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I HAD STAYED AT THE Cloudforest Bed and Breakfast when I first arrived in Mahina. Mercedes Yamashiro, the proprietor, had taken me under her wing. She’d even tried to introduce me to Donnie.
I wasn’t interested. At the time I was dating Stephen Park, the theater professor. Stephen had turned out to be faithless, self-absorbed, and a terrible human being all around. I should have listened to Mercedes and not dismissed Donnie the “plate lunch salesman” out of hand.
Emma drove hard over a pothole, which broke my chain of thought.
“So anyway,” Emma was saying, “I told ‘em, yeah, fine, it’s supposably legal now, but it doesn’t mean you can use my house as a...Molly, are you listening?”
“Of course. You’re telling me a story about...your brother?”
Safe guess.
“Jonah can be such a pain in the tochas,” Emma said. “How does a grown man end up being such a useless waste of carbon?”
“Didn’t you try to fix me up with him?”
“I never,” she said.
“You set up a meeting at Sprezzatura,” I said. “You, me, and Jonah. At the fanciest restaurant in Mahina. And then you backed out at the last minute, hoping that with just your brother and me there, it would magically turn into a date.”
“Yeah, so?” Emma demanded. “What’s wrong with Jonah? I still think you two woulda made a good couple.”
Emma’s little brother Jonah is undeniably good-looking, but notoriously scatterbrained.
“Emma, you’re the one who told me he’s ‘dumber than an empty box of stupid’.”
“He is. And you’re smart. So if you had kids, it’d balance out. Eh, you gotta admit, my brother’s a better catch than Stephen Park. What a putz he was. Glad you dumped him.”
“Can’t disagree with you there.”
“Shame, ah? Bad representation for Koreans.”
“What are you talking about? Stephen wasn’t Korean.”
“Half Korean then.”
“No. Emma, we talked about this. Park is a Scottish name. Stephen Park was zero percent Korean.”
“But then how come—”
“Stephen let everyone think he was half-Korean because in his mind being hapa was cooler than being some plain old white guy whose wealthy parents subsidized his theater career with the profits from their Beverly Hills-Adjacent plastic surgery center.”
“Oh wait,” Emma said. “I think I remember something about that.”
“Don’t you remember how Stephen used to sneer at me for abandoning my literary education? How ‘degrading’ he thought it was for me to be working in the, gasp, horrors, business school? And here he was, a bigger phony than I could ever dream of being.”
“Wow, Molly, sounds like you’re still mad at him.”
“What? Of course I’m not,” I said. “That would be petty.”
“You should be mad at him. Remember when he lost track of time and missed your birthday cause he was schtupping his theater student?”
“Oh, that part you remember. Hey, here we are. I didn’t realize the Cloudforest was so close.”
“Time flies when you’re trashing your ex.” Emma steered into a parking spot.
The young woman at the desk was one of the College of Commerce interns. I knew her from Intro to Business Management class the previous year, so we got to chatting about her internship. She told me she liked Mercedes and enjoyed most of the guests, and she was learning to deal with the occasional difficult customer. Mercedes wasn’t there, so I left a message. Emma bought a jar of guava butter from the display behind the counter.
“Oh, tell Professor Harriet I hope her thumbs feel better soon,” the young woman said as we turned to leave. I turned back.
“Professor Harriet Holmes?” I asked.
“Yeah, Professor Harriet is great. I’m taking her business law class this semester. I always heard b- law was boring but Professor Harriet makes it super interesting.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” I said.
“She get all these stories about high maka maka British guys she knows, like politicians and archbishops and stuff. Did you know what a ‘rent boy’ is?”
“What happened to Professor Harriett’s thumbs?” I asked. “Why did you say you hope they feel better?”
“Oh our class did pretty bad on our last midterm. Someone asked her aren’t you supposed to make sure we all pass? And she told us the grades would stand but she expected the Student Retention office would have her in thumbscrews for it.”
“I think it was just a figure of speech,” I said. “The Student Retention Office doesn’t have actual thumbscrews.”
“Really?” Relief washed over the young intern’s face.
“It is the Student Retention Office though,” Emma said. “You never really know what they’re capable of.”