“Yeah? What did you do?”
Writing on sidewalks sounded like lunacy without a long explanation, and I was too achy for that right now, so I kept it simple. “We ordered Thai food and talked. I held her snake.”
“She has a snake?”
“I mean lizard. Shit. Lizard.”
Chuck didn’t seem to care about the difference, which meant he hadn’t come across the no-snakes law in his Hawaii research. “Lizard, huh?” He took a bite of his banana. “What did you two talk about?”
Our plans for writing on sidewalks while Ana played with my hair because she still missed hers so much. “Yoga,” I said, “and just, you know, how to be better people in the world.” I felt a little bad for lying to Chuck, so I reminded myself it wasn’t really lying. A small omission. It barely counted. Later, when I felt less sore and more awake, I would explain the whole thing.
“Better people in the world,” Chuck repeated. “That’s big. Do you have any tips for me?” He winked. “About how to be a better person in the world?”
“Well,” I put my hands around my mug—we needed new mugs, maybe smaller ones like Ana’s, because why were ours so huge?—“yes. My tip is: Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
Right after the words had left my mouth, I realized the problem. The problem was that this implicated Shelly. Chuck seemed to pick up on it, too. He shifted his weight and said, “I won’t do anything I’ll regret ever again, Nance.”
“I won’t either, I hope,” I said quickly. And then to make light of it: “I’ll never buy this shitty milk again.”
That made him smile.
“Come here,” I said, and he leaned over the counter and I kissed his banana lips.
?
After he left, I spent a relaxed morning stretching on the lanai and eating oatmeal and watering the garden. One slim green sprout had sprung from the earth, but I couldn’t remember which vegetable it belonged to. That was fine. It would be a surprise. My blog was all about watercress today. “Watercress Peanut Stir-Fry = 2 Die 4 x 8!” I would make that for dinner. Cooking would be fun if I reinvented what I was cooking.
When I had nothing left to do, I called Marcy back. “Oh, I’m so glad you called me today!” She sounded thrilled. “The lei-making class starts in a few hours. Will you come? Say yes.”
I had no plans for the rest of the day. And the empty house, which I’d been happy to have to myself since Chuck had left for work, seemed dangerously empty when I imagined the hours ahead. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll meet you there.”
?
The loud-shirted women and their screaming flowers were a manic outburst in the sterile, air-conditioned room. They sat at a long plastic table in the high-ceilinged Activity Den of the community center. They were all old, and their floral shirts were all different but all the same. The table was covered in mounds of flowers separated by color. Every color of the rainbow was represented. Oranges and purples and yellows and pinks and something fuzzy and green.
Marcy had an outburst when she saw me come in. “Nanceeeee!”
A few women looked up, looked me over. Black spandex crops, black top. I had decided not to change because I had decided I felt more active when I stayed in my active clothes all day.
“I saved you a seat.” Marcy gave me a one-second hug—she smelled like Aqua Net—and pulled the chair out for me.
“Nancy, this is”—and then she said all of their seven or eight names, and the only two I retained were Auntie Moleka (because she was the teacher) and Holly (because she was the woman Ana and I had seen at Longs—the one who probably owned a French bulldog).
“How have you been? It’s so great you came.” Marcy smiled with her whole face. Her teeth were yellow and boxy and very small, and her pink floral shirt brought out the pink in her cheeks.
“Thanks for inviting me,” I said, scooting in closer. I had arrived a relaxed seven minutes late, and the women were already working. Marcy must have arrived early, because she was halfway done with her first lei.
“Here,” she said, “I knotted one off for you.” She placed a threaded needle in front of me with care. “So that’s it. Just add flowers.”
“Thanks.” I sat there for a second, contemplating my choices. Was this something I was going to spend a lot of time and attention making, or was I just going to put some flowers on a string? The red flowers at the far end of the table near Auntie Moleka looked nice, but no, it was too much effort to get up. I would just put some flowers on a string. I picked a plumeria from the heap in front of me.
“Good choice,” Marcy said, tugging her yellow flower down her string in little jolts. “And hey, I like your nails. Purple and sparkles? How fun. Did you go back to the salon?”
Flashback to Ana painting them last night, flashback to Portico wrapping herself around the nail polish bottle and Ana saying, “Portico, you always want what’s mine.”
I settled on a half-lie. “I did them at home.”
“An ancient tradition!” Auntie Moleka boomed in a raspy voice. She had a thick Hawaiian accent—not full pidgin, but almost there, not that I fully understood what qualified as pidgin—and at least four double chins. “There is no replacement for a real Hawaiian lei! Artificial flowers? Nah.” She held up her lei for us to see. “You see this, lei makers? Tight flowers. You gotta make it tight. Pull your flowers all the way down. No loosey-goosey. And color! You see these colors?” Red flowers and white flowers and some of the green fuzzy things. She laughed to herself—until that made her cough, and then she was batting her chest and fumbling for her Sprite. When she had recuperated, she pushed her small wire-framed glasses up her big nose. “It looks like a Christmas lei, yeah?”
Holly the French bulldog owner said, “Festive,” and the woman in purple groaned, “The stems are so annoying,” and the slight woman across from me encouraged herself: “Okay, I can do this.”
“She’s a third-generation lei maker,” Marcy whispered to me. “Fan-tas-tic woman.”
Wow, I mouthed, and looked at Auntie Moleka, who was popping open a plastic container of either potato or macaroni salad—I was too far away to tell the difference.