Haole Wood (13 page)

“It’s handmade, and very unique. It has a special sun protection formulated in it, too. I’m afraid we’d have to charge you quite a bit.”

“Well? What’s quite a bit?” the woman drawled, allowing her diamond rings to wink at me in the sunlight. “And I’ll pay extra for rush charges.”

“My grandmother was thinking about charging $300.” I couldn’t believe I said that.

“Fabulous,” the woman said. “I’ll take two. My daughter will need one as well. Do you have any other colors, or other clothes?”

“Well,” I said. “We’re just starting our line and working on several designs.”

The woman clapped her hands. “Perfect! I love discovering new designers. I’ll be here for two weeks, let me give you my name and number. How long do you think it will take to make them? I’d love to have them by this weekend, we’re going sailing.”

“I think we can do that,” I said, crossing my fingers under the material of my own sunshmina.

The woman gave me her info, thanked me and started to walk away. “By the way, what’s the name of your clothing line?” she called back.

A delicious swirl of caffeine kicked in, flooding my brain with a wave of giddiness. I fiddled with my sunglasses, remembering what the surfers called me at the memorial service. It wasn’t original or very exciting, but maybe it would suggest an element of celebrity pizzazz to help justify the price. “Hollywood Haute,” I said, not able to bring myself to add the word couture.

I ran to the bathroom and couldn’t wait to get back to tell Jac. As I approached our table, I saw him in a mauling embrace with a beautiful Hawaiian girl who wore a tightly fitted pink flowered sarong and a lei. I watched him kiss her fingers as the woman, the nymph, the super-model, gracefully began to hula away.

Jac noticed me and motioned me over. “Lana,” I heard him say. “Hang on a sec. I want you to meet Jaswinder. Jaswinder Park, Lana Ho, our island’s favorite entertainer. You’ll have to hear her sing, she’s amazing.”

“Aloha,” Lana said, tossing back her froth of wavy dark hair.

I don’t remember what I said, but I do recall being nearly struck dumb. This woman was gorgeous. Forget girl crush, I could have spent a lifetime just staring at her. What must it be like to wake up in the morning, and look in the mirror at that? I knew I was staring, but I couldn’t help it. Her patient smile merely accepted it as her just due.

I curled my hair behind my ears, and tugged my sunshmina over my shoulders, embarrassed by my pinkened arms. I know I managed a “so nice to meet you.” I tried to catalogue her features, were her eyes exactly the same size? Is that what made her so mesmerizing? Did the greenish, brown sparkling magic crystals zooming in on me cast some spell? And were her eyes more green or brown? Her eyebrows were merely the perfect outline for those orbs, oh dear Lord, I called her eyes orbs, not that there was a chance in my guardian angel’s hotspot of anyone not noticing those. I played with my spoon to prevent myself from spouting poetry. Her skin, her smooth, not brown, not white, not a hint of pink, skin, was simply the best color of skin ever invented.

Be cool, I warned myself. “I love your lip gloss.”

“Thank you,” she said, followed by the fluting laugh of a pied piper. “I’m not wearing any.”

Of course she wasn’t. Before I could stop myself, I repeated her laugh back at her. Like a bird in some Disney movie. “Ha ha hee hee ho.” Whereas her laugh tinkled, mine merely made me want to. I sounded nothing like the lovely Lana. I wanted to hate her. But I was too busy wanting to be her. My tongue licked my lips as again I warned myself to get a grip, and not start rhyming things. Which immediately made me conjure up, “There once was a girl from Lahaina . . .” Even master wordsmith Eminem, the only person in the world to successfully rhyme orange (door hinge) would have been hard pressed to find something that rhymes with the “ina” sound in Lahaina. Oh my gosh, Kona coffee should really come with a warning. Nothing could be
finah
. . . I gave a shake of my head before I started waxing poetic about her hiney, or something. Why not? That was magnificent, too. If guys had any idea how thoroughly girls check out other girls, I probably think they’d quite like that, a lot.

“So nice to meet you, Jaswinder.”

She remembered my name!

“See you later, Jac.” Her scent lingered for a few seconds, wafting in her wake.

“Who was that?” I asked, fearing I sounded like a jealous, unstable girlfriend.

“Lana is a good friend of mine. Seriously, if you are here long enough, I will take you to one of her shows. She has an amazing voice. She’s great, and a real sweetie.”

“If I looked like that, I’d be a real sweetie, too,” I told him.

“You are very sweet.”

An image of my tub-o-lard guardian angel popped into my head. I could practically hear him laughing at me.

“I was not digging for a compliment,” I protested. I waved my hands to change the subject. Even though some of the bubbles of excitement burst about my new sunshmina adventure, I told him all about it. “I’ll probably be stuck here for another week, so I’m sure I can put together two more of these things and get paid for it,” I said, pulling my wrap tighter.

“Oh, do you sew?”

“No, but how hard can it be? I watched what my grandmother did. I’ll figure it out. Besides, I love this fabric. I swear, it makes me feel cooler.”

Jac reached across the table and rubbed the fabric between his hands. “What is this, anyway?”

“Who knows?” I answered. “My grandmother has a closet full of this stuff. It’s like a crazy mixture of gauze and silk. It’s so lightweight and pretty.” I lifted my arms. “See how it kind of shimmers?”

“You know, Jaswinder, if your grandmother treated it specifically to protect you from the sun with her secret kukui nut formulation, this might really have some sun protection factors. Do you want me to test it for you?”

“Wow. Sure.” I sipped my coffee, sneaked a look at my surfer dermatologist and sniffed the ocean breeze of all that is good. “Jac. I really do want to apologize to you.”

“For what?” He grinned at me as if he knew exactly what I was going to say.

“You haven’t exactly seen me at my best.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Ha ha.” My sunburn prickled. “About that night. I don’t,” I stopped. How can I put this without being tarred with the me-thinks-she-protesteth-too-much brush? “I don’t usually A. drink that much, or B. have sex with strange men in the park.”

He laughed and reached for my hand across the table. “Jaswinder. I respected you in the morning. Well, at least in the afternoon when you came into my office. The pleasure was all mine.”

I grabbed my hand back. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Calm down. I am agreeing with you. We maybe started off on the wrong foot.”

I folded my arms across my chest.

“I enjoyed very much meeting you the other night, and I hoped to see you again. I just wasn’t sure how long you were going to be in Maui.

I nodded.

“But, happily, sometimes fate intervenes.”

I looked at him. “Or a guardian angel?” I smiled.

His blue eyes twinkled under his messy brown hair, making me itch to tug on a curl that looked like one of those tubular waves surfers always liked to brag about. “You are a funny girl, Jaswinder Park.” He paid the check and came around and helped my out of my chair. “I’m very glad I met you and I’m sorry for your troubles. If there’s anything I can do to help you get your grandmother out of jail, I’ll do it. I’ve been keeping my ears open and I’ll let you know if I hear anything. This island is a small place and gossip spreads like . . .” he paused and looked down at me.

When he didn’t continue I started to get worried. What did he think gossip spreads like, my legs? I tried to help him fill in a different blank. “Wildfire?”

He pulled me into a friendly hug and kissed the top of my head. “Sorry. I lost my train of thought. I was going to say it spreads like gossip spreads everywhere—quickly and usually inaccurately. Want something more poetic? It spreads like that blush creeping over your cheeks that you try to hide under your sunburn.”

I knew he saw me swallow.

“Actually,” he said. “There is a saying,
pipi holo kaa’ao
, which means a well-told tale travels. So, you know people are talking about the murder, but no one seems to know who did it.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “Come on. Let me drop you back home. Go work on your sun wraps and bring me a piece of the treated fabric if you can spare it. I’ll have a research buddy of mine take a look at it to try to determine if it has any SPF. It should only take a day or so.” He peeked under the fabric to look at my shoulders. “Healing nicely. The flaking should commence soon. Just keep your skin moisturized and stay out of the sun.”

Later that afternoon, I stopped by the police station to visit my grandmother. Business must have been slow because they actually let me sit with her in the dingy lobby. “Oh, Halmoni,” I said, hugging her tightly, “how are you?”

Halmoni smiled and leaned back as if she were admiring the sunshmina.

“It’s so perfect,” I said. “And guess what?” The words spilled out of me though I knew my grandmother probably wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. “A tourist wants to buy two of these wraps,” I told her. I tugged on the fabric and held up two fingers. “Since you’re still in here, do you think I can make them?”

“Not that,” Halmoni said.

“Oh, and I went to the memorial service for Mike Hokama.” Halmoni frowned. I took a deep breath and pushed my hair back behind my ears. “It was alright, except for the part about being beaten up by his mother.”

My grandmother turned away from me.

“I’m okay, though. See, somehow there was a picture of me in the paper and she thought I—”

I stopped as my grandmother held up a copy of the newspaper. “Not that.”

I groaned. “I’m so sorry, Halmoni. The whole island has seen that picture. Anyway, I talked to your ear wax surfer boys and they’re going to let me know if they hear anything. And Jac, Dr. Case, showed up.”

Halmoni’s eyebrows soared high up on her forehead. Just like my Dad’s used to do during interrogation sessions back home when I was a teenager. “I don’t know how that car got a flat tire.” My sister and I swore we could hear our father’s nerve endings ratchet his brows up higher and higher. “I thought for sure I had a B in history.” Creak, creak. “I only tried it once.” My father’s eyebrows, just like his mother’s, could practically become part of his hairline.

I shooed those memories away and smiled down on my grandmother. “Put those eyebrows back where they belong. As soon as I get you out of here,” I put my arm over her tiny bony shoulders, “and back on the path of righteousness, you and I both know I have to go back home. Dr. Jac tried to hook me up with a part time job at an optometrist office, but that didn’t quite work out.” I flicked my fingers to brush away that memory, too.

“So, Halmoni. I think I can follow your pattern to sew this,” I fluffed my wrap. “But what about the kukui nut oil? I swear, whatever you did made this thing not only block out the sun’s rays, it makes me feel cooler with it on than without it. It has to be the kukui nut oil. Please understand what I’m saying. How do I do it?”

“Da-di-da, da-di-da.”

I started to worry. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. My guardian angel appeared behind my grandmother. “Honey-Girl,” he said, sounding like a cool breeze. “All you need to understand is that your grandmother needs you, and you are where you are supposed to be.”

“That and $3.50 will get me some Hawaiian shave ice,” I said. After the prison guards, who genuinely seemed to care about my grandmother led her away with assurances that they would keep an extra-special eye on her, I grabbed my sunshmina.

My grandmother turned back and smiled at me, giving a little wave. Armed with a tremulous connection to a grandmother I would never understand and a nebulous link to an other-weirdly being, how could I go wrong? Let me count the ways.

As soon as I returned to Halmoni’s house, I headed into the back bedroom and opened the closet door. I pulled out ten bolts of the shiny, shimmery, slippery fabric in green and gold, pink and bronze, blue with silver shot through it, and my favorite, red with ruby highlights that gleamed in the afternoon sun. I thought I’d start with the green, just like my grandmother did, because that’s what the woman from the hotel saw, and liked. I unrolled the bolt of fabric and laid my sunshmina over it. I picked up the scissors and started humming. The first cut is the deepest. I was as scared as if I had been cutting my own bangs. Which I had done before, and therefore had good reason to be scared.

I’ve just got to go for it, I thought, visions of poor Mr. Abraham trying to put a contact lens in his eye, and TV live shots gone bad dancing through my head. Which led me to reminisce about the amount of money I owed my parents, divided by my pride, times my own dwindling bank account. “Kwik-kwik,” the scissors snipped through the material, zipping a fairly straight line across the entire length. Now what? I figured I’d sew it up first and then worry about cooking it in the kukui nut oil brew later. A stitch in time may save nine, but skipping a few steps would save even more time, right? I noticed that my grandmother just made up a rectangular pattern then sewed it together. I went to the sewing machine. The thread was the same pale green that my grandmother used on mine. Good call on the color choice, I congratulated myself.

I sat down and turned on the machine. Maybe I should put pins in the fabric first. I shrugged. My grandmother didn’t. I was sure I could follow along. I’d seen enough home improvement shows where total buffoons were able to sew up curtains and pillows and stuff. I even managed to hem up a pair of pants or two, without using tape. I placed the fabric under the silver guide piece of the sewing machine. Just as I watched my grandmother do, I released the little lever that pushed the guide onto the fabric. “Eh, voila!” I said, feeling very crafty. My big toe gently nudged the foot pedal to bring the machine to life. Nothing happened. I applied a little more pressure. Nothing. I decided to give it some gas and the machine roared into life, tearing off down the fabric like a Maserati, zero to sixty in under six seconds, taking hairpin curves on a closed course that should have come superimposed with a warning about not trying this at home.