Page 33 of Big Island Weddings
“I hate math!” He crumpled up the hand-drawn set of equations that she had made for him, and her temperature simmered towards the boiling point.
“Take a break,” she snapped. “Just go outside.”
“Fine! I don’t even care! I like Dio better than you anyway!” He ran out, slamming the door behind him.
Emma lowered her head to the table with athunk.
“Are you okay?” Juniper asked.
“I’m fine.” She sat up again and looked at her niece, who was watching her with amusement in her hazel eyes. Her voice took on a pleading whine as she said, “He loves math.”
“Sure.” Juniper turned off a burner on the stove and lifted the lid off of one of the pots she had simmering; lemongrass and Thai lime perfumed the air, anchored by the earthy smell of mamaki. “That sounded like a kid who loves math.”
“He does, though. He used to recite square roots for fun. He loves doing multiplication with his mangatiles. But anytime I try to show him anything on paper, he blows a gasket.”
“Didn’t you use to do this for a living?”
“Yes,” Emma replied shortly. She held back from saying that she would rather wrangle a classroom full of kindergarteners than try to get Kai to sit through a single worksheet.
But that’s why she hadn’t sent him off to school. He wasn’t the kind of kid who could sit still and keep quiet. He didn’t even sit and color the way his cousins did.
Unless something could fully capture his interest and occupy his whole brain, Kai was up and out the door. Worksheets felt like torture to him, and she sympathized.
She just wished he could be a little bit easier. Just sometimes.
And then she immediately felt guilty for wanting him to be anything other than what he was.
With a heavy sigh, she slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes against a growing headache. She pressed her fingertips to her temples and massaged them in circles, breathing in the fragrant air of the different herbal tea blends that Juniper was testing.
A mug connected gently with the table in front of her, and she opened her eyes to a steaming cup of herbal tea. Juniper sat down across from her with a mug of her own.
“Thank you.” Emma put her hands around the mug in front of her and inhaled the cinnamon steam. The tea was a deep shade of red.
“It’s one of my iced teas, but it’s not bad warm.”
Emma sipped it, savoring the tart hibiscus and hints of citrus. “It’s delicious warm. It makes me think of spiced apple cider.”
“That’s a good idea! I could add even more spices, like star anise, and sell it warm when the weather’s cold. Actually, that might work for iced tea too…” She was talking mostly to herself now, jotting notes down on the big yellow pad that she was using to keep track of her experiments. “The basic hibiscus and royal purple teas taste basically the same, so I want to use different spices with each of them to create different flavor profiles. Star anise for the purple could be fun…”
Emma sat back and sipped her tea as Juniper’s chatter washed over her. She had been so anxious about her niece coming to live with her, worried that she wasn’t up to the challenge of parenting a grieving teenager. But so far, it had been astonishingly easy.
Juniper was working two part-time jobs in addition to helping at the soup kitchen and attending permaculture classes with Emma. Her drive to start her own business was awe inspiring, as was her knowledge of medicinal herbs. Seventeen was a distant memory for Emma, but she couldn’t remember being half that passionate about any sort of work.
“Egg delivery,” Nell said as she came through the kitchen door. She had all but taken over the daily work of caring for the animals, and Emma felt half guilty about how much her new tenant had taken on.
“Thank you!” she said. “Can’t you use any?”
“I have a dozen in my fridge already.”
“Well, if they keep piling up like this we could always use them to make something for the soup kitchen.”
“Or bring them to A Place of Refuge,” Nell suggested. “Hard boiled eggs, maybe? The shared kitchen there can be difficult to work in.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Juniper rose and walked over to the stove, then yelped so loudly Emma thought that she’d burned herself.
“What happened?” Emma asked, standing.
