“I’m sorry,” I started to say, just as she said the same thing to me.
“It’s been a bad week, hasn’t it?” she said, and smiled. “So many things for everyone to be sorry about. Will you tell your mother I sent my regards? Sometimes I long for those days when you and Terri were at Punahou, and your mother and I worked together on the PTA, and everything was so much simpler.”
“It just seems like it was because we’ve gotten past it,” I said. “I’m sure we gave you plenty of problems back then.”
She nodded. “You’re probably right.” She took my hand in hers. “Take care of yourself, Kimo. And see if you can help my daughter. She has so much ahead of her.”
“I will, Mrs. Clark.”
“Well, I must be off. William retired last year, you know, and he’s very particular about his lunch. If I’m not there to make sure everything is fine, he gets very upset.”
What a luxury, I thought, as I watched her walk to her champagne-colored Mercedes. To worry about lunch. Then I went inside.
Terri and Danny were sitting at the kitchen table, and she was trying to get him to eat a grilled cheese sandwich. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t eat either. Terri looked up at me. “I don’t know what to do with him.”
I walked over to the table and sat down. “Hey, Danny.” He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. “You know, it’s a beautiful day. You want to go hang out with me, outside?” Again, there was no response, so I said, “Come on, come with me, okay?” I took his hand and he got up from the table. We walked together out to the front half moon of lawn, between the driveway and the road, and sat down, me talking and him not saying anything.
I lay down on my back and looked up at the sky. Danny sat next to me Indian style. “So what do you think that cloud looks like?” I pointed up to the sky. “A sheep? See, there’s its woolly body, and there’s even a lump at the top like its woolly head.”
I babbled on for a few more minutes about clouds, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. There was a cool breeze there, so close to the water, and I remembered what it was like being a kid, just smelling the fresh-cut grass, listening to birds, hearing the thump of a basketball on a driveway down the street. So I just lay there, and eventually Danny lay down next to me, and rested his head on my arm, and we lay like that for a while, and then he started to cry.
I held him close to me and stroked his head. “It’s okay, Danny. It’s okay to cry. Sometimes bad things happen, and they make us feel like crying. You go ahead and cry.”
He cried for a few minutes, and then he was calm for a while, and then I sat up. “You know what?” I asked. “I remember you have some really neat pogs. Can I see them?”
He nodded. Well, that was a start, I thought. He got up and ran inside, and I got the bag of pogs from my truck, and when he came out again with his I had mine lined up in neat piles. “You want to flip some?” I asked.
He nodded again and sat down across from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Terri standing in the front door, but then she went back inside. “I’m warning you, I haven’t flipped pogs for a long time,” I said. “I might have forgotten how.”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “You make a stack like this,” and he piled up ten of his pogs, all face up. “And then I flip my shooter at them, and the ones that stay face up are still mine, and the ones that go the other way are yours.”
He flipped, and the pile toppled. Eight of them stayed right side up, and he pushed the other two over to me. “Now you do it,” he said.
We flipped back and forth for a long time, and pogs seemed to migrate from my side over to his. I guessed you had to be six years old to be a champion pog flipper. Some dark rain clouds blew in off the ocean, blocking the sun, and then Terri came to the door and said, “Who’s ready for some supper?”
“Will you play with me again?” Danny asked.
“Of course.” We gathered up our pogs and went inside.
“Go put your pogs away and wash your hands,” Terri said, and Danny went off toward his room. “Any progress?”
“He’ll come around,” I said. “He did talk a little, but don’t say anything to him.”
Terri had made meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We sat at the kitchen table, under a montage of old hapa haole sheet music covers Terri had collected and framed. In the twenties and thirties hapa haole music, or half- white music, was popular in the islands. It featured the ukulele and the slack key guitar, and often was about the romance between a haole and a native, under the Hawaiian moon.
She cut meat loaf for each of us. “Would you like some potatoes?” she asked Danny.
“Yes, please.”
She raised her eyebrows to me and smiled.
After dinner Terri and I sat on the overstuffed couch, her with her feet tucked under her, mine stretched out onto the coffee table. Danny sprawled on the floor and didn’t speak again, but this time his silence was calmer, less pained. We didn’t make a big deal about it. Terri and I talked easily about old classmates, things we’d done at Punahou, while the big-screen TV played in the background.
When Terri announced it was Danny’s bedtime, I asked, “I know tomorrow’s only Wednesday, and it’s normally a school day, but I was wondering, would you guys like to go on a picnic tomorrow? We could go down to Makapu‘u Point. I could bring my board along and give Danny a surfing lesson.”
“He already loves his boogie board,” Terri said.
“Please, Mom? Please?”
“All right. Now go take a bath and then get into bed. I’ll come and tuck you in.”
“Can Kimo come too?”
“Sure,” I said. I reached out and ruffled his hair. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
Terri waited until he had left the room to speak. “I don’t know what you did, but it worked. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“This is just a start. Give me a little while, and I’ll talk to him about what happened to his dad.”
“God, you know, I’d almost forgotten. Just for a minute or two there. It was like we were just sitting around watching TV, and our worlds hadn’t fallen apart.”
“I’m on the way to picking mine up,” I said, reaching out for her hand. “Come on along, we can pick up yours on the way.”
AN ASSEMBLAGE OF TREASURES
While I was getting ready for bed I turned on the TV news, Lui’s station. I was just in time to see part three of their series on gay cops. Lucky me.
But as I watched, I got more and more interested. There were police forces around the country that had incorporated gay officers into their regular patrols. They primarily worked neighborhoods with large gay populations, and they were more sensitive to issues like gay bashing and regulating gay clubs than straight officers were.
It was a surprisingly well-balanced piece. I didn’t know if that kind of enlightenment would ever come to Honolulu, but seeing such a piece on my brother’s normally scandal-packed station was a nice change.
The next morning the phone rang at eight-thirty, just as I was getting ready to go out for a late swim. It was Lieutenant Yumuri. “Can you come over to the station this morning?” he asked.
“Sure. What for?” I thought maybe he wanted to talk about the case, ease up on the pressure. Maybe this was the first step toward getting my badge and my weapon back. There were a couple of discrepancies I wanted to talk to him about, mostly centered around Evan’s suicide, which I was now sure was faked.
To his credit, Lieutenant Yumuri sounded uncomfortable when he spoke. “Officer Greenberg is getting his shield. I want to put him at your desk. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by and pick up your personal belongings.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. It was all over. My career as a cop, as a detective. And this was how it ended. Finally I said, “Sure. I’ll be over in a little while.”
“Thank you.” He hung up his end, and I held my receiver there for a minute, listening to nothing, until a female voice came on the line and said, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”
