Page 66 of Big Island Neighbors
Kiana thought about that for a second. “Like flowers?”
Lani smiled down at her. “Sure, like flowers.”
She clapped her hands together. “For real life?”
“For real life.” She dumped the blankets in the far corner of the truck bed and went back for another load.
This time, Kiana only went as far as the open door. “Can I watch cartoons?”
“No cartoons.”
“Aw! Why not?”
“It’s a beautiful day. Go play.”
“I don’t wanna go play!” She stomped her foot. “I want cartoons!”
A truck rumbled up to the front gate, and Dio started to bark. Not the warning bark that he used when strange men walked by, but the excited, puppyish yipping that he saved for kids.
Kiana jogged around the house to see who was there and shouted, “Olivia!” She sprinted to the front gate.
Lani waved at Tenn and went back inside.
What next? She would need a hand with the couch.
She walked through to the downstairs bedroom and started to strip the dank quilts off of the musty old mattress.
It wasn’t pleasant work, but she was glad that everything wrong with the house seemed to be surface level. Getting it livable would be easy enough, and then she could fix it up over time.
She was almost reluctant to leave her little third story room at the top of the Kealoha house, but she knew that having a house of her own was an important part of starting over. It would help her to feel that this new life of hers was real, that she had actually made it past the nightmare of her marriage and come home for good.
As much as she loved living with Emma, and as much as Emma insisted that the Kealoha house was as much Lani’s as it was hers, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was only there temporarily, staying with family, just passing through before she left the island again.
She wanted to make a home that was only hers. Hers and Rory‘s. A place of their own.
“Need a hand?”
Lani startled and dropped the towering stack of blankets that she was holding.
She turned to see Tenn in the doorway. He smiled abashedly and apologized for startling her.
“Hi.” She almost embraced him but didn’t, figuring that her clothes already smelled like the blankets she had hauled out to the truck. “Thanks, but I’ve got it.”
She gathered the blankets back up, and Tenn stepped aside to let her through the door.
“How about the mattress?” he asked. “Are you keeping that?”
“Nope. Everything must go.” She smiled at him over her shoulder on her way out. “At least everything with fabric.”
As she stacked the blankets in the truck, trying to take up as little space as possible, Tenn came through the front door of the house dragging the mattress behind him.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“It’s no trouble. Want to give me a hand guiding it up onto the truck?”
“Sure.” She jumped up into the truck bed and helped him steer it on. Or pretended to help; he could have done it without her.
“That mattress was pretty bad. How long since anyone stayed there?”
