by Piper Lennox
The knock on the door is sudden, but doesn’t make me jump. I’ve been waiting for the front desk to evict me, oh-so-politely, ever since Luka left.
I check the peephole; the hall looks empty. But when I swing open the door, I can see he was just leaning out of sight, one arm up and braced against the jamb.
He looks exhausted, even kind of sick. His tie’s undone, and his hair’s fallen in front of his face, shrouding his eyes. I almost reach to push it back for him, until I remember it’s not my place to do that kind of thing. If it ever was.
“Hi.” I swallow hard and take a breath, ready to tell him my exact flight schedule. Ready to tell him I’ll be out of here in no time, if he can just grant me the simple favor of ignoring me a few more days.
Before I can speak, though, he dips his head to kiss me. Rather than the astringent taste of junipers or the burn of sugar from a maraschino, or the mellow sourness of coffee, the sickly sweetness of energy drinks—instead of any taste I’ve linked with Luka, all these vacations, I taste the dried earthiness of sand, the way the hottest breezes taste on my mouth when I lie on the beach. The way my own chapped lips taste, every time, when I lean my head against the plane seat and breathe my last bit of Kona as my flight takes off.
When he pulls back, resting his forehead against mine, he whispers, “Still want that story?”
Twenty-Two
Luka
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I temple my hands in front of my mouth and eye the tape recorder on the kitchen table. Tanya sits at one end of the table, notepad and pen in hand; I’m beside her. Mom and Dad take their seats on the other sides.
“I’m sure,” I tell her.
She smiles and clicks a button on the recorder. The red light flickers once, then steadies. We begin.
“Let’s say I do get out of this contract,” I told Parker, that day on the beach. “How do I help the affiliates?”
“That’s where this comes in.” He kicked his briefcase gently. The papers slid. “Remember that non-disclosure agreement they made you sign?”
I thought a moment. “No.”
“Because they didn’t.” He smiled. Actually, he grinned, like he’d found directions to Atlantis in that contract. “The only thing was a document saying you can’t disclose trade secrets to competitors. Most everything else is fair game, especially if it’s information already known to the public.”
“If it’s already known to the public, I have no leverage.”
“The media outlets have been getting the run-around from every Port employee they talk to. If they can even get them to answer questions in the first place. You give them the real story on all the rumors flying around lately, focusing on how they screwed over the affiliates, and people will be flocking to support their businesses after the story’s published. Especially with all this social media buzz about Aruba.”
I picked a line of sand out from underneath my thumbnail. “What about everyone who works at the resort? If we close down—”
“If you get out of the contract, the property is still yours. Your non-compete agreement would be void—unless they negotiate keeping it in a settlement—so you could still operate it as a hotel. No employees have to get fired.”
“But when Port leaves,” I pointed out, “they take a ton of shit with them. The furniture in all the suites, the restaurant, the advertising....” I tilted my head back and rested it on the stair above me, watching the only cloud in the sky glide out of view. “I can’t start from scratch, with nothing but a building and some beach.”
“Someone might want to buy it from you. Employees included. Who knows.” The click of his briefcase closing underscored this as the impossibility it really was.
He got to his feet. I felt sand hit my arm as he brushed off his suit. “Like I said, talk to that lawyer, first. I can’t help much.”
“You’ve already helped way more than I deserve.” I opened my eyes and smiled weakly, then held up my fist. He tapped it. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ve been watching their every move on this affiliate thing since the day they started it.”
“Since I started it, you mean.” I sat back up and watched the water. A skim boarder was coasting on the foam. He caught some sand and toppled. “This all started because of me.”
Parker nodded gravely, but nudged me on his way up the stairs. “Then finish it.”
Tanya
“Got everything you need?” Luka leans against the fridge and folds his arms, ankles crossed. I know this stance. He does it every time he doesn’t want me to leave.
“Looks like it.” I flip through page after page of notes, then eye the two cassettes we went through during the interview. Between Luka and his parents, I have plenty. Add in the interviews Luka arranged for me with the Kalanis, the Lee family, and Rhett Silva, and I could probably write an entire book. Luckily for me, all I need is a couple pages for WorldCast magazine.
“Did they offer you anything permanent?”
“They want to meet in person, so I’d say that’s a pretty good sign.”
His teeth rake across his lip. I stand. Slowly, he looks at me.
“Thank you.” My exhale comes out as a laugh. I still can’t believe this happened. “What you’re doing, it’s...it’s really noble.”
“It’s really not.” His laugh is breathier than mine, bitter. “I hate that I let myself be so blind to everything they were doing. They kept saying they cared about the local businesses, the people...but they didn’t.” Out in the garden, we can hear his parents discussing their produce stand. “My dad was right about them. And me.”
I tilt my head. “What did he say about you?”
“The same thing you did. About how shitty it was to go after Rochelle’s house. I tried to justify it, ‘Well, somebody’s gonna get it,’ whatever, but...that was no better than what Port did. The whole ‘just business’ mindset.” He pauses, thumbing his lips in that way I catch myself thinking of whenever I sit still too long in my apartment, alone with my thoughts and memories. “When you get caught up in the business side of things, you forget there are real people affected by your decisions. Or you don’t care.”
“You just forgot,” I correct him. “Port doesn’t care. They never did.” The joists under the floor creak as I step closer to him. “That’s the difference.”
He shrugs, not believing me. I reach out and catch his hand after it passes through his hair, before it can fall against his leg. He looks at my fingers, then me.
“I know how much you’re giving up to give me this story. And to help the affiliates. You don’t have to think it’s noble, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.”
“I’m just trying to do what’s right,” he mutters. “It can’t undo all the wrong I’ve already done, though.”
His words shake something loose in me: a memory from when I was twelve, in the apartment where my mother and I shared a bedroom. A memory that stays sharp and vivid, no matter how often I wish it would fade.
It was the feeling of being asleep and knowing I was asleep, stretching my limbs into the void of the bed and sensing every fold of the sheets, appreciating the weight of the comforter on my back. Inhaling the soft scent of the pillow as I rolled onto my stomach in the darkness.
Then, suddenly, my consciousness would heighten. The bedroom door whined open. Mom never entered quietly.
She had a job, briefly, running the register from eight at night to four in the morning, in a convenience store fourteen blocks west. It was the kind of place with bars on the windows and the cashier behind Plexiglas. A dangerous job for anyone, but especially a woman. Ditto on the crappy wages.
But, for several weeks, she walked dutifully to her shift every night. Sometimes I’d watch her leave, staring from the bathroom window until I couldn’t see her anymore past the brick and trees.
And when she came home each morning, it was like my body sensed it: I’d rise from deep sleep to that in-between place, j
ust before the door opened and she bumped her hip on the bureau, the way she always did.
I’d keep my eyes closed and hear her change into nightclothes. The mattress would sigh as she slipped into the bed beside me.
Her fingers were cool on my cheek.
Then she’d pull her hand back. I’d hear her kiss her fingers before they touched my skin again, the quickest goodnight, before she’d roll away and steady her breathing, and we’d fall asleep within moments of the other.
That job scared the hell out of her, I could tell. It scared me. Walking to school in the clean light of morning was hard enough; how my mother must have felt, trekking to the store alone in fading light, while men heckled from porches and drug addicts blocked her path more often than not, I could only imagine.
When she quit after Alastair breezed through again, I hated her for it. What little money she’d made, at least it meant no more bare cabinets and forgotten bills.
She latched onto my father’s return like a lifeboat arriving just in time to scoop us up. And, when he left, she found another boat, and another.
As I walked from the resort to Luka’s parents’ house today, I thought about that apartment again. My walk to school; my mother’s walk to work. How different the view was then, compared to what I was seeing now: palm trees cradled in the easy wind off the ocean, everything bright and green and thriving, instead of cold concrete and litter. I stepped over discarded shells and pebbles, instead of busted crack pipes and cigarette butts.
My mother did try. She sacrificed what she could, in the only ways she knew how. It was still too hard to let go of my anger, but I felt a tiny piece of it fracture as this realization hit me. Just because she didn’t do everything right, didn’t mean she did everything wrong.
“It’s the best you can do,” I whisper now. His head dips imperceptibly as I lean into him, our mouths floating near the other’s. “That’s what counts.”
Our kiss is short, soft. Probably the briefest and gentlest kiss we’ve ever shared—no frantic passion, no hormones surging through our veins, calling for skin to skin as fast as humanly possible. No promise of a wild night ahead; no silent dare to slip unnoticed into a sauna or closet and say with our hands all the things our voices can’t.
It’s a goodbye. Unmistakable, final, with the airy touch of a breath you can’t catch. I keep my eyes closed as I pull back and he guides my ear to his chest. If I don’t, he’d see me cry, my tears revealing the last secret I’ve guarded from him with everything I have: I don’t want to leave.
Twenty-Three
Luka
“Wow. Been a while since you slept this late, huh?”
I squint, bleary, at Dad’s silhouette against the patio door when I finally drag myself out of bed at noon. “Nowhere to be,” I remind him.
“Tanya’s flight already left?”
I nod, refusing to show just how much that fact bothers me while I shuffle into the kitchen, starting a pot of coffee before remembering I’m not supposed to drink it anymore. Not until my prescriptions kick in, at least, and my ulcer shows signs of improvement. With no job, no projects in the pipeline, and no quarrels with a girl who could argue paint off walls, you’d think healing would come easily. Instead, I think about the empty hours ahead of me and wince, the coal in my stomach burning bright as ever.
“Your mom and I were kind of surprised she didn’t stay longer,” he says casually, but the hook in his voice is too similar to Mom’s when she prods for information. He wants to know why she didn’t stay longer. How I could’ve possibly messed up the one good thing going in my life, right now.
“Tanya lives on the mainland,” I say flatly, like I’m reciting the periodic table. “I live here.”
He seems unaffected by my answer as he digs through the basket of seed packets on the counter. “You’re welcome to help your mom and me down at the stand today, if you want. We’ll be there another hour.”
“No thanks.” The only thing more depressing than watching South Park reruns in my undershirt and sweats all day, would be rummaging through a closet of suits I’ll never need again to find just one pair of jeans.
“By the way,” he calls from the porch, as I flop onto the sofa, “there’s something online about Port I think you’d like to see.”
“I bet I wouldn’t,” I call back, mockingly singsong.
“Kona Today. Just look.” The door closes on his laugh.
Even the effort of lifting my phone is more than I want to attempt today, but I type in the website and blink through my caffeine headache while the page loads.
Paradise Port: Kona leaps at me, first a photo of the resort from the front, when guests arrive, and then an aerial view of our property. I brace myself for a nasty rumor, true or not, in the headline.
PARADISE PORT CANCELS AFFILIATE PROGRAMS; KONA OWNER SPEAKS OUT
Tanya King
Few jingles in the advertising world prove to be the earworm that Paradise Port’s 1980s commercials spawned. Paradise Port: vacations the way they should be. Everyone knows it, and some dedicated travelers—myself included—lived it, returning to Paradise Port locations all over the world, year after year.
Equally as catchy are the timeworn rumors of takeovers, monopolization, and unethical business practices. With the company’s recent announcement that their Aruba location will close, rumors have only strengthened—particularly here, in Kona.
“The rumors come and go, honestly,” says Jacob Singh, the head bartender at the Paradise Port: Kona resort. “You learn to tune them out, but it’s hard not to wonder if there’s any truth to them.”
Paradise Port, Inc. began in 1982, when founder Theodore Bozeman decided to expand his popular Orlando hotel into a chain. However, lacking the funds for such a venture, he turned to franchising—the process by which a business model is streamlined and “sold” to other owners, who then set up their own separately functioning location.
David Williams and his wife, Rose, never dreamed of turning their quaint yet thriving hospitality business into a franchise. “We were always against it,” David says. “You talk to people who live here, and they’d tell you the same thing. [Franchising], it’s very commercial.”
Commercialization of Hawaii has been a growing concern with locals for decades—so when David decided to convert his existing hotel into a Paradise Port location, he was met with some resistance.
“Our friends were not happy, but I think they were hesitant to tell us just how much it bothered them,” says David.
“Our oldest son’s death...was the catalyst, for many reasons,” adds Rose. “So most people knew that, and didn’t feel comfortable telling us what they really thought of Paradise Port.”
Two years ago, David suffered a stroke at the age of fifty-two, which he believes was caused by the increasing hours and workload demanded from him by Paradise Port’s corporate division.
“When you first sign on,” he says, “they make it sound like you’ll have freedom to run the business the way that fits your lifestyle, your goals...which isn’t the case. The corporate managers who get sent in to help you, they come with rules and it’s all very rigid.”
Added Rose: “You’re under an enormous deal of pressure, but they stay smiling. So you don’t really notice until it’s too late.”
Former Paradise Port: Dublin owner Shawn Brighton agrees. His location began much like David and Rose’s: a low-key but successful hotel, family-owned and operated.
After signing with the franchise, however, Brighton realized the company was not interested in helping him succeed.
“We had long-standing contracts with other businesses,” he explains via email. “These were my friends, but also connections I’d spent decades cultivating. Paradise Port didn’t care that their projects directly competed with these companies and damaged my relationships with [these businesses].”
“Directly competed” included Paradise Port opening in-house spas, bringing their own restaurants into new locations, and
implementing other changes that caused franchisees turmoil with local businesses, at best—and, at worst, cost those business owners everything.
Kona Tours is one such company. Owner James Lee says, “We were approached by [Luka Williams, current owner of Paradise Port: Kona] to join a new affiliate program the company was trying. And it sounded great. It really did.”
The affiliate program—pioneered by Williams, but implemented company-wide at almost every Paradise Port location, at the insistence of corporate—did indeed sound great: local businesses, from wine suppliers to touring companies, could team up with Paradise Port locations in what were pitched as symbiotic relationships.
“We were told, you know, ‘Give us two of your shuttles, some of your bicycles, and we’ll put your logos and pamphlets everywhere, so our guests will funnel into your clientele,’ which didn’t happen,” Lee says. “The contracts we signed were worded strangely.... It was hard to tell what we were getting into, until it was too late.”
Locals will remember the sudden end of Kona Tours in 2017, after years of success as one of the island’s most popular touring companies.
Paradise Port, Lee says, approached him “several times to try and buy us out. Every time, we’d be like, ‘Where are our logos on the shuttles and the bikes, like you promised?’ and they’d say, ‘Soon, soon, if that’s really what you want, but hear us out.’ Then they’d make an offer to buy the company, and we’d refuse, and then nothing. No logos, no branding.”