Page 99 of Totally Shipped
A curtain twitches, then I heard a high-pitched squeal. The front door is flung open, and Nanda tears down the steps.
“Keyara! Pepe laitiiti!” she screams, running full tilt and nearly falling into her daughter.
“You’re alive! My little love!”
“Key! You’re alive—”
Then there is Nikau. He stumbles after his wife. The last time I saw him he looked a hundred pounds and deathly pale.
Now his voice resonates out of his broad chest. “I knew it! I knew there was a reason why the Lord chose that I would survive.” He joins Nanda and Keyara and they are dancing in a circle. Dancing with joy.
Nanda looks like she’s aged a hundred years. Her scalp is visible through her thinning, patchy hair.
Nikau picks up Key and throws her in the air. “I just knew. I knew you were out there. Otherwise what was the point of me surviving? I just knew it.”
I don’t think Nikau will ever let that kid leave his side again. Their reunion has everyone crying.
And the fact that Nikau had miraculously gone into remission from his cancer?
I’m not a religious man, but sometimes I wonder.
I scan the doorway, half-expecting Meemaw to be there, wiping her hands on her apron and telling us to wash up for supper.
But the next person to step into the doorway is certainly not Meemaw.
He’s a handsome black man with an extremely upright posture—old Thomas ‘Tough Love’ Malone himself. You can tell by the lack of emotion.
Rex’s dad was always scary to me. He’d come into town occasionally, criticize everyone and everything, then leave again, looking nothing but glad to be getting away from his parents and his son.
Rex steps away from the rental car where he was leaning.
Leander and Killian fuss over Daisy and Thea, but I step around the SUV and join Rex as he greets his father.
“Dad.”
“Rex.”
Then.
“Gray.”
Huh…all these years I wondered if he actually knew my name, as he always just referred to me as ‘boy’.
Tough Love narrows his eyes slightly, then walks down the stoop steps, circles around Key’s still shrieking reunion, and puts out his hand.
His son has been missing, presumed dead for almost a year, and Thomas Malone offers his hand to shake.
Cold. Fish.
Rex gives it a brief pump. I guess he didn’t expect anything else. But we’d just watched the outpouring of love from Nanda and Nikau, and I thought, just maybe, Tough Love might, I dunno? Care?
Rex waves a hand back to the rest of us.
“Dad, I want to introduce you to some people. These are the people who I was… castaway… with.” Rex clears his throat. This is so weird, it’s like he’s introducing a Sunday League kickball team, not the people he’s just spent twelve months fighting for survival with.
“You know Gray,” Rex says, “and this is Leander, I don’t know if you remember him. Then this is Killian, and this is Daisy.”
Tough Love’s eyes narrow. “And the baby?”
