Page 20 of Big Island Neighbors
“And I’ll ask Auntie Mahina to find some photos. I bet she has whole albums full somewhere.”
Emma sniffed and dried her face. “I should print up some pictures of Adam and Kai. We had plenty at home, but here… when we came, I had no idea we’d be staying so long.”
“Is your house still sitting empty?”
“No, some family friends are staying there for a while. They lived up above town, and their house was destroyed in the fire.”
“That’s good of you.”
“I couldn’t just leave it sitting empty when so many people lost their homes.”
Rory came stomping in, mud splattered and scowling. “Where’s my hot chocolate?”
“It’s here, tiny tyrant.” Lani settled her at the kitchen table with a mug and a plate of toast topped with goldenliliko’ibutter. “Eat some food while you’re at it.”
“I’m starving!”
“Yeah, I could tell.” She squeezed Emma’s arm in passing and walked out onto the lanai. Through the window, Emma heard her greet Kai and sit beside him on the bench. “Do you see thatlychee tree there, behind the papayas? Me and your dad used to climb it when we were your age.”
“Really?” Kai asked.
“Yep. We used to sit up there for hours. Sometimes he would wedge a cushion between the branches and read a whole book. We even tried to build our own treehouse once, but it was a disaster.”
“What do you mean, a disaster?”
“Now that’s a story.”
Emma smiled and moved away from the window. Her heart felt warm and wounded at the same time. She wondered if she would ever be able to remember her husband without that mix of warmth and pain… probably not.
At least now the balance wasn’t so off that the pain completely overwhelmed the joy every time that she thought about him. It still did sometimes… maybe even most of the time.
But not every moment of the day until she was drowning in it. Not anymore.
And that was something, wasn’t it?
She scooped out a bowl of leftover rice and ladled some hot bone broth over it. Then she sat at the kitchen table and ate mechanically, out of necessity rather than hunger, nodding along as Rory described an argument between two girls at the co-op in excruciating detail.
She was washing the dishes when Kai came in with the day’s eggs. They were pale blue, chocolate brown, olive green – there were even a couple of oversized eggs from the ducks.
“That’s an impressive haul, kiddo.”
“I still have more places to check!”
“Wait just a minute. You need breakfast.”
“I already ate a whole bunch of bananas!”
“You did?”
“Yeah, those little ones that taste like candy. Auntie Lani helped me climb the lychee tree, and we ate up there like a couple of monkeys!”
He grinned at her, and she smiled back. And then he was gone, out the door and racing back through the orchard with Dio at his heels.
As she rinsed the dishes and set them in the rack to dry, Emma watched the ducks splashing in the puddle that had spilled over from the catchment tank. It rained nearly every night, and the rooftop caught so much more than they could use.
When it poured the way it had the night before, the water pooled into puddles the size of ponds where the ducks would splash delightedly… for a few hours, and then it was gone.
Below their thin layer of soil was nothing but porous lava rock, and water drained quickly (thankfully, or else the trees would drown and the goats’ hooves would rot).
