by Deb Caletti
“You guys ready in ten, fifteen?” I say. I’m hoping to have this done with, quick. I’ll give back a check that could change my life, maybe go to the beach and swim. Maybe I can’t fund my dream to stalk Hunter Eden from concert to concert, but I can make Melanie jealous by bringing back a good tan.
“Meet you at the car,” Dad says.
I brush away my coffee breath, change out of my sweatshirt to my T-shirt from the guitar exhibit at the Experience Music Project. It’s getting hot already. I find my flip-flops in my backpack. Dad and Jennifer are back in their room with the door shut, so I head out front and wait by the car.
Dad’s house is in a clump of other, various-size homes near the beach. His is the closest (and the smallest)—you can actually walk right out onto the sand through a small gate from his backyard. I lean against his car and the metal is warm; it zaps straight through the fabric of my shorts and T-shirt. It smells so good out here—salty and sweet-flowers both, a pinch of that ocean odor of cold, seaweedy vines washed up. Trevor would love it here. I wonder if Mom would—I picture her here in this house instead of Jennifer, but my parents have been divorced long enough that the thought of them together seems odd and even makes me feel slightly panicked. Mom would fuss with sun lotion and worry about jellyfish and warn Bex to come in from the surf, and Dad’s dreamy semi-there-ness would drive her nuts. It would be too hot to cook, too hot for quilts or tea that Mom likes. Then again, maybe she would like to drag a stick behind her to make a line in the wet sand. Maybe she’d like to wear a ponytail all the time and eat food that doesn’t require constant supervision.
I watch a muscle-y neighbor strap his surfboard to his car (you’d have watched too), and then when that fun’s done, I realize I’ve been standing out here for too long. Keiko sits under a palm tree in the shade, eyes glued to me. It’s funny about dogs, how they have these jobs they take so seriously—the guarding, the watching, the following. We just go about our business and don’t even notice the singular, focused intent of their world and of their life’s work. They should all get raises.
Keiko’s tongue is lolling out, so I check her water bowl and refill it with the garden hose and take a drink myself and spill water down my front and then start to get the restless pissed-offness of waiting in the heat. Especially now that I realize I am completely wrong about nerves and the islands. My stomach is starting to tap-dance at the thought of seeing the Vespa guy. Richard Howards, I remind myself. I see his name in my mind, signed on that line of the check. “Dad!” I yell childishly.
No answer and I wait a few more minutes until can’t-wait surges with sudden urgency. I’m fine one minute, but now I’m not fine, and filled with Now. I lean through the open window of the car and beep the horn. I’m done being the polite guest because I’m just me after all, and that’s my annoying father.
Dad emerges, running his hand over his hair. His Hawaiian shirt is flapping as he trots to the car. “Longer than ten minutes,” he admits.
“I’m getting gray as you,” I say. “How long will Jennifer be?”
“She’s staying.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Keiko can come,” he says.
I clap my hands and she runs over in full-out dog joy. Keiko climbs into the car, her beard dripping water from her bowl, and I climb in the front. The seat is hot on my legs and I lift them up, set my feet on the dashboard with intention to ride like that. “Trade one bitch for another,” I say, and it’s out of my mouth before I realize it. I don’t even mean it how it sounds. It’s just one of those jokes that slip past the guards of rightness. Look, I don’t see the guy very often and I want things to go well, and insulting his wife is not exactly the way to make that happen. I don’t even really think she’s a bitch. Just slightly grating the way fluorescent lights are grating. Maybe slightly greedy, too; the kind of people whose self-focus seems a small and daily thing.
I sit upright and look over at Dad in marginal horror, grasping around for apology, when he opens his mouth wide and lets out this huge laugh. My God, it’s just this big Ha! and I relax and smile and apologize anyway.
“I didn’t mean that how it sounded,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says, and I see that it is. Maybe more than okay. I think he likes having someone on his side. He seems to be a man who’s been on a deserted island, and I’m the one who appears with sympathy for his situation and some food and a phone made out of a coconut.
We drive, and Keiko’s lips are blown open in a windy dog smile. We are curving our way along the ocean, and bits of clouds are peeking open and showing blue, and when this happens the ocean gets sparkly and the waves tipped with white. It’s funny, but Hawaii looks just like Hawaii. Like it should, from the pictures.
“So pretty,” I shout, and Dad just nods. He turns on the radio and there’s some seventies song and he lurches his head to the beat, which is something I’d advise him against, as he looks a bit like those dashboard figures with the bobbing heads. The song is from the time when guys called their woman “Pretty Mama” and people were doing it in Chevy vans. It’s okay, though, as he looks really happy. It’s like I’m just getting to watch him be himself when no one’s around. And then I look down, at the yellow envelope at my feet. When I see it, the lightness I feel is shoved aside and a gnarl of nerves wind in my stomach.
“How far?” I say.
“Five miles?” Dad shrugs. “Dan Shugman’s old place,” he says, though this means nothing to me.
“Weird. So close to you. Do you think if I’d have mentioned Costa Rica he would have gone to Costa Rica?”
“When I was in college? I once took a trip to Jamaica because I overheard some guy talking about it on the bus,” Dad says. “Then again, Hawaii’s sort of all-purpose, user-friendly for disappearing, right? You can drink the water.”
We drive past an outdoor shopping mall, with dresses and shirts in Hawaiian fabrics hung in doorways of stores to attract tourists. There’s a grocery store, the clang of shopping carts, and then we are back by the ocean again, driving against the backdrop of a lush mountain painted in a hundred shades of green. We pass a string of big hotels and then a busy stretch of road, with cars parked along both sides. Here, the ocean is dotted with reds and yellows and greens, colors of surfboards, people riding waves and crashing; long, smooth rides, and short, ditched ones, ending in arcs of white splashes.
“Wow, look,” I say, though of course he’s seen this a million times. Dad only nods, flips his turn signal on. We curve our way up a hillside; climb a small cliff until the ocean is below us, looking suddenly both smaller and larger. The houses here are newer, not the small shaky haphazard ones of Dad’s neighborhood. Some are huge, with walls of glass and peeks of swimming pools. Dad turns into a driveway of a creamy house that’s notched into the cliff side. There’s a small patch of lawn and two palm trees, and while the house is smaller than its neighbors, it’s new and clean and the view is wide and stretches along the coast.
“We’re here,” Dad says. He cuts the engine, and Keiko is already trying to shove to get out.
“Dan Shugman’s old place? I was expecting something with a grass roof and a Folger’s can to pee in,” I say.
“Dan Shugman’s a classy guy. He moved out to the golf course,” Dad says. “How about I’ll check and see if Mr. Howards is here.” Dad pops out of the car, but hey, forget it. I pop out after him. It’s bad enough that I’m surprising the Vespa guy, let alone my dad. I close the door on Keiko, who looks shocked and affronted. I trot to the front door. Dad rings the doorbell. I hear its hollow sound echo in the house.
We wait for the sound of footsteps. Nothing. Dad cups his hands around his eyes, leans up against the glass next to the front door. “Lots of boxes,” he says.
“Move over,” I say. I cup my hands too, and look inside. Boxes, all right. Stretches of wood floor empty of furniture. Wadded-up paper, a couple of glasses unwrapped and set on the countertop bar that separates living room from kitchen.
A large, ugly black and brown clay vase is lying on its side on some bubble wrap. Glass doors lead to a pool hanging over the cliff. Not a bad way to run away from home.
“He’s not here,” Dad announces.
“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock,” I say.
“Let’s go and come back.”
It’s disappointing, because now I’m ready. Ready is like that. Ready is the reluctant guy on the dance floor. You ask him and he says no; you ask again, drag him by his wrists, and when he’s finally there, after a few steps, the music fills him and he’s cutting loose like there’s no tomorrow.
“Lunch?” Dad says.
“Didn’t we just eat?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he says, pretty sensibly, if you ask me. “Onion rings? Let’s go by and see Neal first. We’ve got two new guys and your old Pop can’t stay away from work one day, right? If you tell Jennifer we stopped, she’ll say she was right.”
“It’s our secret,” I say. We’re pals now, and this and the idea of onion rings fills me with a singular gladness. I feel a lift of hope, new things coming. Dad taps his thumbs on the steering wheel to the music that’s not playing anymore. Keiko sticks her head between the seats so she can be part of things up front.
“I’m going to whack you with my elbow when I shift,” Dad tells her, gives her head a soft push back. Keiko has a flexible personality, though. She changes her plan enthusiastically, shifts around in a needless circle and watches for other dogs out my side of the car. I hear her breathing just behind my ear.
We’re back down the hill again, out where the hotels are, huge places with filled parking lots and open-air lobbies and layered, identical balconies. There are older hotels too, across the street, with names like Sea View written in blue script on their white-cement sides, little kids in partial bathing suits running up and down outside corridors, pissing off their neighbors, though what can you expect at this price, honey? It’s a place where wives wear their hair up in huge butterfly hair clips, and husbands look for the water wings in the suitcases and wish they’d stayed single. The buildings look past tense, the pools a bit murky, though maybe it’s only by comparison that they suffer. Comparison is like that—we’d all be more satisfied without it, because across the road are bellboys in Hawaiian shirts and crisp tan shorts, greeting airport shuttle vans with luggage carts made from leggy curved brass.
Dad parks at a public beach entrance. The asphalt of the lot is covered with a coat of sand and my footsteps are gritty. Keiko knows this place, starts ahead without us. I take my shoes off when we reach the beach, and the sand is warm, but cool when I dig down my toes. The sky is only patchy clouds now, wisps on their way elsewhere, though a poofy train of looming white is on the horizon.
The beach is already filling. People from the hotels sit under grass-roofed umbrellas and shade tents; they lean against chairs with adjustable backs and foam cushions and fluffy, white hotel towels. Everyone else (including the poor suckers from across the street) lugs armfuls of stuff, bringing as many of the comforts of home as possible—red-and-white coolers of food and striped canvas bags of sun lotion and beach toys and magazines and sunglasses and cameras to record it all. I hear a radio—You make a grown man cryyy-iiii—owned by someone who either assumes we all share his love for Mick Jagger or else doesn’t care if we do or not.
“Any of this look familiar?” Dad says. We’re trekking across the sand and toward a block of beach layered with windsurf boards and sails and even a paddleboat or two. A little building behind us houses surfboards and boogie boards and life jackets and scuba gear. Two guys are out by the equipment, and one shouts, “Hey, Keiko! Hey, girl,” and slaps his hands on his knees, and Keiko’s rear starts swiveling like mad and then she’s off, running toward her glorious, thrilled, dog-human reunion. Dad waves, and Neal takes one hand from the thick fur around Keiko’s collar and waves back.
“You missed me, huh, boss? Can’t stay away for two days. Or else you think I boarded up the place and ran off with the till? Right? Like that’d maybe get me to the other side of the island, if that,” Neal says. “Maybe buy me a Coke. No, no, don’t tell me. This can’t be little Indigo. No way. No friggin’ way. You picked up some hot chick at the Sunset Grill. You finally came to your senses and are gonna dump Miss High Maintenance. You’re all grown up.” He holds out his hand to me.
“Neal, you look exactly the same. Probably the same shirt, even,” I say.
“I only got the one,” he says, and gives up the handshake and puts one big paw around my shoulders in a hug. Neal was Dad’s first employee, and we had lunch with him when we visited before. You can tell he and Dad are close, but in the teasing, punching-arm way a lot of grown men are close. Verbal jabs mean love, and that plus many years means they’ll be there for each other’s hospital visits and family funerals. Neal is a native Hawaiian, and I mean it when I say he hasn’t changed. He’s got the age-defying genes of Polynesian men, and he’s brown and bulky-muscled in his tank top, wide-smiled, kindly-eyed. He could be twenty-five as easily as forty-five. I think he’s got something like five kids, which makes me wonder if Mrs. Neal shows her age for both of them.
One of the guys from the shack calls out to Neal “Windsurfer!” And a paunchy tourist in his midforties with dark hair dyed blond and a mean-looking goatee approaches Neal while tucking his wallet into his back pocket.
“What’s your name?” Neal says.
“Dean,” the guy says.
“Okay, Dean, you done this before? Big guy like you knows what he’s doing before he takes this baby out, right?”
“Of course,” the guy says. His of course is an insulted one, a shove to the front of some competition. I can tell which one is his wife on the beach. She’s sitting on a towel and looking nervously our way. “I know what I’m doing.”
“We got a lesson today,” Neal says. He checks his watch. “Thirty minutes.”
“I don’t need lessons,” Dean says. “I’m a soccer player.”
Neal shrugs. He hauls the Windsurfer to the edge of the water. He’s so strong, he looks like he’s carrying an envelope. He trots back to us, leaves Dean to struggle with the Windsurfer as if he’s suddenly been handed a squirming sumo wrestler. I can see his arm muscles quivering from the beach. He gets the sail upright at just the moment a wind gust comes, and he shoots out to sea. His wife has her hand up to her eyes, shading out the sun, watching Dean get smaller in the distance.
“Chump,” Neal says. “He’ll need the rescue boat, I guarantee it. Friggin’ mainland athletes. Friggin’ jocks.”
Dad chuckles. We follow Neal to the shack. Keiko’s already there, getting a drink from her work bowl.
“That guy signed all the waivers, right?” Neal says.
“Yesiree,” one of the guys behind the counter says. He taps the clipboard with his knuckles. “Hey, boss.”
“Zach,” Dad says. He uses the guy’s name instead of a hello. “This is my daughter Indigo. And Eric, over there.”
“Hey,” Eric says. He’s drinking from a bottle of Koala, a mixed-continent metaphor, and is peeling the label with his fingernails. New guy.
“Hi,” I say.
“Great name,” Zach says. “Indigo, not Eric.” He chuckles at himself.
“Credit her brilliant father,” Dad says. “Thoreau. ‘The night is a different season…. Sweet-fern and indigo weed in overgrown wood-paths….’”
“Etcetera, etcetera,” Neal says.
“I was named after a weed? That explains a lot,” I say.
“A beautiful weed,” Dad says. “I never told you?”
I shake my head. “I just thought you had a thing for different names. Maybe you liked blue.”
He throws his hands up in a What’re-you-going-to-do-with-a-father-like-me gesture. “Now you know it was Thoreau’s fault. So, we’re going to go eat. Onion rings.”
“Yesss!” Zach pumps one arm, giving us a fluffy view of a swath of armpit hair.
“
Looks like everything’s under control here,” Dad says.
“The minute he’s gone, bring the dancing girls back out,” Neal says.
Keiko’s a bit confused at the short workday. Dad has to call her three times, and Neal has to urge her on before she heads out with us. Keiko’s obviously very responsible on the job. We head down the beach. Dean’s just a dot on the horizon now.
“What’s going to happen to Dean with the mean goatee?” I ask.
“Lost at sea, eaten by sharks. But he sure could play soccer,” Dad says. “Nah, his wife there is going to have to pay sixty-five bucks for the barge to go and fetch him. We make more profit on guys like that.”
We trudge over to Crabby Bill’s, a beach bar with outdoor seating. We sit at the counter, on high stools with woven seats. They obviously know Dad; the bartender puts in his order between pushing blender buttons. “Two,” Dad says. The bartender nods. He’s quick—he’s facing us and then there are the apron strings tied behind his back and then he’s with us again. “Wade here,” Dad says, “is a real talented singer. If you were staying longer, I’d take you out to the Kingfisher, where he performs. This is my daughter, visiting from the mainland,” Dad says.
“Aloha,” he says. “I’m a better singer than a bartender, that’s for damn sure.” But I wonder. He’s off again, zipped to the other side of the counter. Wade is fun to watch. He’s shooting colorful liquid into cups and flipping down soda handles and pouring icy deliciousness from blenders and chatting with the customers and joking and making people smile. It’s just before noon, so the place is starting to fill, but Wade’s got it handled. I know what this feels like. He’s swinging in the rhythm of his work and loving it, and it makes me miss Leroy and Jane and everyone back at Carrera’s.
Wade sets down two tall icy glasses of piña colada. “No booze. Sorry, kiddo, it’s the way he likes it, what can I say. We’re not all sane, rational people, are we?” He smiles and then he’s off again, wipes down the counter and sets two coasters down in front of a new couple at the bar. “Hot enough for you folks,” he says. “What can I getcha?”