Reese chuckled and blushed. He looked just as smitten with her as she felt for him.
“Let me talk to Darcy and Joel,” Reese said, speaking of his family members and colleagues who helped him work tirelessly on app design. Together, they had sold numerous apps to top brands for mega millions. It was a computerized world that Oriana often resisted.
“But I have to say,” Reese went on, “I can’t imagine they’d say no. Save me a seat on the plane.” He winked, and Oriana drew herself over the top of the table and kissed him.
Chapter Two
Apain ratcheted up Jasmine’s back, toppling her into the counter at the front of the little beachside café and convenience store. A family of four gaped at her from the other side of the sales computer, gripping their sunhats and looking at her like she was a pitiful old thing. At seventy-eight, she was accustomed to these kinds of looks. Nobody could figure out why she was still working at her age, as though the economy was a mystery to most of them. As though they didn’t watch the news.
Finally, in an act of chivalry, the husband barreled around the counter, scooped his arm around her waist, and led her to the nearest empty chair. “I thought she was having a stroke!” he called to his wife, as though Jasmine couldn’t hear. As though she were too old and therefore too stupid.
Jasmine steadied herself in the chair, her hands spread out on the table. The wife sat across from her and spoke gently. “Is there someone we should call?”
Jasmine shook her head and grimaced into a smile. “It’s just my back,” she said. “I’ve been standing up all day. Sometimes it has a mind of its own.”
“I don’t understand why you’re still working at your age,” the husband said.
The wife cast him a look that meanthush.
The husband seemed vaguely clueless, red-faced, and from somewhere far away. He saw Jasmine’s collapse as a thing that had happened to him, a thing that had gotten in the way of his beautiful family vacation.
“I have some aspirin,” the wife said, searching through her purse and procuring a bottle. “Take some. Please.” She tapped some of the pills into a little plastic baggie and handed it over. “You live here?” Her eyes searched Jasmine’s. They echoed pity.
Jasmine nodded and accepted the bag. “Thank you.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” the wife said, standing. “It was always our dream to come to Hawaii. We thought we would for our honeymoon, but I got pregnant too soon.”
The eldest of her children mumbled, “Mom…” and made a face.
The husband gestured vaguely toward the items that Jasmine hadn’t yet scanned for them during their purchase. He was impatient. Jasmine wondered what their vacation plans were. “We need to get this show on the road,” he said.
Because Jasmine couldn’t yet stand, she instructed the little family on how to use the scanner and their card to pay. It was relatively simple. She guessed that if her boss caught her letting the customers use the computer, she’d get fired immediately.
When the family left, Jasmine clenched her fists and limped back to the counter, where she found her water bottle. She took the pills, closing her eyes, willing the medicine to work. She had only a few hours left before her shift ended. She had to make it through. She had to pay her rent this month and feed herself.
Everything felt precarious. It had always felt precarious, especially since Hawaii had gotten so darn expensive. It hadn’t been that way when she’d first moved out here.
Ten minutes after Jasmine was supposed to be finished with her shift for the day, Sherry wandered in, looking lost as ever. She still wore a bikini from her long day on the beach, and her hair was wild and teased. “You wouldn’t believe the day I had,” Sherry told Jasmine, pulling a T-shirt over her frame. It looked like she’d forgotten bottoms to go with it.
Sherry talked about what had happened to her at the beach. Some married guy had asked her out on a date, her ex-husband had told her something horrible over the phone, and her kid had said something bratty during breakfast that morning. Jasmine listened, murmured, and clocked out. Her back spasmed again. She wasn’t sure if she could make it all the way home just yet. But there was no way she was going to tell Sherry about it.
Outside the café and convenience store, Jasmine collapsed at a table in the sun. There, she ate a small ice cream and watched the beach-goers spread out on the sands, most of whom had traveled from the greater forty-eight states to visit Hawaii. Because she’d left the greater forty-eight almost fifty years ago, she often felt as though everything across that stretch of ocean was a dream. It was hard for her to fathom her birth state. It was hard for her to imagine miles and miles of highway, going from one end of the continent to the other.
When Jasmine realized it was unlikely that she’d manage the mile-long walk back to her apartment, she called her daughter, Jenny. Jenny was forty-nine years old and a dental hygienist at a nice office in downtown Honolulu. Usually, she got out of work around four or four thirty, unless she had to stay and help the dentist with something like surgery. Today, Jenny answeredwith fatigue in her voice. “Hi, Mom,” she said. Jasmine wondered when she’d last heard her daughter’s joy.
“Honey, I’m sorry to bother you like this,” Jasmine said, “but I did something to my back at work today, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t think I can walk home.”
“What happened?” Jenny’s voice was pinched.
Jasmine explained what she knew: pressure and pain in her back. “But it’s a mystery.”
Jenny sighed. “Hold on a second,” she said. She then either muted the phone or held her hand over the receiver to talk to whoever she was with. Jasmine prayed it wasn’t her son-in-law, Walton, whom she’d never found a way to love, not even so many years after Jenny and Walton’s wedding or three kids later.
“The kids are going to come get you,” Jenny said then, drawing Jasmine out of her reverie. “They’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Jasmine was caught off guard. It boggled her mind to think of her tiny grandchildren as old enough not only to drive cars but also to pick up their grandmother during her time of need. But Chase, Alyssa, and Jade were nineteen, seventeen, and sixteen, respectively. Chase was taking online college classes and working at a surf shop, Alyssa was in her senior year of high school, and Jade was a junior. Sometimes Jasmine prayed that they would never leave Hawaii, that they’d never leave Jasmine and Jenny behind. Other times, she prayed that they would fight for whatever life they wanted to build, no matter how hard the struggle was.
Jasmine was glad to see it was Chase in the driver’s seat and Alyssa and Jade in the back of Chase’s clunky secondhand car. Jasmine waved and limped over to the passenger side and was surprised when Chase leaped out to open the door for her.
