Page 43 of Big Island Sunrise
He’d included a picture of the menu she had designed, printed on quality cardstock. Then a picture of her coloring pages, filled with careful color or wild scribbles and taped in positions of honor along the walls of his restaurant.
When are you coming to see them in person?
Lunch tomorrow, maybe,she replied.We’re Kona side today.
See you tomorrow, then.His reply came through immediately.Enjoy the sunshine! It’s pouring over here.
“What are you grinning about?” Emma teased her.
She put her phone away. “Nothing.”
“Hmm.” Emma made a knowing sound, still smiling.
“Can wegonow?” Rory demanded.
“Yep.” She tossed her sunscreen back in her beach bag. “Let’s go swimming!”
“Yay!” Rory jumped down from the truck.
“Yay,” Kai said in a tone that was pure Eeyore.
The water shone with blinding light, and they walked down the beach to find a spot that would stay shady all day. Kai hovered near the trunk of the large tree, peering cautiously out at the other beachgoers in the surf. Rory, on the other hand, plunged immediately into the water.
Lani stood just behind her daughter, in the surf up to her knees, while Rory let the waves push her forward and backward. She cackled with delight when a particularly rough one tumbled her, and then she ran right back into the surf.
Eventually Emma coaxed Kai out past the breaking waves and into calmer water, where she stood steady and held him up. He would swim a bit, floating over the easy waves that passed without breaking, and then reach out to his mom.
Rory wanted to go out into the deep water too, and so Lani helped her out past the shorebreak. Her tiny daughter refused to be carried, so Lani just stayed next to her and held her steady as she ducked under the rolling whitewater of each oncoming wave.
The swim out to her cousin was so exhausting that she finally did let her mother hold her when they were past the shorebreak.
Then, once she had caught her breath, she swam circles around them.
When they finally went in to shore and settled onto their picnic blanket in the shade, the kids ate with the ferocious appetite unique to growing children who had spent hours in the water.
Once their bellies were full, they went to the wet sand just beyond the surf and set to designing their own civilization in miniature.
Rory constructed a whole village of fairy houses, complete with doors and chimneys made from bits of seaweed and fallen twigs. She used small stones to create paths leading from one door to the next and adorned each little sandhouse with shells.
While she made the village, Kai dedicated his efforts to a wall and a moat that would protect the villagers against the incoming tide. He worked tirelessly, digging deep into the sand and building a wall that extended far beyond the village on either side. It even curved towards the sea on either end, the better to divert water away from the fairy houses.
Lani felt a peculiar ache in her chest, watching them.
She felt as though she had fallen through a time warp to some long-ago day when her parents were still alive, when they used to swing by and pick Adam up on their way out of Hilo, escaping the rainy winter weather in favor of a beach day on the west side of the island.
Rory and Kai looked so much like her and Adam that it gave her a peculiar sense ofdéjà vu, like watching her childhood from the outside.
During those lonely years in Alaska, she’d felt a growing sense of guilt for not giving Rory a sibling. Lani herself was happy with her perfect little girl, content to give her everything that she had. But at the same time, she felt like she was cheating her daughter out of some vital piece of her childhood, a relationship that would last forever.
By the time that she was married and physically ready to have a second baby, she had begun to have her doubts about Zeke. And by the time he had quit his shipboard job to live fulltime in Alaska, she had known deep down that she couldn’t tie herself to him with a baby that was his by blood. He had pestered her for a baby, but she stood firm.
Even when that pestering had turned into something scarier.
Especially then.
It was bad enough that Rory had spent her early years under the same roof as that volatile temper; Lani wouldn’t knowingly bring another baby into that.
All the same, she had felt a deep grief - wishing that things were different, that she had more to offer her daughter than the life of an only child. She knew that feeling all too well.
