“You got to shut off that TV and fucking go somewhere, Luke,” she said later. “Paradise ain’t paradise for everyone.”
She’d met Finch when he was stationed at Kaneohe Bay. She’d waited tables nearby at a tourist trap called Aloha Café, where the menu featured items with names like Surfside Steak and Luau Lamb Chops. Finch ordered the Beach Bum Brownies, but he kept calling them Butt Brownies, which made her laugh. She was eighteen. By the time she reached Luke’s age, she had married, moved to the mainland, and birthed three kids. Luke liked her children but he wondered if they were the only reason Cherry and Finch were still together. When he came over to watch a game with Finch, he studied the two of them, expecting to spot some invisible bond between them. But Finch rarely acknowledged Cherry and she was quiet around him, as if they had parceled out space in the house, carved it up like warring countries fighting over territory. Cherry behind the kitchen counter, passing through the living room like a tourist, Finch awkward anywhere near a stove, instead sprawling across the couch.
At Cobras parties, Cherry sipped pinot grigio with the other wives, always seeming a bit bored. Once Luke had heard the other wives call her stuck-up and he thought about her stories about eating sugar sandwiches for dinner, how she rarely saw her parents, who worked at the Dole cannery, how she’d grown up thinking that everyone knew their parents vaguely, by shadows cast in late nights or half-remembered forehead kisses at dawn. How she’d gotten married and grown fat and still felt the need to hoard—stashing candy bars in end drawers, packing old clothes in garbage bags at the back of her closet—because what if there wasn’t enough? Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.
“I’m starting a new diet tomorrow,” she said, unwrapping a Reese’s cup she’d tucked in her coupon drawer.
“Which one?” he said.
“The one where you can only eat what the dinosaurs ate.”
“Didn’t they all die off?”
She laughed. “That’s why I like you, Luke.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re honest,” she said. “Because you don’t say, ‘Oh Cherry, you don’t need to go on a diet.’ What bullshit. The people who tell you that are the same ones calling you a fat ass once you leave the room.”
He liked that she thought of him like that—honest, shrewd, unsentimental. He found himself spending more time around her, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He wasn’t used to having friends with wives but he understood that there were boundaries you ought to respect. And even though he knew he shouldn’t visit when Finch wasn’t home, he still swung by the house sometimes before his afternoon shift. He usually made up some excuse—he wanted to return a socket wrench Finch had lent him, he lost his playbook, he thought he’d left his water bottle on the coffee table. In reality, he just wanted to talk to Cherry, who always seemed interested in his life. She told him where he should look for a better-paying job, how he should consider going back to school, how he should stop stalking Nadia’s Facebook.
“That’s your first mistake,” she said. “You never go sniffing around an ex. Why would you want to see how happy she is without you?”
Cherry was right. She was right about many things, and he liked asking her for advice. He couldn’t ask his own mother, not anymore, not since the morning he’d told her about the pregnancy and she’d returned with cash. He didn’t blame her for helping him but he knew something had shifted between them in that moment—his mother had done something he’d thought her incapable of, and the boundaries of their relationship had suddenly moved, leaving him disoriented, like stepping into a room and feeling for where the walls had once been but instead only touching air.
“What’re you two hens jabbering about?” Finch said, when he came into the kitchen and caught them in mid-conversation. Cherry always said “Nothing” and went back to being her silent self. It amazed Luke, how quickly she could shift. Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around. Who was Nadia, then, around Shadi Waleed?
“I saw your video,” Cherry said one day when Luke came by to return a book he’d borrowed called Blu’s Hanging. Here, she’d said, handing it to him. Here’s your poor Hawaiians. He’d almost told her that he didn’t have to read about it to believe her but he read the book anyway because he could tell it mattered to her. He liked it enough, even though he’d read online that the treatment of Filipino characters might be a little racist. Was that true, he’d planned to ask her. Was it true that in Hawaii, Filipinos are treated like blacks?
“What video?” he said, half listening as he tried to find the spot on the shelf where the book had been.
“What do you mean?” she said. “What other video is there?”
“Oh,” he said. “That one.”
“Finch had some of the guys over,” she said. “They kept watching it again and again and again.”
He had a sudden, clear image of the Cobras hunched around Finch’s computer, replaying the video of his injury and laughing. Jesus Christ, look at Sheppard! One more time, okay, wait for it, wait for—oh shit! The bone and everything! He’d thought he was a Cobra but he wasn’t. He was just a gruesome joke.
“Can I see it?” Cherry asked.
“You already did,” he said. He felt strangely betrayed by her, as if she, of all people, should’ve known better than to watch the video.
“No,” she said. “Your leg.”
She’d spoken so casually, it took him a moment to even realize what she’d asked. “Why?” he said.
“Just want to,” she said. “I can’t even understand how you walk on that thing half normal, let alone play.”
She was curious, but not like he’d imagined the Cobras, searching for a laugh. She looked like a person climbing out of a wrecked car, eager to inspect the damage to convince herself it wasn’t worse than what she imagined. He sat on the La-Z-Boy near the bookshelf, quietly rolling the leg of his sweatpants up to his knee. His mother had cried when she’d seen him in the hospital bed, his shattered leg propped up in front of him, and not wanting to worry her, he had smiled and said, “It’s fine, it don’t even hurt.” His father had called later that afternoon from Atlanta—he was delivering a keynote address at a pastors’ conference that night but he’d sent a prayer cloth in his stead. When his mother had placed it on his busted leg, Luke hadn’t felt the healing power of God. He’d felt nothing, and maybe, that was the same thing.
He shivered as Cherry’s hand traced down his leg to the ugly brown scar stretching down to his ankle. She bent and kissed his scar, and he closed his eyes, believing, like a child, that her kiss might stop his hurting. How easily he had believed then, how simple it had seemed, a kiss from his mother and a body that always, somehow, healed.
—
THE NEXT EVENING, he hauled the trash out to the alley behind Fat Charlie’s, still thinking about Cherry’s kiss. He had left right after—her youngest daughter had appeared in the hallway, demanding juice, and Cherry had pushed herself to her feet, not looking at Luke. She was embarrassed, and why wouldn’t she be? She was spare with her affection, even to Finch, as if the two were in a competition fighting to be the one who seemed to care the least. But Luke was grateful for her kindness. He wanted to call her when he got off work. Maybe he could ask her to get a drink. Not a drink, maybe coffee. He didn’t even like coffee, but coffee seemed like the thing you invited a girl to do to show that you weren’t just trying to fuck her. He dragged a bulging garbage bag, lugging it into the green dumpster. The sun was setting over the pier, the sky blazing orange. Sometimes Oceanside could be beautiful, even from a dirty alley.
He was heading back inside when he saw the Cobras. Finch and Ritter and Gorman and five others, all coming down the alley.