages are shaped by my grandparents, uncles and aunties, cousins, and parents, as well as the histories they’ve shared with me, and I am in debt to my entire ʻohana, for by generously recounting their stories, they have taught me how to tell stories of my own.

K
RISTIANA
K
AHAKAUWILA
, a native Hawaiian, was raised in Southern California. She earned a master’s in fine arts from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Princeton University. She has worked as a writer and editor for
Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado
, and
Highlights for Children
magazines, and taught English at Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaiʻi. At present, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.