“Me too,” Anne agreed.
“Two to one!” he crowed. “We win!”
“This is so unfair,” Claire groaned.
“This tropical island is the worst,” he groaned, mimicking her tone. “The sun is too sunny! The water’s too watery! Paradise is so lame.”
“Shutup, Pete! Sunburns and moldy shoes and gecko poop on my pillow isnotmy idea of paradise.”
“You’re not allowed to tell me to shut up! Mom!”
“Hush, both of you.” She turned into the post office parking lot and found an empty spot. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
The long line out front was not encouraging.
It was too hot for the kids to wait in the car, so they stood with her, pressed against the post office wall in a thin line of shade.
Forty minutes later, laden with Amazon packages and Dawn’s uncollected mail, they finally headed home.
It felt strange to drive along the familiar highway. The high green walls on either side were drastically different from the desiccated landscape that she’d grown used to in San Diego.
Even in the midst of everything else – her messy divorce, resentful daughters, an empty savings account, the loss of her father, and now her mounting credit card debt – Anne was deeply grateful to be back in Pualena. She felt a deep sense of home there that she had never been able to find or create on the mainland. And this was the first time she had been home, truly home – not just a quick trip for Christmas or a wedding or adoption ceremony or memorial service – since she moved away at the age of eighteen.
She’d been proud of her business on the mainland, content to run her boutique hotel in La Jolla – until her husband’s debts ruined them. But even in the good years, underneath all that happy busyness, she was never quite content. Never truly fulfilled living a money-driven life in Southern California.
Their family was picture perfect – handsome husband, wonderful children, an ocean-view house in La Jolla – but they hadn’t been close. Not really.
Her marriage was an unhappy one, more often than not. She had lost enough of Claire’s life to nannies and school that her daughter kept her at arm’s length. If she had kept going like that, she might have ended up with as much of a relationship with Claire as she had with Zoe – which was to say, nearly none at all.
Sometimes she worried that it was too late to fully repair her relationship with either one of her daughters.
Pete was young enough to forgive all of her shortcomings. Anne hoped that she could still forge a strong relationship with her son… because prioritizing her career over her daughters had been the worst mistake of her life.
“Do you know what Pualena means?” Anne asked as she drove through town.
“Puameans pig,” Pete volunteered.
She laughed. “Pua?ais pig.Puameans flower. Butpualenameans the first golden light of dawn.”
“Very poetic,” Claire said sourly.
“I always thought so,” Anne said, keeping her voice light. Any negativity she showed to her teen came back to her tenfold. But if she could just stay positive long enough, she could eventually cajole Claire back into a good mood.
Not so with her elder daughter.
Zoe sat on the lanai, drinking coconut water straight from the fresh green sphere with a steel straw. A faded gray baseball cap was pulled low over her eyes, her acid-green braid threaded through the back. She wore cargo pants and a long-sleeved men’s t-shirt, armor that she maintained even in the summer heat.
Anne gathered the packages that they had piled on top of their groceries, dropped them on the lanai, and then went back to rescue bags of frozen food from the rapidly heating car.
“That’s a lot of shopping for someone who’s supposed to be broke.” Zoe eyed the brown Amazon bags with distaste.
Anne took a calming breath. “It’s mostly groceries. It’s cheaper to buy online than from the store.”
“There’s plenty of local food,” Zoe said with a sniff. “It’s healthier than anything in a box. Cheaper, too.”
She wasn’t wrong. But after uprooting Pete and Claire, buying a few of their favorite staples felt like the least that she could do.
They shored up her conviction by falling on the pile like a pair of ravenous wolves, ripping them open in search of their gluten-free cereal and glass noodles.
