The Aloha Spirit

by Linda Ulleseit

  That would mean less money for Maria, too. “You take good care of her, Kimo. She’s lucky to have you.”

  Kimo shrugged and climbed into his truck. The bumper bounced off the roadway as he drove away, scraping and clattering as it had done for years. Dolores turned toward the house.

  Alfred and John were playing in the yard. Four-year-old Alfred attracted dirt like a full-grown field hand. He had only to step one foot in the yard and dust covered him. Now it looked as though he was trying to initiate John into the wonders of mud. Dolores parked the truck and rushed forward as John put a handful of dirt in his mouth.

  “No, John! That’s not for eating! Alfred, you should know better than to let him do that!”

  “But I eat it, Dolores,” The little boy said, looking up at her with Maria’s large solemn dark eyes. Telltale mud streaks covered his lips and chin. “Mud no ka ‘oi.”

  “It’s the best? Oh, dear.” Dolores took each of them by the hand and nodded to Henry. “Let’s go inside and help your mama, all right?”

  Maria was in the kitchen arranging orchids for assembling into leis. Dolores held up the hands of the dirty boys. “Which do you prefer? Leis or bath?” she asked.

  “They’ve only been out there for a few minutes!” Maria protested, scrunching her nose. “I’ll take leis. They smell better.”

  That meant bath was Dolores’s job. They had running water in the kitchen, but despite lavish promises from Hawai‘i’s new Board of Supply, the water wasn’t always reliable. Dolores preferred the old hand pump in the kitchen that drew water up from an ancient artesian well. It built her arm muscles to fill a pot which she then put on the stove to heat. She filled the tub with a good mix of hot and cold water and stripped the boys of dirt-encrusted clothes.

  “You two hop into the tub and let’s get you clean.”

  “I don’t need to be clean to eat,” Alfred said, but he looked at the water and leaned over to dip a finger in. “Water no ka ‘oi.”

  Dolores smiled. With Alfred everything was no ka ‘oi—the best. Luckily, all the boys loved the water. They preferred the beach to the bathtub, but any water would do. They went into the tub without a fuss and splashed enough to assist with rinsing. By the time Alfred and John were clean, water had soaked the bathroom walls and the bodice of Dolores’s dress.

  Dolores dressed the boys and shooed them off to the kitchen. She stretched sore shoulders and used a third clean towel to mop up the water on walls and floor.

  In her own room, Dolores changed into a dry dress and thought how different her life would be if she’d learned to sweep or cook by age seven. She never would have met Maria. Today she’d be somewhere in California, working hard with a foster family that wasn’t hers. Dolores froze. Working hard with a family that wasn’t hers. She loved Maria and Peter and their boys, but more and more she dreamed of her own family.

  In the kitchen, Maria had two finished leis. Up to her elbows in purple orchids, she strung each flower, careful not to bruise the petals. Alfred and John occupied themselves in the corner with crayons and paper. She could see that the paper had started on the table. Some crayons were still there. The boys had moved to the floor, as they often did, for more room to spread out. Vividly colored animals and fish covered the paper. A green whale flew over a pink palm tree on one. Dolores marveled at the scope of their imagination.

  “I talked to Kimo out front,” she said to her friend as she picked up a lei needle and a piece of string.

  Maria nodded. “He told you, then?”

  “Won’t be long before he cuts his grandmother off and makes her retire.”

  “She deserves it. I feel selfish for wanting to make her continue. I’ve thought about how I could run the flower stand, or how I could have you do it. But Kimo has a cousin who’s going to step in. A cousin with a large family to make leis.” Maria set down the lei she was working on. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Hey now, the lei money has been a big help, but it won’t make or break you.”

  ON Saturday they loaded boys, food, and beach paraphernalia in the truck. After Peter made a secure nest of towels for the boys in the truck bed, he, Maria, and Dolores squeezed into the front like they always did. The road to Hanauma Bay had improved over the years, but that was good and bad. While it was easier to get to the beach, it now attracted more tourists. Peter found a place to park, and they unloaded everything, giving a stack of towels to Henry so he could say he helped.

  Before long, the three boys were playing at the water’s edge with Dolores, Maria, and Peter watching. Dolores admired the boys, so close in age. Shouts came from down the beach. Dolores shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand. The Medeiros boys were frolicking in the surf. They splashed each other and laughed. On the beach, a girl about Maria’s age was shouting and gesturing at them. A huge floppy straw hat protected her head and face from the sun. She wore blue-and-white-striped beach pajamas, the height of fashion this spring. Dolores admired the soft fabric that flowed around her legs in billowy pants. In back, the top of the one-piece outfit crisscrossed with straps. A matching blue-and-white-striped band decorated the hat.

  “Those are the Medeiros boys. A large Portuguese family from the Punch Bowl area of Honolulu. Lots of wild boys.” Peter clearly disapproved.

  Dolores scanned the group, looking for Manolo.

  Maria laid a hand on his arm. “They’re fun,” she said. “Always surfing and playing pranks. There’s room for that in life.”

  “Hmph,” Peter grunted.

  Dolores watched them and smiled. One thing was sure—these boys loved to tease each other. They had worked their way down the beach and now stood between Dolores and the water where the boys were playing. “I’ll get the boys,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Maria told her. “Have some fun.”

  “Watch yourself,” Peter warned. “Don’t go far.”

  Dolores walked over to where the girl in the floppy hat stood, the hems of her pajama outfit licked by seawater. She smiled shyly.

  “Aloha,” she said. “I’m Dolores.”

  “Aloha.” She smiled. “I’m Ruth, irmã, sister, to the barbarian horde.” Her hand indicated the boys in the water.

  One of the young men stepped forward. It was Manolo. His black hair was thin on top, slicked back by the water, but when he smiled, his face lit up like the sun parting a cloud. Dolores’s heart fluttered in response. Round wire-rimmed glasses, spattered with salt spray, sat on his nose. They made him look smarter, somehow. He wore black, tight-fitting swim trunks and a brown scapular on a cord around his neck. She knew some Catholics wore them to ensure the Virgin Mary’s protection despite sinful living.

  “Aloha, Dolores,” he said with a grin.

  “Aloha,” she said.

  Others echoed his aloha. They shook Dolores’s hand and threw their names at her. Some spoke to each other in Portuguese, and Dolores felt they must be discussing her. It made her uncomfortable yet relieved her of the duty of conversation for the moment. Dolores knew far more Hawaiian than Portuguese. She watched Henry, Alfred, and John, but her eyes fastened on Manolo as he and his brothers raced into the surf, hurdled the breaking waves, and dove into the swell beyond. Manolo ducked into the surf with his glasses still on. When he emerged, water droplets sparkled like diamonds all over his body. Dolores couldn’t take her eyes off him, and her stomach quivered so much her breath grew shallow.

  “Let me get the little ones out of there before they’re swamped,” she told Ruth. Before she could move, though, Maria had already corralled her boys and set them to making sandcastles with a small pail.

  A young man detached himself from the group of Medeiros boys and joined Ruth and Dolores on the beach. He grinned at Dolores with eyes full of devilment. “Want a drink?”

  She smiled in spite of herself. This would be Alfred in ten years or so. “A drink?” she asked him. He was a couple of years younger than she, too young to be offering her alcohol, and besides, Prohibition made it unlik
ely he would flaunt an offer of liquor. “What do you have?”

  “Guava juice.” He reached out to shake her hand. “I’m Alberto. Manolo is my uncle.”

  “Nice to meet you, Alberto. Manolo must have much older brothers or sisters to have a nephew your age.”

  “Alberto’s mother is my much older sister,” Ruth confirmed.

  Alberto ran back up the beach to their spot and returned with a guava juice. Dolores accepted the sweet pink drink as another boy came up, almost a duplicate of Alberto—short and sun-browned with curly dark hair—but without the devil in his eyes. “This is my Tito João.” Alberto laughed. “Watch out for him!”

  She gave up trying to figure out this convoluted family. “Aloha, João.”

  “Don’t let Alberto here fool you. He’s the troublemaker,” João told her.

  “Whacha sayin’, you codfish eater?” Alberto pretended to be angry.

  Dolores cringed at the epithet, but João laughed. “Get away, Alberto! Go bother someone who can’t resist your charms.”

  Alberto laughed and joined Manolo in the surf.

  “I won’t apologize for him,” João said. “He’s just a baby—eight years younger than me.”

  “How old are you?” Dolores asked.

  “Nineteen,” he said with a grin, then dashed off to leap in the surf.

  That made Alberto eleven. Looking over the crowd, Dolores realized that for once her fifteen years put her in the middle of the group.

  “It seems Maria has retrieved her boys,” she told Ruth. “Nice meeting you. Say good-bye to Manolo for me?”

  “To Manolo?” Ruth’s eyes lit with speculation.

  “And João, of course, and Alberto.” Dolores blushed and hurried away. For the first time, her mind was full of a handsome boy. It both exhilarated and embarrassed her.

  “Meet anyone nice?” Maria asked, trying to feed a banana to Alfred.

  Dolores took the banana from her and broke off a piece for Alfred. “Ruth Medeiros and her brothers.” She made a face at Peter. “They’re nice.”

  Peter smiled but shook his head as if he didn’t understand. “They’re wild and irresponsible.”

  “I’m glad you had fun,” Maria said. “You should do it more often.”

  “I’d like that,” Dolores said. Images danced through her head of Manolo in the surf. He played and laughed without a care in the world. Dolores had never been carefree. Even now, her responsibility to Maria and Peter kept her busy. Her days had settled into a routine of laundry and the care of her friend’s children. She’d chosen that life, Dolores reminded herself. But in reality, hadn’t she just traded hard work for Noelani for hard work for Maria? When would she ever have the satisfaction of hard work for herself, her own family, her own home? She turned away from the frolicking Medeiros boys to concentrate on sandcastles and on little boys she loved but who were not hers.

  On the way home that afternoon, the boys all fell asleep in the bed of the truck. Dolores sat by the passenger window. She stared out into the dusk and imagined meeting her new friends again, even though the only face she could remember clearly was Manolo’s. Maria and Peter talked next to her.

  Something in Maria’s tone caught Dolores’s ear. “Oh, ku‘uipo, it will be all right. It will.”

  She often called him sweetheart, but her tone was full of angst. Dolores listened harder.

  “Another baby is wonderful,” he said. “I love you and all my children. It’s just the dairy … I don’t know …” His voice trailed off.

  Another baby? Why hadn’t Maria told her?

  It was quiet for a moment as Maria laid her head against his shoulder. Uncomfortable, Dolores wondered if they had meant for her to overhear. She was right there—not a good way to keep a secret.

  “I know you’re worried,” Peter told his wife. He’d taken one hand off the steering wheel and put his arm around her. “I am, too. But this is our child. We will love and care for it like we do all the others.”

  So the dairy wasn’t doing well, and Maria was pregnant. She was no doubt afraid they would lose the dairy. Together with the demise of her lei business, this must have Maria tied up in knots. The rest of the ride passed in silence, each of them busy with their own thoughts of the future.

  ELEVEN

  Manolo 1930

  At church the next day, Maria sat between Peter and Dolores in their usual pew. The boys were arranged between the three adults. As they settled in, Dolores laid a hand on Maria’s arm. “I will pray for you,” she said. She tried to give the words a weight of hidden meaning. Maria had not yet told Dolores of her pregnancy. To Dolores’s shock, tears filled Maria’s eyes.

  “Oh, Dolores, I’m so sorry.”

  Dolores waited.

  “The bills are piling up, and the heifer is sick, and the boys are into everything. And I’m pregnant.” Her tone went dead with the last two words.

  Maria loved babies. She loved to welcome people of all ages into her home for a visit or to stay. This mood was unlike her. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Isn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  They had kept their voices low, but now Peter leaned forward. “Are you talking about the baby? Isn’t it wonderful, Dolores?” He mustered an excited tone, but his eyes remained worried.

  At the front of the church, the priest intoned Mass at the altar. In their pew, the tension was thick. “I don’t think either of you believe it’s wonderful. What’s wrong?” Dolores whispered.

  The tears that Maria had been holding back fell unchecked down her face.

  “Mama, why you crying?” John asked.

  “Shush, love,” Dolores put her arm around him. “Mama’s fine. She’s just a little sad, but your papa and I will make her better.”

  John turned his attention back to the words of the Mass. He tried to join in like Dolores had done at his age.

  “I need to spend more time at the fort over the next few weeks, and then the band goes to California for a week of performances,” Peter said, smiling at John.

  “I’ll look after Maria and the boys. Don’t worry,” Dolores said, but she sensed there was more.

  “I don’t know how I’ll keep the dairy. I’ve been talking to Hind about buying it outright.”

  “Aina Haina? Buying it?” Peter’s willingness to sell surprised her. The dairy had been a dream he and Maria shared. Selling it to Mr. Hind was even more of a surprise. He’d named his ranch Aina Haina, which meant Hind’s Land, and he’d gobbled up smaller dairies from Diamond Head to Koko Head. Some predicted he would own all the land maunalua, between the two mountains. “Where would you live?”

  Maria was quicker to answer. “Tell him not to do it. He loves that dairy.”

  “I love you and the boys more,” Peter said firmly. “It’s my responsibility to make sure you’re fed and healthy. The army is much more stable than the dairy business right now. There’s no competition in the army and plenty of army housing near Ewa Beach.”

  All around them, clothing rustled as parishioners stood. Conversation broke out, and Mass was over. Dolores told her friends, “You’re both being silly. The future’s never guaranteed. You do your best, and you do it together. We’re a team who share the responsibility of the family and farm, all three of us. We do what we must and greet our newest family member with the warmest aloha when he or she arrives. That’s our job.”

  Maria wiped her tears and nodded. “She’s right. We’ll be fine, Peter.”

  “We’re agreed then.” He smiled at Dolores over her head and mouthed, “Mahalo.”

  That wasn’t the end of the discussion though. As the weeks rolled by, Maria’s pregnancy gave her more and more trouble. Besides the physical sickness, the cloud of worry that had settled over the dairy caused her to tire faster. Sometimes she clutched her stomach as if labor had already begun early. Dolores told Kimo to stop bringing orchids and quietly assumed more and more of the boys’ care and the household duties. It was a testimony to Maria’s physical limita
tions that she let Dolores do it with no protest.

  Dolores made her some tea and rounded up the boys. “Let’s go to the beach, darlings, and leave Mama to rest, shall we?”

  They clamored around her, but Maria had already fallen asleep, her tea untouched beside her. Dolores left her a note saying they’d be back in a few hours and slipped out as quietly as she could with three raucous boys.

  The truck knew the way to Hanauma Bay. Dolores didn’t get to take the boys to the beach alone often, but she loved it. She pretended they were a family, her family, and her heart sang. As she parked at Hanauma, she scanned the beach for the Medeiros boys, for Manolo. When she saw him laughing at a girl she didn’t know, Dolores drew in a large mouthful of air and looked away. She unpacked the truck and settled the boys in the wet sand just above the surf line. Alfred filled a tin cup with sand and upended it to make a hill. Henry, of course, roared and stomped it down. John giggled. With them occupied, she dared to look up the beach. She saw Manolo walking toward her, and her face flamed. She looked back at the boys, but he’d seen her looking.

  “Dolores!” He ran the last few yards and dove to his knees next to the boys. It was like he never left the beach. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

  “Who are you?” Henry asked.

  “I’m Manolo Medeiros. And you?”

  “Henry Gabler.”

  Dolores hid a smile at Henry’s attempt to act grown up. “And this is Alfred and John.”

  “Yours?” Manolo asked.

  She laughed, letting the tension ring out of her body. “They’re Maria and Peter’s. I’m sort of a sister to them.”

  “Sort of a sister?” Now he laughed. “Sounds as crazy as my family. Did you just get here? Want to walk along the beach?”

  “I can’t.” She waved toward the children.

  “Oh, I can fix that.” He whistled and waved. “Helen! Come here!”

  The slender girl he’d been talking to came toward them, a storm on her face.

  “You didn’t have to call her like a dog,” Dolores protested.