“More than enough,” Gina said. She followed the woman to the sedan and put her suitcases in the trunk. Getting in the front seat, she buckled in. “Thank you for picking me up so late in the evening.”
“No need for you to stay in a room for one night, or to rent a car. Even if you had, you might have a hard time finding the place you’ll be staying. How long have you been away?”
“Been away? I’ve just come from Cleveland.”
“Very long trip. We’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“Thanks. I’m excited about being here.” Gina watched out the window as her welcome committee drove through the city. In the last week, she’d looked at hundreds of pictures and watched videos online, trying to get an idea of the city’s vibe. That’s all the time she’d had in preparation since being hired for the job as landscape manager of the estate gardens. The cars, the freeway, the bridges were nothing new, but the lush tropical foliage and tall palms were as foreign to her eye as the names of streets and buildings. “Definitely not in Little Italy anymore.”
“Little Italy?” the woman asked.
“The part of Cleveland I’m from.”
“We don’t have anything like that in Honolulu. We have a nice Chinatown instead, and plenty of Filipino shops everywhere. What part of the Philippines is your family from?”
“Philippines? We’re Italian.”
“Oh.” The woman steered off the freeway and found a wide boulevard hidden beneath a giant trees. Broad, sturdy limbs spanned the street, making a tunnel-like canopy over them. “When we saw your picture and your name, we assumed you were Filipino.”
“Sorry. Just plain, old Italian.” That answered the question of why she’d been hired to quickly. The Tanizawas must’ve assumed Gina was a local girl already familiar with Hawaii, or at least the tropics. She was beginning to wonder how much of a mess she’d made for herself, and would for the garden, by taking the job. She knew the plants and trees would be different from that of anything growing in the Midwest. The only living orchids, tree ferns, and banana plants she’d ever seen had been in hothouses operated by nurseries. “Is that important?”
“Maybe. The crew you’ll be working with are Filipino, and I think they’re expecting their boss to be the same.”
“It’s nice that you hire new immigrants,” Gina said, hoping to sound diplomatic. That was a chore after such a long and tiring day in transit. Something else that was a chore was listening to the woman’s accent. She was definitely speaking English, just not in any way Gina had ever heard before. Some words were dropped, while others were stretched out in peculiar ways.
“Oh, not so new. Just no need to speak much English.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting them. Are you Filipino?”
The woman seemed to share a laugh only with herself. “I’m sansei Japanese.”
“I see.” Gina was as lost in their conversation as much as she was lost on the city streets. “What’s sansei?”
“Third generation. My grandparents were the original immigrants to come from Japan to settle in Hawaii.”
“I guess that makes me fourth generation Italian. Which will get you a half-priced cup of coffee in any Little Italy diner, as long as you buy a meal to go with it.” Gina watched as they turned onto a short road between two modern buildings. It was a little too dark to see much else, except that there were no residential houses that she could see. They went over a narrow bridge hidden by trees that spanned a gully. Gina could hear water tumbling over rocks in the darkness. All she could tell was that they were headed into a forest of some sort. “Where are we going?”
“That was the main entrance to the estate. Your house is on the far side of the gardens toward the back.”
Following a gravel driveway, they went through a forest overgrown with vines rather than a botanical garden until they got out in the open. “No, I definitely wouldn’t have found this place.”
When the woman parked, she left the headlights on aimed at a small structure. All Gina saw in the beams of light was something better described as a shack than a house.
“It’s better on the inside than what the outside looks, Miss Santoro,” the woman said as they walked toward the shanty. She dragged one suitcase across the flagstone walkway while Gina managed the other. “The whole place is being rebuilt one project at a time. The first project is to get a proper roof on the house. Maybe you heard of the storm we had a while back? That took off much of the roof. The boys have fixed it as best they can for the time being.”
Gina knew she had to be complimentary, even though the place needed a match more than it needed a roof. “It’s very interesting. I’ve never seen a place like this before.”
“While it was vacant, it was lived in by squatters from time to time. The last of them finally left when the storm hit, and we decided to rebuild the house.”
Gina followed her escort to the front porch that spanned the front of the house. “I’m sure it’ll be nice when it’s done.”
“Watch your step coming up onto the porch. A couple of the boards are tricky and need to be replaced.”
Every time Gina stepped, she found a tricky board from the squeaks they made. Palm fronds acted as an awning for the porch roof, and a few were falling loose. The railing and uprights that held the porch together were heavy timber bamboo, and everything was fixed together with rope. The exterior of the house was painted a dark green color, where there even was paint. It looked like some of it had been replaced and the entire house needed paint. Every wall had louvered windows, which were smudged and grimy.
“Not in Cleveland anymore,” Gina muttered.
When the woman went
