Honoka‘a
I start my days different now. Just me and Dad running down the shoulder of the Honoka‘a-Waipi‘o road. It’s one of the ways I take care of him, right? It seems good for him. I seem good for him. But I don’t tell anyone that, okay, maybe not even myself most of the time. I hate so much of this—being home, being something like a nanny or a nurse. It isn’t what I was supposed to be. It isn’t what I’m going to be, someday. But it’s what I am right now.
The first weeks were bad between me and Mom. Lots of cold stare-offs and her making me do things for her—help cleaning, help cooking, help budget shopping with the little money she brings in from cleaning, right. I’d do a bad job, slam things, complain. She’d ask what did I want her to do—I was the one that begged to come back here—and that she’d tried to keep me on the mainland, where I still had a chance.
And that was true, but I don’t belong in San Diego anymore. It’s almost March, almost spring break up there. I’ve sent too many messages to Van. Plus I even called once, my heart going so hard in my throat I thought I’d vomit. But she never responded. She’s probably blocked my number by now. I deserve it.
SO THIS IS IT: I’m here, a fucking housemaid and a nurse. We run. There goes the pat of our running shoes on the blacktop, right along the guardrail, with the spills of green below and then beyond ocean and horizon. My father’s mind has gone away to someplace young, the way he’s running. He’s looking ahead and his eyes and cheeks are tight with memory of a body that could do this. Now he’s brown and touched by age—moles, deep creases, scars—and thicker than he should be. He’s got his old high school football shirt on, heather gray with Dragons across it in Kelly green, and shorts that are definitely too short, okay? Under his shirt you can see his broad middle ripple with each stride. But the old Augie is there somewhere and we’ve been running ourselves off, him and me. Sweat stains in patches across his chest like calico. His hair clumps and splays from the morning heat and where he’s swiped his hands. He’s still got his trimmed little mustache. These days mostly me or Mom do the trimming.
He’s running and I’m running and I see his eyes looking far ahead. Or far behind, right? He’s thinking of when he was the one in the Friday-night games. Ironman football. Tight end and linebacker both. We pound down the blacktop hills and the long straight flats of the road to Waipi‘o with all the stalks of cane hissing and bowing. Long shadows from the eucalyptus planted on the mauka side. The beat of our breaths and our sweat. The dark smell of the soil. Pink-blue sunrise.
“HE’S NOT GETTING ANY BETTER,” Mom tells me, when we’re home, and Dad’s on the porch, staring out at the ocean, out past the hills and Hāmākua cliffs. Uncle Kimo has left for work for the day. I don’t even know what day of the week it is. “Actually, I think he’s getting worse.”
Me and Mom standing at the kitchen counter. Hands wrapping coffee mugs. The steam curling and vanishing, same as our thoughts. Okay, there are two versions of Dad, I know there are: The one that we see now, that is something like a dream trapped in a body. And then there is the Augie that was once a cane-truck driver once a husband once a luggage handler once a father. I’ve seen them both since I’ve been home, is what I tell her.
She smiles. It’s a sad smile. “Me and Kimo figured the same thing with us. Some days your father would spark back to who he was. Like a switch had been flipped, and he was almost normal. But then he’d fall back. After long enough, it stopped being both ways.”
“He didn’t use to go for runs with you, did he?” I say. “He’s still in there, Mom.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“What else can we do?” I ask. “It’s not like we can just drop him off at a care facility somewhere.”
“Don’t insult me,” she says. But there’s no teeth behind her comeback. Shit, maybe she did think about just dropping him off once. She’s looking at her palm. As if it has a message written on it, right? Finally she leans her chin into her hand, cups her jaw.
“He’s better now,” I say. “He’s better with me.”
She shakes her head. “Go ahead and think what you think. I should know better than to try and talk you out of it.”
“Listen to yourself,” I say. “You’re acting like you’re giving up.”
She examines her coffee. The sweet steam of our mugs blows over us. The day is coming full across the lanai. The trade winds and their nightly showers left the plants damp. Now they’re as green as anything could ever be. Okay, I want to tell my mother I’ll keep trying. I want to tell her she should, too. But it’s a conversation we’ve had a million times, and the only answer that ever comes out of it is that we’re never going to have another miracle. I want to scream: Where are all the island gods now?
But she wouldn’t hear me. She never hears me.
IT’S TUESDAY, which means I go to Hoku’s farm. He of the jowly sunburned face and broad-brimmed straw hat. He of the paint-stained, mud-stained, knee-patched jeans and the sort of easy paunch you get from drinking too many beers at pau hana time. I started working for him after that day he found me in the grocery store.
THAT DAY I WAS just standing there in the store, staring at the surprising varieties of paper towels, when he’d started talking to me. “You’re Malia and Augie’s daughter, yeah?” he’d asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That was your brother, then, d’kine that fell.”
“It was,” I said. “They never found him, though.”
He nodded. “Sorry for your loss.”
I shrugged.
“Some people was telling me you’re looking for one job,” he said.
Shame and distrust prickled my ears. I’d forgotten how people talk when they all know each other. Honoka‘a. “Maybe,” I said.
“Wow, no smiles or nothing?” he asked.
“I’m not your eye candy,” I said. “My face is my face.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Simmer down, Hawaiian, easy. I got this farm I trying for get going. Maybe some aquaponics, maybe some of the normal stuff, lettuce and papaya and like that.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I need people.”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“How much do you pay?”
He coughed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I just getting going.”
I almost slapped him. “You’re looking for free labor, so you find the girl whose brother died?”
“I mean,” Hoku said, “there’s stuff I trade for with a few the other farms, they give me their leftover harvest, like that.”
I hate to admit it, but that did get me listening. If there’s one thing that we pay out the ass for, it’s groceries. I could already hear the conversation with Mom: You went away to college and came back to work for what? But it’s not just the food that we’ll be getting. It’s the other part, too, for me. The work. My hands, my head. Making things again, building toward something besides bedsheets and towels and washcloths for Dad. Sometimes people make me feel sorry for wanting more, the same as they did back when I was growing up. But that day in the grocery store I didn’t give a shit. “How much free food?” I asked.
He shrugged. “More than I can eat.”
“Looks like you’ve been trying to see how much that is.” I waved in the vague direction of his belly.
He actually laughed. “I like you,” he said. “Way salty, this one.”
SO I WORK. Mornings I’m at Hoku’s farm. I dig and plow and plant. I trench and lift and wheel and throw. I blister and splinter and ache to the stiffest. There’s chicken shit and centipedes that get in my shoes and this warm stink that settles in my hair, right? It’s so hard to get out that I let it stay. Seems like it says clearly what I am now anyway.
By late afternoon I head home. Most days that means slogging up the hill to the Honoka‘a-Waipi‘o road and hitchhiking it. I carry my machete to and from. Not like there’s much of a danger out here. Small slow days with small slow people on the road. If anything I’m the dangerous one.
The first few days when I come home, there’s Mom at the door, seeing me in my mud-streaked clothes and nothing in my hands. No check or cash or pluses for the bank account. And she does that one sigh I used to think was reserved for Dean and Dean alone, another behavioral report or study-hall requirement, right? Only now it’s her daughter, another moneyless day in the fields, so a long slow exhale from her nose. It seems to blow around the entire house and fill all the space between our sentences. But eventually I bring home the first weekly exchange. Two backpacks and a rice sack of rainbow leftovers, lettuce tomatoes kalo papaya. I thump each one softly onto the table when I take it out. So she can hear the weight. So she can hear the reality. It sounds like an answer, even if I hate it.