Page 51 of Big Island Moonlight
They both walked into the room, where Juniper scooped their baby up off of the bed and put him to her breast. Cody stood just behind her, his chest warm against her back. The soft scruff of his jaw brushed her cheek as he looked down at their baby.
“Look what you made,” he said, breathless with awe.
“He made himself,” she reminded him.
“Out of your blood and bone.”
“That’s very dramatic,” she said, but her voice was warm.
“Blame the thousand epic fantasy books I read growing up.”
“I’ll do that.”
They were quiet for a moment, just gazing at their son.
Cody wrapped his arms around both of them, holding them up. Juniper leaned into him, admiring the muscles he had earned through a lifetime of farmwork.
Behind her, he sighed in contentment. “My family.”
18
Lani
Their clear blue winter was followed by a gray spring. Thick storm clouds hung over Pualena, drenching them in near-constant rain that ranged from a mist to a downpour.
When Lani went to pick her boxes of coloring books up from the post office, she draped each one in a raincoat to carry it out to her truck, where she stacked them in the cab instead of the flooded truckbed.
Her phone pinged about a dozen times as she drove. Despite her best efforts, she hadn’t succeeded in creating much breathing room for their family.
It was one thing to say that they needed more downtime; it was another thing to decide which activities and commitments needed to go. The girls loved soccer. Friends’ birthday parties felt irrefusable. Family was family, and there was always some gathering or another happening.
Carving out more time for rest meant refusing invitations to things that she genuinely wanted to be a part of, and she hadn’t quite figured out how to do that.
Lani loved her community with her whole heart, and she felt ungrateful for not appreciating a life that was basically one nonstop party full of family and aloha… but lately, she was just so tired.
When she got home, it was pouring so hard that she didn’t even try to take the boxes out of the truck; she just opened the nearest one, tucked a couple of coloring books under her raincoat, and ran for the house.
Just inside the door, she shed her coat and set the books down on a side table.
“You got them!” Tenn picked the coloring books up and started leafing through them.
“Do they look okay?”
“Same as the samples they sent. They’re brilliant.”
“Thanks.” She ducked into the circle of his arms and leaned into his chest, letting the warmth of him ease the chill of the day. He set the books back down and held her with both arms.
“You said there are stores that want to stock them?”
“Big Island Bookbuyers in Hilo agreed to stock a few and see how it goes. There are a couple of stores in Kona that are willing to take a few copies too, and I’m going to stop in at other stores while I’m driving around to see if anyone else is interested.”
Reluctantly, she left the circle of his arms and went to get the books she’d left in the living room. Ever since she got the sample copies, she had been coloring in her spare time, from five-minute lulls at Haumona Shave Ice to quiet time with the girls to hours of zen after their bedtime when Tenn had crashed early too.
“I colored in the more advanced coloring book, and the girls colored the kid one.”
He opened up the intricate coloring book that she had spent months designing and weeks coloring with a vast array of colored pencils to make the detailed designs really pop.
“I thought that if I had samples of both, I might sell more.”
