Page 36 of Big Island Weddings
It all left her feeling like an unwanted house guest in her own home… in his home.
She hated it.
Was she really going to deny Rory a shot of having both of her parents under one roof out of some vaporous hope that Tenn was The One? What if he wasn’t?
What if he didn’t love her anymore?
Lani was so trapped in her own head that she drove right through Hilo, over the bridge and up the highway. It wasn’t until she saw Alae Cemetery on her left with its massive monkey pod tree that she realized she had overshot the library.
She pulled into the cemetery to turn around… but then, instead of flipping the truck around and going back to the highway, she drove up to the parking area.
She hadn’t been to Alae since moving back to the island.
She hadn’t been there since her dad was buried.
She had driven past a dozen times, had told herself a dozen more than she would visit some other day when she had the time, when she was ready… but she never had.
It was too painful.
Today, she parked her uncle’s truck and climbed out into the cloud-filtered sunshine. The sky was bright white, making her squint.
Uncle John wasn’t there in Alae. They had scattered his ashes out in the ocean along with his son’s. She stood for a long time with her back against the truck cab, staring out over the blue Pacific and gathering her strength.
She walked up to the tree first, letting its long branches shelter her. With her fingertips trailing along the trunk, she circled the tree three times. Then she set out to find her family.
Some of the graves were beneath the branches of the enormous monkeypod tree. The overlapping green leaves shone above like stained glass. But her family was out in the sunshine, on the slope of the hill overlooking the water.
Lani hadn’t been to the cemetery in over ten years, but her feet took her straight to their plots.
They were all together: her maternal grandparents,theirparents, her mom, and her dad.
Her great-grandfather’s headstone had his photo on it, as many of the older stones in this cemetery did. It was an oval with a black-and-white photo of him, younger than any other photo of him that she had seen. He’d died before she was born.
She knelt, brushed her fingers over it, and then moved on.
Her grandparents had a shared headstone, polished and gray, that read Kealoha on top and their given names below with the years of birth and death.
Her dad’s grave was on the end, and she sat right on top of it, on the rectangular cement slab that marked it. Maybe that was a graveyard faux pas; she had no idea. But it reminded her of sitting on his lap as a little girl, all the mornings that she had stumbled out half awake to find him at the kitchen table reading the paper.
She leaned over so that she could touch her mom’s grave with one hand, and tears spilled down her cheeks. It wasn’t just that she didn’t visit them. She hardly even talked about them.
It wasn’t a lack of love – just the opposite. Remembering her parents hurt so much that she had locked those memories away.
Coming home to Hawai’i had brought it all back up again for a while… and then, without even realizing that she was doing it, she had locked it all back down again.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I haven’t come sooner or brought Rory to see you.” She took a shaky breath and looked out over the ocean.
She sat there for a long time, just breathing and looking out at the blue horizon.
The sunshine soaked into her hair and the stones and the fabric of her clothes.
And slowly, anxiety loosened its grip on her chest.
Her breaths came easier again, and the pressure behind her eyes let up.
“It’s really beautiful here,” she murmured, turning to run her fingers over her mother’s name. “I’ll come more. We both will.”
Feeling lighter than she had on the way in, Lani stood and walked back to her uncle’s old truck. Before she climbed into the driver’s seat, she turned, kissed her palm, and blew the kiss back towards her family.
