Page 10 of Big Island Neighbors
“That’s amazing!”
Dio was less than a year old, but he was brilliant and utterly devoted to Kai. The six year old boy had spent hours watching videos of dog trainers and teaching Dio new tricks. Emma was proud of him - and deeply relieved to see him engaging with something beyond a screen.
Only a few months had passed since Adam’s death, and some days it felt like they were still scrabbling to climb out of the hole that he had left in their lives.
Kai and Dio repeated the trick several more times, seeing how high the dog could jump. The answer wasvery.With a running start, Dio could nearly clear Kai’s head.
“I made honey veggies,” she called down after Dio slumped to the grass in a panting heap. “Do you want some?”
“Okay,” Kai agreed. He was short of breath himself. He had been running around the orchard with Dio all morning.
Emma had finally succeeded in chopping back the spiny grass that had threatened to overtake the fruit trees, and Lani had helped her to lay down a thick layer of cardboard and mulch to keep it from growing back. With the cactus grass gone, the pair had twice as much space to run.
She carried her empty bowl inside and scooped out a serving of food for Kai. Her son eating a bowl of vegetables was another major win. His picky eating had reached an all-time high afterhis father’s death, and he was still reluctant to try new foods. But he had planted the radish seeds himself, and honey roasted radishes had become one of his staple foods.
Emma made a mental note to give him another packet of seeds to plant, to replace the dozens of radishes that they harvested each week.
Once Kai was settled at the picnic table on thelanaiwith his food and a big glass of fresh goat’s milk, Emma wandered back out to the garden. There was always more to do - tomatoes to tie up, weeds to pull, manure to bring in from the goat pen - but she was starting to feel a certain restlessness that her everyday garden chores didn’t completely soothe.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out to find a picture of her niece and nephew. Sixteen-year-old Juniper was beaming down at the bundle in her arms. Emma zoomed in to see that Juniper’s newborn brother had a firm grip on one of her fingers.
She replied with a string of hearts and pocketed her phone again. She was happy for her brother and eager to meet her new nephew, but the photo had brought a sharp ache to her chest. She and Adam had just started trying for a second baby when he died in the wildfire that had threatened their little town. That little brother or sister that might have been was just one more thing that Kai had lost along with his father, and it hurt her to know that he would always be an only child.
But he had Rory, she reminded herself. Lani’s daughter followed him around with an endless string of chatter, like any little sister would do. And he had plenty of other cousins besides. That would have to be enough. She knew in her heart that she would never have another baby.
As unthinkable as it was now, she knew that she might find love again. Maybe. Someday. She knew it on a logical level, even while her heart refused the possibility.
But falling in love while she was still young enough to have another baby? That wasn’t in the cards for her. And so, as much as she would have loved to give Kai a sibling, it just wasn’t meant to be.
“Doggonit!” There was a clang and a clatter from the other side of the fence, and Emma walked over to see what was going on.
The fresh chain link fence had just been stretched a few days before, and so she could still see through it. It would only be a few months - weeks, even - before the whole thing was shrouded in green leaves like the rest of the fenceline.
Beyond the fence, Mrs. Rasmussen was struggling with a cauldron-sized soup pot. She set it on the ground and set about collecting its contents - whole heads of cabbage that had rolled every which way.
“Need a hand?” Emma called.
Her neighbor waved her away without looking up. They had gotten off on the wrong foot when Emma’s goats jumped over the old broken fence and got into the neighbor’s garden.
Now that she had decided to stay indefinitely, she wanted to cultivate a better relationship with the lady next door.
“Please let me help.”
Mrs. Rasmussen looked up and narrowed her eyes in consideration. Her gray hair was pulled into its usual bun, and she wore a flowing dress in place of her usual gardening clothes.
She gave a curt nod of agreement, and Emma trotted out to the road and around to her neighbor’s gate.
“What’s all the cabbage for?” Emma asked as she knelt in the gravel driveway near her neighbor. She picked up a small green head of cabbage and picked bits of gravel off of it before putting it in the oversized pot with the rest.
“Soup.”
The seconds ticked by with no elaboration, and Emma fished out a pair of onions that had rolled under a hibiscus bush. Its bright red flowers were nearly the size of her face.
“There’s a weekly soup kitchen at the community center,” Mrs. Rasmussen explained when Emma returned the onions to the pot. “We’ve been getting more people every time, and for some of them it’s the only real food they get all week. I bought this ridiculous pot, and I thought it would be manageable without any water in it, but… well, you see how everything went flying.”
“You make the soup there?”
“Yes, there’s an outdoor kitchen next to a large covered area with picnic tables.”
