Right, that was true. Why was I assuming guilt for something I didn’t even do?
“And it’s okay, Nan,” Ana said, her face alive and pink from laughing so hard. “Everyone who works in a restaurant hates people anyway. The point is that we made the world a little more right today. We just shifted the molecules on this earth one degree toward justice.”
She held up her hand for a high five and I slapped it. “Let’s get some cookies!” she yelled, loving how it felt to yell.
“Cookies!” I yelled, loving it, too.
People on the street were looking at us like they were jealous of our fun. It was such a relief not to be nervous anymore, and I understood something new about the Karma Factory in that moment. Delivering the karma could be hard sometimes, but afterwards you really did feel like a goddess.
We ordered our cookies hot and sat on the curb in the shade eating them with our sticky glue fingers. Warm white chocolate mac nut cookies and they were delicious. As we watched the people amble by—the tourists with their pasty calves and the locals with their dirty feet and everyone else—I didn’t think: I want to be you. I don’t want to be you. I want to be you. Which was what I normally would have been thinking at a time like this. Not today. Today with Ana on this curb, I didn’t want to be anyone but us.
22
I got there first. I sat in the fifth row. I placed my bottled water next to me on the bleachers, a halfhearted seat saver for Chuck. But when he arrived, sullen and disheveled, with his Walmart Hawaiian shirt buttoned one button off and asymmetrically hanging, I grabbed the water bottle and pretended not to see him. He pretended not to see me too, although I knew he had because he sat in the first row to be as far away from me as possible. Chuck hated the first row.
I concentrated on the pool. There was pale Tom and there was—ugh—Liko and there was coach Iona bent over the water with his hands on his knees, explaining a play. And then there he was clapping his hands, shaking his fist in the air, riling his players up.
A man next to me said to his wife, “We’re missing church for this. Why would they have the game on a Sunday?” The wife said, “I don’t know, but it’s Sundays all month,” to which the husband responded, “I don’t like it.” The wife put her hand on the nape of her husband’s neck, massaging it. “God is everywhere, honey. Plus, we can start going Saturday nights.” The husband laughed. “To the Spanish service?” The wife shrugged. “Sí.” She kissed his cheek. “You won’t even notice the difference.”
The ref blew the whistle and the teams sprinted toward each other. Jed just missed getting the ball first. I looked at Chuck’s sweaty neck and realized something was missing. I had forgotten to bring the GO MURPHY BOYS! sign. Which wasn’t surprising. It had been a tense morning.
Chuck had slept in the ohana again. He’d gotten home at 1:00 a.m. Or 1:04, but who was counting. The sound of his car woke me up. Then at 11:00 a.m., he’d strolled into the kitchen like a hungover college student to make coffee, strolled right by me stretching on the lanai. We looked at each other for a second—he looked paunchy and irritable; I looked healthy and radiant—and neither of us said anything. I heard Cam say, “Hi, Dad,” but Chuck didn’t answer. He hadn’t had his coffee yet.
Part of me wanted to run after him and throttle him and say: You need help and we can find help and let me help you. But I had done this before and it hadn’t worked. Chuck needed to come to his own conclusions. And my main focus right now wasn’t Chuck. It was Ana. For the next three to six to maybe nine months, helping Ana was my main focus. If Chuck thought I was spending all my time with her, then he was right. I still hadn’t told him she was dying.
Cam made an amazing pass and I clapped and said, “Woo!” I looked at Chuck, and, good, he had noticed and he was clapping, too. I watched him scratch his sweaty neck. The front row was in the sun and he was boiling. I could pass him my water bottle. But I would not. Chuck could come to his own conclusions. If he was thirsty, he could get his own water.
What happened next: I saw it happen before it did. The KFC family was sitting next to Chuck today, passing the humongous bucket of chicken parts between them, and Chuck kept glancing over. Kept glancing and kept glancing and then he said something to the barefoot mother, probably, “Hey, that smells good.” And then she patted her barefoot toddler on the back and pointed to the sweaty man, and the toddler made his way on wobbly legs to Chuck with the tub, and then it got even more embarrassing.
Instead of just picking whichever piece was on top, Chuck spent real time fishing in the tub for a thigh. Of course he had to have his thigh. After some digging, he found it and held it up with a smile and said something else, probably “Hope you don’t mind I took a thigh!” and the wobbly toddler, who’d been waiting, somehow made it back to home base without falling into the bleachers.
I watched the back of his neck working as he gnawed. When he was done, he got up to throw the bone in the trash can. He made his way there slowly, his eyes on the game, not aware that he was blocking people, who were shifting to see around him. Then he wiped the grease from his hands onto his bare legs and rubbed it in like it was sunscreen. No one told him to move because these people were too nice, but I knew everyone was happy when he sat back down. Oh, Chuck. I almost felt sorry for him.
In the third quarter, Jed dunked an opponent—really dunked him, pressed his shoulders down into the water full force, not even trying to hide it from the ref—and he was given a red card and taken out of the game. No one booed because we all agreed with the ref’s call, except for Chuck, who stood up and shuffled around like a mad ape.
On the side of the pool, Coach Iona with his hands on his knees said something to Jed, and Jed untied his cap and smacked it on the concrete. Great, anger is inherited. Or learned. Either way, it was Chuck’s fault.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pool, Cam and Tom were having what appeared to be a lighthearted conversation—both of them smiling—so at least one son had been spared from the anger complex.
Then Liko—ugh—gave Jed a high five, and Jed got out of the pool and paced around the players’ bench with his hands on his waist, stopping to kick the gear on the ground. Eventually he sat down to watch the rest of the game with his torso hanging over his legs in a defeated posture.
All of Cam’s throws were bad after that. He wasn’t paying attention. Or his brother being kicked out of the game had drained the energy from both of them. It was like that with twins. One felt what the other was feeling. Sometimes this made them more powerful, and other times, like now, it sucked them both dry.
I sent Ana a text: How are you feeling?