Kaua'i Me a River

by JoAnn Bassett

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you find out if you have any newfound brothers or sisters?”

  “Oh yeah. He had seven other kids besides me.”

  “Seven? Wow, that’s great.”

  “You think?”

  “Sure. You’ve finally got a big ohana. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

  “I guess.” I didn’t want to go into how Phil had set it up so there was zero chance I’d ever be invited to family gatherings or get to play auntie to any nieces or nephews. My pariah status would come out soon enough. “The last wife, Sunny, was really friendly. She invited me to stay with her when I come back for probate court.”

  “That’s good. Hey, did you have any lunch?” he said. “I meant to bring you some pizza but those guys were animals. Ate every last slice. Let’s go grab something down by the pool.”

  At the poolside grill I ordered a cheeseburger with curly fries. I don’t usually allow myself to eat stuff like that, but the morning’s events had kicked my self-discipline to the curb.

  While we ate, a guy in his late twenties came to the pool holding hands with a tiny girl in a pink polka-dotted swimsuit. They got in the water and the little girl clung to the guy’s back while he hauled her around.

  “More, daddy, more,” squealed the little girl.

  “In a little bit,” said the dad. “But first I’m going to teach you to swim. First, you need to put your face in the water.”

  The little girl looked up at him and shook her head. Her wet curls threw off water droplets like a dog shaking itself after a bath.

  “Don’t be afraid, honey. I’m right here,” he said.

  After a couple of chin-deep efforts praised by her father, she finally dunked her entire head under.

  “Good girl,” he crowed, grabbing her when she popped back up. “I’m so proud of you, Ava.”

  I pushed my plate away. “You know, I’m probably the only kid in Hawaii who never learned to swim.”

  Hatch shot me a pained look. “Oh come on. It’s not like you to play the victim card.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just saying.”

  “Message received. Your dad was a jerk. Well, remind me someday to tell you about my old man. If misery loves company, you’ll love my company when we compare your AWOL dad to my drunk and disorderly one.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Hey, look at the time,” said Hatch. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  We packed up and headed to the airport. The flight to Maui was uneventful except for me garnering stink eye from the flight attendant when my phone went off during the ‘in the event of an emergency’ announcement.

  I checked the caller ID before flicking off the phone

  “Who was it?” said Hatch.

  “Just Farrah. She’s probably just checking to make sure we made our flight. I suppose when you live your entire life in one building, keeping track of everyone else’s comings and goings is a big deal. I’ll call her when we land.”

  We retrieved Hatch’s car from long-term parking. He gallantly opened the passenger door for me before going around to the driver’s side. “You want to go straight home or stop off at your shop?”

  “Would you mind dropping me at Farrah’s? I need to tell her about the trip. Since you’re on shift in the morning you probably shouldn’t wait. I’ll ask Steve to come down and get me later.”

  “I really don’t mind waiting.”

  “That’s sweet, but I’ve been gone three days. Farrah will demand a minute by minute accounting.”

  We pulled in front of the Gadda da Vida Grocery and I leaned over and gave Hatch a kiss. I went for the real thing, not a little ‘thanks for everything’ peck on the mouth.

  “Whoa. Maybe I should wait for you after all,” he said.

  “No, that’s got to keep you going until this weekend. I’ve got a ton of stuff to catch up on at work. I’ve got that big Lindberg wedding on the Fourth and I’m way behind in doing my vendor follow-up calls. If Eleanor catches even a whiff of me slacking off she’ll probably demand I cut my commission in half.”

  “Okay, but we’re still on for Saturday, right? I’ve got that firefighter awards dinner in Wailea.”

  “You never told me, are you up for an award?”

  “Who knows? But it’s at the ballroom of the Grand Wailea. Award or no award it’ll be first class all the way.”

  “It’s a date.”

  I went inside. I was surprised to see Beatrice working the counter so late in the evening. Beatrice is an ancient lady who often comes in while Farrah takes lunch. She occasionally helps out if Farrah has a tarot reading in the afternoon, but I’ve never seen her at the store after dark.

  “Hey Bea, how’s it shakin’?” I said. I talked loud, since Bea has a hearing problem. She says it’s only in one ear, but from what I can tell neither ear works any better than the other one.

  “A snake? You seen a snake?” Bea looked horrified. “We gotta kill it. No good to have snakes in the islands.”

  “No,” I said waving my hand. I went up to her and talked as if I was in an elocution contest. “No snake. I just came in to say ‘hi’. Do you know where Farrah is?”

  Bea scrutinized my face. “She say she not feeling so good. I’m working all day. I gotta sit down sometimes on this little stool. You know, I got the arthur in my knees.”

  I nodded and pointed at the ceiling rather than ask if Farrah was upstairs in her apartment.

  Bea nodded.

  “Mahalo,” I said. “I’ll go on up.”

  “Oh, good luck to you too, Pali.”

  I went out the back door and climbed the stairs to Farrah’s apartment. A searing blue-white security light came on when I hit the fourth stair. I knocked and waited for her to scrutinize me through the peep hole.

  As soon as the door opened I knew something was up.

  CHAPTER 10

  The unmistakable odor of ‘baby’—wet diapers, baby powder and milk—was all over Farrah. She looked like she’d been working in the cane fields all day. Matted hair, haggard face, slumped shoulders.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Come in. This is going to totally blow your mind.”

  In daytime, Farrah’s apartment is always dimly lit because she’s covered her windows in fake stained glass contact paper. When the sun goes down she usually turns on a few lights but there were no lights on when I went inside. But even in the near-darkness it didn’t take long for me to locate the source of the smell. A tiny baby, most probably a newborn, was lying on a tattered blanket in the middle of the room. It wore nothing but a disposable diaper and a benign smile. The kid was half-heartedly kicking its arms and legs. I’m not exactly a ‘baby person.’ To me, the little creature looked like a bug on its back trying to right itself.

  “What’s going on?” I said again. “Can you turn on a light here?”

  She snapped on a table lamp. “You leave for a few days and see what happens?” she said. She was positively beaming.

  Okay, this was a first, even for Farrah. Last year she’d mistaken the gender of her dog, Sir Lipton, and ‘he’d’ had puppies. I’d found that almost unbelievable, but Farrah not realizing she was pregnant and about to give birth? Not even Farrah’s ubiquitous billowy mu’u mu’u dresses could have concealed that state of affairs.

  “Farrah? What the hell is going on?”

  “Okay, he’s not mine,” she said. “Well, he’s mine, but not technically. Yet.”

  “Have you still got some of that ‘Awake’ tea?” I said. “I’m gonna make us some. And then you’re going to tell me everything.” I went to Farrah’s miniscule kitchenette and filled the tea kettle. Then I rummaged through her bread box-sized cupboard and found a tea tin with a picture of a guy with sunbeams shooting out of his head. The label read, ‘AWAKE TEA, Not Your Grandma’s Cuppa’.

  By the time the tea had steeped, the baby had nodded off. I carried two cups into the living room dodging cast-off clothes,
a heap of wadded-up bath towels, and Lipton’s slobbery dog toys.

  “This isn’t the most sanitary environment for a baby,” I whispered. “Does the mother know you live like this?”

  “I’m the mother around here,” said Farrah in a hissed voice. “I’m exposing Baby to the rigors of this Earthly world. How can he build a strong immune system if his body doesn’t learn to make peace with normal physical surroundings?”

  “This goes way beyond ‘normal’,” I said looking down at the matted carpet that had never known the whirr of a vacuum cleaner and the dog hair-encrusted blanket that had never felt the wet of a washing machine. “This is like a giant petri dish. Remember that scary stuff we grew in high school biology?”

  “I don’t dig your harsh remarks but I’m going to ignore them because I need your kokua—your help,” Farrah said.

  “Before I’ll offer to help, I need some answers. Where’s this baby’s mother?”

  “I don’t know. Yesterday morning when I went down to work, there he was. Like baby Moses in the rushes.”

  I was surprised by Farrah’s biblical reference. As far as I knew, she wasn’t one to attend church, let alone read the Bible. But she was an ordained minister of an online spiritual community, “The Church of Spirit and Light.” She’d become a minister so she could conduct wedding ceremonies for “Let’s Get Maui’d”, but no doubt she’d had to learn at least some measure of mainstream Christian/Judaic beliefs to pass the final exam.

  “This baby was abandoned?”

  “Bummer, right? Here’s the note.” She handed me a note written in childish block letters on three-hole notebook paper.

  Grocery store lady—Please take my boy. You can give him a new name if you want. Since you have lots of food I now he wont go hungary. Tell him his mama loves him very much.

  The mother had misspelled a few words, but the message was clear.

  “Wow, Farrah, you need to report this to the police,” I said.

  “You, of all people, want to see this little guy dumped in the system?” Farrah picked up the baby and clutched his damp diaper-clad body to her breast. With clutching hands the baby rooted around the bosom of her mu’u mu’u trying to figure out how to get to what lay beneath.

  “Look, Farrah, you can’t just keep a baby because some pathetic woman left it on your doorstep. There are laws.”

  “This is Hawaii. You weren’t handed over to ‘the man’ when your mom passed. Your Auntie Mana took you in. No social workers, no judges, no nuthin’ like that. So don’t go all establishment on me here, Pali Moon. Help me figure out how I can keep my baby.”

  ***

  By the time we’d finished the Awake tea, we’d come up with a short term plan. I offered mother and baby safe haven at my house in Hali’imaile for a few days to get away from the prying eyes and ears of the customers at Farrah’s store. Beatrice wouldn’t be a problem because she’s practically deaf, but it wouldn’t be long before a customer would claim they were sure they heard a baby crying upstairs and want to investigate.

  “I’ve got to clear this with Steve first,” I said. “He’s coming down to pick me up in a few minutes. But don’t worry, it’s just a formality.”

  Steve arrived twenty minutes later. On the drive to Hali’imaile I told him about Farrah’s baby.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “How am I supposed to put up with poopy diaper smell? And waking up to bawling at three o’clock in the morning? It’s just not in my nature to tolerate stuff like that.”

  “Look, Steve, I’ve heard what sounds like ‘bawling’ coming from your room at three o’clock in the morning and I’ve never said a word.”

  He whipped his head around and looked at me aghast.

  “Okay, I’m just kidding,” I said. “But seriously, Farrah has to have somewhere to go while she figures this out. If a customer hears the baby and calls the police, not only will she get in trouble for having the baby, but she’ll get kicked out of her apartment. It was condemned, remember? No one knows she lives up there.”

  “Oh bull,” said Steve. “The whole town knows she’s up there, including the cops. They don’t hassle her because they need her to run the Gadda. If she left, then the weed-heads would try to bum rides off tourists to get down to Kahului for their Cheetos or their rolling papers. The last thing the cops want to deal with is some stinky dope-smokers hassling Dot and Bob from Minneapolis.”

  We compromised with me offering to give up my downstairs bedroom to Farrah. I’d move into the guest room adjacent to Steve’s bedroom on the second floor. “With the two of them downstairs you won’t hear a thing. And I’ve laid down the law with Farrah about housekeeping. Diapers will be disposed of properly and bottles and nipples will be washed and put away promptly.”

  “Nipples?” said Steve. He shimmied in disgust. “Let’s avoid mentioning stuff like that, okay? I won’t be able to get that image out of my head for a week.”

  “Oh get over it. You were a baby once.”

  “Not hardly. I sprang full-bearded from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.”

  “You’re not ‘full-bearded’ now,” I said, reaching over to stroke Steve’s pathetic Brad Pitt goatee. He’d spent a small fortune on online products including a ‘facial hair stimulator’ that looked suspiciously like a vibrator I’d come across at a rather tawdry bridal fair.

  I went on. “Please act nice. Farrah’s been through a lot this past year.”

  Steve reluctantly agreed. “How long is the rug rat going to live with us?”

  “Hard to say. I’m going to get in touch with Sifu Doug’s lawyer brother, James. I have to play it cool, since Farrah doesn’t want ‘the man’ involved. But I’m worried the baby’s mother will pop back into the picture after she comes down from whatever she was hopped up on when she ditched the kid. If that happens, Farrah will be heartbroken.”

  “Farrah’s not planning on keeping the kid forever, is she?” Steve’s voice zoomed up a couple of octaves.

  “Seems that’s what she’s thinking. But it’s not like she came across a kitten in her dryer vent. She’s going to have to jump through some hoops to be able to keep him.”

  “Whoa. But you just said they weren’t going to stay for very long. I mean, we all love Farrah. No argument there. But a droopy drawers kid pitching food off a high chair and the TV blasting Barney the Dinosaur when I’m trying to sleep in? Ugh.”

  “Don’t worry. The kid will be long gone before he ever needs a high chair.”

  “Pinkie swear?” said Steve.

  I held up my pinkie finger. “Swear.”

  “On another subject, tell me what you found out about your mom over in Kaua'i.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he said. “Then why did the lawyer make you go over there?”

  “To let me know my SOB father had died.”

  “Wow, you found your father? Who was he?”

  “I just told you. He was an SOB and now he’s dead. End of story.”

  CHAPTER 11

  On Thursday morning I got up before dawn and went down to the Palace of Pain, the martial arts studio where I work out. Because I’d had so many weddings in June I’d been spotty in getting in my workouts. I hoped it was early enough that my instructor, Sifu Doug, wouldn’t be in yet.

  No such luck. His car was parked in the alley.

  “Hey, stranger,” he said when I came inside.

  “Hey, Sifu. I’ve been over in Kaua'i.” I left it vague, hoping he’d think I’d been off-island for most of June.

  “How long were you over there?”

  “I just got back yesterday.”

  “Okay, don’t tell me. But you know if you don’t keep up your practice you’ll get soft.” He nodded toward the wall where my picture hung alongside the five other black belts, all of them guys, who trained at PoP, “You know lots of keiki girls look up to you.”

  “Sorry, Sifu. But this was a busy month.”

  “Then I better let you get to it. Y
ou gonna go through your forms?” It wasn’t a question, it was an order.

  “Yes, Sifu.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I’d planned to stay about an hour but it turned out to be closer to two. I took a quick shower and started to head out when I noticed Sifu Doug sitting in his office. No time like the present. I poked my head inside.

  “You got a minute?” I said.

  “Sure, just move that stuff off the chair.”

  I sat down on a metal folding chair across from Doug. Three years ago when I first laid eyes on him he’d scared the daylights out of me. Former Army Ranger, chiseled good looks, eyes that bore into opponents with such ferocity that he’d won more than a few fights by sheer intimidation.

  “What’s happenin’?” he said.

  “I’ve got a problem.”

  He smiled. “Pali, you know I love you like a sista, but just once I’d like you to come into my office carrying something other than a problem.”

  “I know; I apologize. How about I make you some cookies or something?”

  “I got a wife for that,” he said. “But next time you hear some gossip, or a good joke, you come tell me. I get first dibs.”

  I thought about my meeting yesterday. Talk about a joke. My father had been Hawaii’s cable mogul and I found out I had six siblings. And from the looks of things I’d be coming into some serious cash real soon. But I wasn’t there to talk about me.

  “You got it, Sifu. Next time I get something juicy you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Okay, so what’s on your mind?”

  “All of this is just conjecture, okay? A total what-if.”

  “Got it.”

  “If someone asks someone else to raise their kid for them, is it legal?”

  “You know it is. We got hanai kids all over these islands. You were a hanai kid yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Right. But my mother was dead and my father was gone. There was nobody to tell my Auntie Mana she couldn’t take me in.”