We thought that loosening the leash might have the reverse-psychology effect of making them want to be at home more, so we told them that yes, if their homework was all done, they could skip family dinner and go out with their friends a few nights a week. So far, this plan wasn’t working, and they went out as often as they could get away with it, which was often.
Chuck was working late regularly now, and he was also spending two nights a week shooting pool with the Tide Poolers. The team was getting more competitive. Marcy had even gotten them some shirts. White on red—same coloring as Costco, since most of the guys on the team worked there. I hadn’t returned Marcy’s calls since the day of the lei-making class, but I had, because I was a nice person, texted her an excuse: I’m SO busy. Hope you’re well.
It wasn’t that I hated cooking like Ana did, but I resented that it felt forced upon me. I needed a break. Plus the boys didn’t enjoy my new healthy food, so if Chuck wasn’t going to be home, I gave them dinner money and let them go out. This won me tons of Cool Parent points.
I spent a few evenings alone, enjoying the hum of the crickets and the kissing noise of geckos, and trying not to turn on the TV. It wasn’t that I felt lonely on those nights. No, not at all. It was more that I felt that if everyone else in my family is out, having fun, I should go out and have fun.
So Ana and I started a new tradition. On Chuck’s busy nights, I would leave dinner money on the counter for the boys and we would meet around five for Evening Activities. That’s what we called them. Sometimes she would take me somewhere new: the saltwater pool at Kona by the Sea, the blowhole at NELHA, the hidden beach past the mangroves at the end of the harbor. Most of the time, we did “Books and Natch,” which meant going to the used bookstore and then to Island Naturals, the Hawaiian Whole Foods equivalent, sort of, but smaller. We’d plate up our dinners at the healthy buffet and eat at the outside tables as the sun set.
If it was a new moon or a full moon, we would find somewhere to lie down and enjoy that. Either we’d go to one of the beaches or we’d just sprawl out on the still-warm hood of her Jeep, eating Red Vines and talking about how the sky in Hawaii had so many more stars than the sky on the mainland. Ana preferred the full moon—she said it gave her power—and I liked the new moon better. The blankness of those all-dark skies was full of possibility.
At yoga—and, I hoped, in life—I was becoming much more flexible. I could reach my toes in a forward bend now. I could also do an unassisted jump back, which was just exhilarating.
The week Patty’s cat Marbles finally lost the battle and died, Ana dedicated the class to him, and Patty cried and used her MARBLES shirt as a tissue. The sight of his whiskery face may have made her cry harder. No one made the joke that Patty had lost her Marbles, even behind her back, because we were good people who did yoga and believed in the strength of kindness and compassion above all things. That was how Ana phrased it, in her soothing yoga teacher voice: “We are yogis. We believe in the strength of kindness and compassion above all things.”
Sara Beth had officially fallen for this new guy she was dating, and we were all so happy for her, and Kurt was his usual warm and wonderfully shirtless self. I felt a little bad for wishing sometimes that Chuck were more like Kurt—a man with perfect teeth who cared about the state of his aging body. But this, I knew, was completely normal. A person was allowed to have her fantasies as long as she didn’t act on them.
After class, Ana and I melted our hard-worked bodies into the Jacuzzi and talked and talked. Ana would rest her head on the plastic edge and look up at the pink house and be constantly amazed that Eunice still, somehow, had not posted the ad. “We are outsmarting the universe, Nan,” she said one overcast morning, and blew a kiss into the wind.
We had our sandwich deed down to a science. Thirty sandwiches was the perfect number. We started getting the ingredients—a two-pack of Love’s bread, a two-pack of Skippy, and a three-pack of Ziplocs—at Costco with my discount. The amount of money was a small price to pay for how great we felt to be the Sandwich Sistahs. People were really counting on us now. We went Monday through Friday at the same time—noon—while blasting what Ana called “our soundtrack,” which was “Lean on Me,” played on repeat. Our targets loved that. “We all need somebody to le-ean on.” Their heads danced instinctively to the catchy rhythm, and the ones who were more awake sang along.
After sandwiches, if we were up for it, we picked up a few hitchhikers and took them to their destinations, or closer to their destinations if their destinations were very far. Our hitchhikers were mostly young nomadic guys. Some of them—the cleaner ones—reminded me of the boys. One—Teddy, who worked in construction—had the same striking dish-detergent-blue eyes the boys had inherited from Chuck. When he got out of the car at Matsuyama’s, Ana said, “He was a stud. I should have slept with him. That would be a good deed, right?” I was appalled. “No,” I said, and she slapped my knee and said, “Nan! I’m kidding!”
One day Ana went into Longs to get us Vitamin Waters and came out with those and something else she had tucked under her shirt. “Nan,” she said, hovering her hand over the mysterious package pressed between her tank top and her stomach, “I have found an object.” She took off her buggy sunglasses and then she took off my boxier sunglasses with one cool sweep of her hand. “This object officially binds us forever,” she said, removing the package slowly from under her shirt. Then she stopped. “Wait.” She pressed Play. The familiar beat of “Lean on Me.” And then she whipped out the package—said “ooh” because maybe it had scratched her stomach on the way—and held it up for me to see. “Yin and yang friendship necklaces.” Yes, that’s what they were. One black, one white, their apostrophe shapes dangling from thin silver chains. “Now for the important part.” She opened the package and held the necklaces, one in each hand. “Who do you want to be?” she asked. “The black one or the white one?”
White was the obvious choice. I was the pure housewife. Ana was the rebel.
“Black,” I said.
“A surprise,” Ana said, tilting her face to the sun. “I love surprises.”
She put the black one around my neck. “Connected.” She clasped it.
Without words, I followed her in this little ceremony. “Connected,” I said, clasping the white one around all her orange hair.
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