backpack. She checked the time on her phone. Aunty would be waiting. Her coffee had gone cold, a milky clot forming on the surface.
People sat at the little tables, reading the paper. The bell over the door dinged with each customer’s entrance or exit. The smell of coffee, the periodic roar of the blender, the bubbling hiss of the espresso machine were all the same as they had been when she came in. But inside Lei something had profoundly shifted.
I thought he forgot me. I thought he never cared. All along he loved me. All along he was missing me, thinking of me. The truth of it pressed on her heart, a message written in deep block print.
She slipped the backpack on, waved distractedly at the barista, and pushed out through the glass door with a ding of the bell. A few minutes later she pulled back into the garage, letting the exterior door rumble down behind her as she went out the side door. The front door was unlocked-and she’d told her aunt to close up. She relocked it and put the chain and deadbolt on.
“Aunty?” she called, heading for her room. She slung the backpack onto the bed, patted it with affection as her aunt called from the kitchen:
“In here, Ku`uipo.” She went in. Her aunt was washing dishes at the sink. She’d always called her “sweetheart” in Hawaiian.
“Why was the front door unlocked?”
“Someone knocked. I opened it and there was a letter there for you on the mat.” She indicated a plain white envelope on the counter, LEI TEXEIRA printed on it. “I hope it’s okay.”
Lei’s heart picked up speed. She’d so hoped the stalking was over, and now he’d come when her aunt was home alone.
“Dammit, Aunty, it was the stalker!” she exclaimed. “There was a reason I told you to keep the door locked.”
“No talk sassy to me, girl.” Rosario dried her hands on the dish towel as Lei went and got a pair of gloves, snapped them on. Got a steak knife, slit the top, took out the trebly folded note, and opened it.
I THINK OF YOU EVERY TIME I TAKE A BATH.
Lei’s stomach dropped and her vision swam. Aunty Rosario reached over her shoulder and snatched the paper up. Her color drained as she read it, hand coming up to cover her mouth. Her eyes were huge looking over her fingers at Lei.
“This must be the guy who did those things to you, Lei! Charlie Kwon!”
Lei got up, fetched a Ziploc bag, slid the letter into it, put it in the freezer between the frozen dinners.
“I don’t know,” she said woodenly. “How could he find me?”
“I don’t know either! This is terrible! He should go to jail for what he did.”
“Believe me Aunty, I’d send him there if I could find him.” Lei sat back down. “Dinner ready? I need something to settle my stomach.”
Her aunt went back to the stove, dished up the ribs and rice. “Aren’t you going to call that Pono or something?”
“No. I just got them to stop staying over here for protection; we’re fine in the house and I’ll take the letter in in the morning. It does seem like it must have something to do with Kwon though. He’s the only one beside us who might know that thing about…” Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Aunty set the plate in front of her with a purple poi roll. Her clenched stomach suddenly translated into hunger. The food was hot and savory, and took her straight back to being safe as a child. She ate quickly and wiped the plate with the tender roll.
“Delicious, Aunty.”
“Thanks, Ku`uipo. I’m thinking about anyone who knew what happened to you. I only told the social worker at Child Welfare, and Momi of course. I don’t know if Momi might have told anybody but I don’t know why she would.”
Momi was her aunt’s partner in the restaurant business, a friend closer than family. Child Welfare was supposed to have confidential records.
“Well the stalker’s finally said something I can follow up on. I’ll work on trying to track Kwon down. Now can we talk about those letters from my dad?”
Her aunt looked down at her weathered hands, folded in her lap.
“ Ku`uipo, I didn’t want him to hurt you, let you down anymore. When he was arrested I tried fo’ get your mother to come to the Mainland, stay with me like he wanted, but she wouldn’t. I lost you-Maylene moved around so much. Finally I found you and gave you my number in case you needed me… and I was angry with them both. They’d screwed up their lives with drugs and they didn’t deserve to have a little girl, when I would have loved you so much…”
“They were my parents.” Lei put her hand on her aunt’s shoulder. “But you were my mama.”
Aunty threw her arms around Lei and tucked her head against Lei’s shoulder. Lei folded her aunt against her, stroking the long, thick braid of her hair. A kaleidoscope of feelings swirled through her, but she just pressed her cheek against her aunt’s head, realizing she was taller, realizing she was stronger too. She had never known that before.
Her aunt pulled away, tore a paper towel off the roll on the wall, honked her nose loudly.
“I’m sorry,” Aunty said. “I kept those first letters because I didn’t know where your mother had taken you, then because I didn’t want you to be upset by hearing from him. I didn’t think he deserved you. And later, I didn’t know how to tell you I’d been keeping them all these years.”
“It’s okay,” Lei said. “It’s just that it would have made a difference. It would have helped me, to know he was thinking of me, that he loved me.”
“I couldn’t be sure what was in there. I was trying to protect you.”
“You could have read them.”
Aunty Rosario sat back, drew herself upright. “That would be wrong.”
“Aunty, listen to yourself! It’s wrong to open someone else’s mail but not wrong to keep it from them?”
“It’s complicated,” Aunty said. “Anyway, what’s done is done. What you going do now, is the question.”
“I’m going to visit him,” Lei said. She clapped her hand over her mouth as if to take back the words, but then slowly lowered it as she realized, yes, this was what she wanted to do.
Her aunt looked at her. Sighed. Picked up the sponge and wiped the table.
“I’m not surprised. Wayne always had a way with words.”
Chapter 35
The bus bound for Halawa Prison on Oahu was a huge Greyhound, and Lei felt like she was in an ocean liner, gliding and swaying far above mere mortals fighting traffic in the narrow double lanes below. She snuggled into her comfortable seat, looking out the window as steep jungled slopes streamed by. She’d got going early that morning, flying out of the Big Island to Oahu, her stomach knotting every time she thought of meeting her father. She pulled the photo her aunt had given her out of her pocket.
In it her father smiled a handsome, square-jawed smile. A toddler Lei sat on his shoulders, her hands buried in his dark curly hair, her grin as big as the moon.
“I don’t have anything more recent,” her aunt had said. “I couldn’t stand to take a picture of him in that orange jumpsuit. But he’s aged, honey. Prison life hasn’t been that kind.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Lei whispered, touching his face. She slid the photo back in her pocket and looked back out the window. According to her aunt, he’d been recently transferred to Halawa from Lompoc in California, with another year on his sentence.
Her phone rang, vibrating against her side. She pulled it out, flipping it open as she looked at the plaque attached to the seat in front of her: N O C ELL P HONES.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Lei?”
“Yes? Who is this?” she flipped the phone over to see the screen ID: Unavailable.
“Me. Your special friend.”
