06-I'm Kona Love You Forever

by JoAnn Bassett

  “Anyway,” she went on. “When Edie told me she OD’d on her insulin, I knew she’d tried to kill herself. All because I wasn’t willing to stand up for her with my father.” Her head was down and her voice so whimpery I probably wouldn’t have understood her if I didn’t already know what she was going to say.

  “Your mom didn’t kill herself,” I said.

  Shayna’s head popped up like a marionette’s string being yanked.

  “What?” she said.

  “Yeah, what’re you sayin’?” said Edie.

  “I know for a fact your mom didn’t take her own life.”

  “Then how come she’s dead?” said Shayna.

  That was a question way above my pay grade.

  ***

  I helped Shayna walk home. I said she’d be hearing from the police, and they’d tell her everything in due time.

  “Does David already know what happened?” she said.

  Since she was keeping score, I chose not to play. “I’m not sure what he knows. But the police will probably want to talk to the whole family at the same time.”

  “Are you telling me my mom was murdered?”

  “I’m not in a position to say. But from the looks of things, that’s a strong possibility.”

  “The looks of what things?” she said.

  Before answering, I considered how much I should divulge. “You know Charlene Cooper, right?”

  “You mean, Auntie Charlene? The midwife?”

  I nodded.

  “She killed my mom?”

  “The police are trying to unravel what happened. But, last night Charlene took her own life. Speculation is she did it to avoid dealing with her role in your mother’s death.” Whew. I could take the stage with that tap dance.

  I made sure Shayna was safely inside her house and then I drove back to the hospital. The woman at the information desk said both Lili and David had been admitted for observation. I asked if I could visit, but she shook her head.

  “The police were here a few minutes ago, but the doctor wouldn’t allow them in. Both patients’ rooms are posted ‘no visitors’.”

  I drove down to the coffee farm to see Loke one last time. I explained Charlene Cooper had used Loke’s daughter’s birth certificate to cover up the birth of a twin girl to Malia Byers.

  “Malia never knew?” she said.

  “That’s up for speculation. Charlene may or may not have told her, but the results were the same.”

  “So, that’s why Lili’s name was the same as my daughter’s?”

  “I assume so,” I said.

  Loke’s eyes drifted down, as if puzzling out a difficult math problem. “Wait, if this Lili is actually Malia’s daughter, then that makes David…” She didn’t finish.

  I nodded.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “I can’t imagine what Lili must be going through. I’ll be praying for her. For both of them.”

  We hugged, and I went outside to make a phone call.

  Farrah answered right away. “Hey you, what’s going on? You on your way?”

  “No, I’m still here in Kona. You’re not gonna believe what I found out.”

  “You find out who the girl’s mother is?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. And it’s a mess.”

  “You can tell me all about it when you get back. The reason I called earlier was to tell you Hatch is bugging out. He came in this morning and said he’s headed to the mainland.”

  “When?”

  “Like, soon. He said he’s pretty much ready to go.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We could both use a little cooling off time. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to say anyway.”

  “Earth to Pali,” she said. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying.” She sucked in a breath; Farrah’s way of prefacing a dramatic tee-up. “He bought a one-way ticket.”

  “What?”

  “He’s moving. He asked if I knew the rules for taking a dog to the mainland. Like what shots they needed, or if they’d be quarantined or whatever. He’s taking Wahine and all his stuff and moving to Montana for good.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “So, don’t bother bummin’ out over what you’re gonna say ‘cuz it looks like he’s done talkin’.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Once again, Steve was right. He’d warned me about nosing into other people’s family secrets. The hunt for Lili’s birth certificate had turned out to be creepier than anything I could’ve imagined. Meanwhile, my own life was unraveling behind the scenes. Hatch moving to the mainland? He’d loved Montana when he’d been sent there for wildland fire training, but I’d hoped it was “vacation syndrome.” You know, what mainlanders get when they come to Hawaii. They see the beaches and the sunshine and the mai tais and the smiling tour guides and they think, It’s great here. We should move to Hawaii. What they don’t see are the astronomical housing prices, the “unique” political situation, the hefty grocery bills, and the hard-fought effort to keep traditional Hawaiian culture alive in an era of McDonald’s and WalMart.

  Hatch won’t like it on the mainland, I thought. It gets cold there. And everything’s far away. Mainlanders drive miles and miles just to get to work every day. And Montana doesn’t have beaches. Hatch might argue a river’s as good as an ocean, but he’d only be kidding himself.

  I drove to the Kona airport waging a heavy debate with myself over what to do next. Should I let Hatch go, hoping once he got to Montana he’d realize he made a mistake? Or should I beg him to stay? I hated the idea of begging. I’d been raised to be independent and resourceful. Begging wasn’t in my playbook.

  ***

  When I landed, my first phone call wasn’t to Farrah. It was to Craig Anderson, Lili’s father. He didn’t sound thrilled to hear from me.

  “What’s going on over there?” he boomed. “We’ve been worried sick. Lili sent a text a week ago and we haven’t heard from her since.”

  So much for Lili’s promise to call.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to keep you posted,” I said. “It’s been one thing after another.”

  “I’m waiting,” he said, as if he found my feeble excuse completely beyond inadequate.

  “Would you mind meeting with me in person?” I said. “It’s kind of a long story.” I really didn’t want to watch his face as I slogged through the details of his daughter’s complicated—and heart-breaking—history, but it wasn’t news that should be given over a cell phone.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m at the airport. I’ve got a flight in forty-five minutes.”

  “Can you reschedule?” I said.

  He laughed. Not a jolly laugh, more like a bitter chuckle. “Not hardly. I’m the pilot.”

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot.”

  “Which airport?” I said.

  “O-G-G. That’s Kahului.”

  “I’m here, too,” I said. “How about we meet for a quick cup of coffee?”

  We agreed to meet at Starbucks. When he came in I was sitting down and the guy looked even taller than he had standing on my porch. He looked around tentatively, like a guy scanning the place for a date he’d arranged on Match.com. But when he saw me he lifted his head in a quick nod of recognition.

  “Where’s Lili?” he said, not bothering with small talk.

  “She’s still on the Big Island,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. She’s in the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” he roared. “What the hell? Is she hurt? Was she in an accident? I’ll kill that kid. He’s the reason she—”

  I laid my hand on his arm. A risky gesture, since he looked like he was in the mood to break bones.

  “Mr. Anderson, I need you to hear me out. Lili’s fine. She’s not hurt physically at all. She’s had some distressing news and she’s in the hospital to allow her time to sort it all out.”

  He squinted his eyes. “Distressing news? What the hell does that mean?”

  I remembered h
e only had a few minutes before he got in a cockpit and took an airplane carrying hundreds of people tens of thousands of feet in the air. The world didn’t need another airplane falling off the radar.

  “Okay, first, she was in the general vicinity when a woman committed suicide by shooting herself. As you can imagine, that was very upsetting for Lili. The good news is it was late at night and completely dark. So, she didn’t see the actual event. She just heard the noise and we all knew what happened.”

  “You were there too?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “You took her to a place where a woman was about to commit suicide?”

  “No, we were at the farm where we were both staying.”

  “Lili stayed at a farm? Lili’s afraid of animals. She doesn’t even like petting zoos.”

  Oh, boy. This was going far afield of how I wanted it to go.

  “It was a coffee farm, okay? But let’s not concern ourselves with that. I’m trying to give you a quick run-down of why your daughter’s being treated at the hospital.”

  “Fine. Go on.”

  “Lili found out about her birth parents and why she was given up for adoption. It turned out to be very disturbing.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Since the police had not formally charged anyone with anything, I didn’t feel obligated to go into the gory details. I laced up my tap shoes and did the best I could.

  “The birth certificate you have for Lili is fraudulent. It was switched with a baby girl who was born around the same time but died a few days later.”

  “Okay, so where’s Lili’s valid birth certificate?” he said.

  “There isn’t one. She was born a twin, and the parents only wanted to keep one of the babies. She was given up, and the switched birth certificate was used to hide the fact she’d ever been born.”

  He looked perplexed. After describing it that way, I was pretty perplexed myself. I’d left out the part about conning the birth mother and the midwife extorting money from Craig and his wife.

  “Did you pay adoption fees to get Lili?” I said.

  “Yeah, pretty hefty ones, in fact. The broker who handled it charged us something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand bucks.”

  “Do you remember the broker’s name?”

  He shook his head. “It’s been nearly eighteen years. My wife might remember. She was more involved with it than me.”

  “Does the name Charlene Cooper ring a bell?”

  “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it was a woman, though.” He checked his watch. “Sorry, but I gotta go. I’ll call my wife and have her fly to Kona. She and Lili have been feuding ever since Lili quit school to marry that Hilo kid. Hopefully this news will put that notion on hold for a while.”

  Oh yeah, I thought. Like until they make incest legal. But I held my tongue.

  We shook good-bye and he hustled off to make his flight.

  ***

  I called Farrah, but it went to voicemail. Probably best. I was only five minutes away from Hatch’s anyway.

  I pulled up in front of his cottage and parked. When I got out, Wahine didn’t fly through the hole in the screen door to greet me. In fact, the place seemed unnervingly vacant. Had Hatch managed to pack up and haul out of there in a single day? Impossible. He had more stuff crammed into his five-room cottage than Steve and I had in our two-story house.

  I walked up to the front door. The hole in the screen door had been repaired. In fact it looked like a whole new door. I knocked on the doorframe, since the screen was latched and there was no doorbell.

  CHAPTER 35

  Hatch opened the door and stared out at me as if I’d told him I was there to sell him magazines. No smile, no frown, no nothin’. He flipped up the latch on the screen and turned and walked back into the house.

  It was nearly seven o’clock and getting dark outside, but Hatch hadn’t turned on any lights. I stood outside on his porch marveling that, for once, I was aware of a “crossroads” moment in my life. I’d had a few. After all, I was an orphan, and I’d had some rather unconventional jobs and startling life events. But usually I hadn’t recognized any “forks in the road” until I’d already picked a path and stumbled down it a ways.

  “You coming in or not?” said Hatch.

  I still hadn’t seen or heard anything from Wahine, and it troubled me. I opened the screen and stepped into the room. Once inside, I couldn’t see much because of the dark.

  “Where’s Heen?” I said. I was going for a conversational tone, but it came out sounding kind of dodgy.

  “She’s getting some work done,” he said.

  “Work done?”

  “Yeah. She needed some shots and the vet wanted to clean her teeth. Seems Heen isn’t big on maintaining proper dental hygiene. She bit him while he was doing the exam, so they put her out for the cleaning. They’re keeping her overnight.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “She’ll be fine.” He plopped down in a chair. “You just here to check on my dog?”

  I wasn’t used to Hatch being aloof. My visits to Hatch’s place follow a pattern: first, I get a raucous welcome and thorough licking from Wahine. Then, hugs and kisses from Hatch, along with a glass of wine and an offer to join him out on the lanai to watch the stars come out. None of that was happening.

  “I’m here to talk with you about what happened in Kona,” I said. I sat in a chair across from him.

  “You mean what happened with your little teenager couple, or what happened between you and me?”

  “The latter.”

  “Fire away,” he said.

  “I guess the best way to explain it is I consider myself a private person. When you showed up with all your friends and—”

  “Excuse me. I think you meant to say, ‘all our friends.’ Because it wasn’t just my friends you humiliated me in front of. It was your friends too.”

  It was beginning to look like nothing short of begging was going to make a difference.

  “Do you want me to say, ‘I’m sorry’?” I said.

  He stood up. “You’re a real piece of work, you know?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was, of course I’m sorry. I’m truly and completely sorry. It was rude of me not to respond to your proposal, but I just wasn’t prepared for it.” For a person with little or no practice at begging, I thought it sounded pretty good.

  “You know, life doesn’t come with rehearsals, Pali. It’s not staged like a wedding. You don’t get to invite who you want and leave the boozer uncle at home. Sometimes you gotta just go with what’s happening. Go with what you feel, not just what you planned.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I don’t care what you know. I care how you feel. Trouble is, I’d be willing to bet you don’t even know how you feel. About me, about yourself, about anybody. You’re by the book, twenty-four seven. Well, this is one time there is no book. No rules, no right or wrong. And you can’t handle it.”

  I hate speeches. Especially ones about things I don’t want to think about. I don’t like speeches about sending money to save starving children in Africa or speeches about climate change and taking the bus instead of driving my car. So, I really hated Hatch’s speech labeling me as an unfeeling by-the-book loser who was out of touch with her feelings. As if getting emotional about anything had ever served me well.

  “I’m sorry you find me so unfeeling,” I said. My voice had choked up a little. I pushed down the urge to clear my throat.

  “Look,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid. Not of me, anyway. That’s what I was offering you in Kona—a safe harbor. For life. I was offering you love and support for the rest of your whole damn life.”

  Uh-oh. I felt a tremor building in my chest. It worked its way up my throat, then to my eyes. Then the dam broke.

  ***

  When I woke up the next morning, I was alone. I wasn’t at home, though. I was still at Hatch’s cottage. Hatch had gone to the vet’s to pick
up Wahine. I got up and went to the kitchen to get coffee. Hatch had left a note, “Good morning to the future Mrs. Hatchley Allen Decker. I’ll be back by 8. Prepare to be attacked. Love, H.”

  Hatchley? It’d never occurred to me that his name was anything other than Hatch. I panicked for a moment as I thought about all the other things I probably didn’t know about him. Then I laughed. Hatch knew it would freak me out. That’s probably why he put it in the note. Safe harbor, indeed. I poured myself a cup of coffee and went into the bathroom to take a shower.

  ***

  Farrah squealed in delight at the news. “OMG, this is so totally groovy. It’s beyond cool. Totally bitchin’ bad rad cranked!” Only Farrah could mix slang from four or more decades and have it come out sounding endearing.

  “Let me see the ring,” she said.

  I did the “fiancée salute,” the palm-up, fingers extended, display of the solitaire diamond on my left hand. It fiercely sparkled under the fluorescent lights in Farrah’s produce section. She’d been carefully stacking papayas in a display, moving the riper yellow-skinned ones to the front.

  “When’s the date?” she said.

  I caught myself smiling as I considered the number of times I’d asked that question in the past five years. The next question was supposed to be, And where will you be holding the ceremony? But Farrah threw me a curve ball.

  “Are you going to do it yourself?”

  Good question. Does a stylist cut her own hair? Does a chef cater her own rehearsal dinner? Does a surgeon take out his own appendix?

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well, then, who’ll you hire to do it?” she said.

  Another good question. Maui wedding planners are competitive. It isn’t as if we’re bitter enemies or cut-throat rivals, but how could I hand over the reins when I think I’m the only one who can properly ride the horse?

  “I don’t know. Maybe you.”

  Another squeal. “Seriously? You’ll let me plan your wedding? Far out. I mean, that’s so bitchin’ cool, I want to die.”

  I hoped she’d forgo the death wish until Hatch and I had signed the marriage certificate. I left the store and went next door to my shop. After nine days away, the place smelled musty. I opened the windows and doors and allowed the breeze to sweep through. My glass-topped display of headpieces was dusty and I grabbed a rag from the back and started to clean.