1
Anne
It was a tranquil morning in Hawaii, all birdsong and golden sunlight.
Anne stepped out into the fresh air and lifted her face to the gentle sunlight that slanted down over themauna. The sky shone a pristine shade of summer blue, and the tropical breeze was soft on her skin.
Her heart felt a bit lighter than it had the night before. Shepherding two tired children through the airport, returning to the Big Island for the first time since her father’s memorial service, life had felt impossibly heavy.
Now it felt… not light, exactly, but manageable. The weight of everything she had to bear hadn’t changed, but today she actually felt up to the task of carrying it.
“Beat you to the pool!” Pete raced down the sidewalk, and the slap of his bare feet on the pavement echoed through the quiet morning.
“In your dreams!” Claire sprinted past, red hair streaming behind her. Five years older and a foot taller than her little brother, she overtook him before he reached the gate.
Twin splashes sounded up ahead as her kids cannonballed into the pool. By the time she walked through the gate, they were already at the top of the slide.
The resort pool was huge, a manufactured paradise with waterslides and artificial waterfalls. Plants both plastic and planted broke up the concrete landscape with splashes of pink and green.
Anne walked to a front-row lounge chair, where the sharp tang of chlorine overtook the sweet scent of plumeria flowers. This concrete landscape with its iron fences and plastic furniture was so different from her Pualena childhood that it might as well be a different world… in reality, it was just another side of the island that had raised her.
The sun was still low enough in the sky to be warm and gentle, and Anne let it warm her back. In another hour, the Kona sunshine would be ruthless. Her freckled skin wasn’t well equipped for the Islands, but she’d been born to them all the same.
“Mom, watch this!” Pete rushed down the slide headfirst and did a faceplant into the pool. He came up spluttering and smiling.
Claire laughed, and the childlike sound warmed Anne’s heart. It was good to see her fourteen year old acting like a kid for once, clowning around with her little brother instead of trying to impress her classmates in California.
That chapter was behind them now. One silver lining in all of this mess was that it would get her daughter away from the toxic friendships that she had formed back on the mainland.
Of course, Claire wouldn’t see it that way…
Pete crashed into the lounge chair next to her and shook himself like a dog, water flying from his dark blond hair.
“Mom, can I have a soda?”
“Are you thirsty? I brought water.”
He sighed and accepted the bottle that she pulled out of her bag.
“Could we get some cheesy fries?” he asked.
“Are you hungry already?”
“They smell really good.” Undisguised longing shone in his sky-blue eyes as he gazed at the array of junk food on a plastic table a few meters away where a family of tourists was sitting down to breakfast.
“No resort food.” Claire flopped onto the lounge chair beside him and held her hand out for the water bottle. “We’re broke, remember?”
Anne flinched, but the kids didn’t seem to notice.
Claire wasn’t wrong.
They were staying at the resort for free, a single night purchased with the last of her credit card points. Those crumbs of her old life had purchased three one-way tickets to Kona and a short stay at the resort so that they could make their way to the other side of the island around midday instead of asking someone to drive those twisting mountain roads in the dark.
It was also one last treat for her kids… before she broke the news that this Hawaiian vacation had no end date in sight.
Anne was crawling home to her mother with her tail between her legs.
That was bad enough, at her age, but what really gnawed at her was the fact that she still had to find a way to explain it all to her children. Not only was she uprooting them, but she had done it without even telling them first. She worried that Claire would never forgive her.
