“We can’t do this,” your father said to me. It was late in the evening, after you all were asleep. Dogs were barking down the road, but the sound was soft and we were used to it. The gold light from our desk lamp made our skin look honey-coated. Your father’s eyes were wet. He wouldn’t look straight at me, and I realized I hadn’t heard a joke from him in so long. That was when I was really afraid.
“How much?” I asked.
“Maybe two months until trouble,” he said.
“And then what?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“I gonna call Royce,” he said. “We been talking.”
“Royce lives on O‘ahu,” I said. “That’s five plane tickets. That’s a whole different island, a city. Cities aren’t cheap.” But your father was already standing up and walking toward the bathroom. The light went on, and the fan, then the water hissing and spattering in the sink, the wet sucking and spraying of his breaths as he washed his face.
I wanted to break something, it was so still and quiet. Your father came back in the bedroom.
“So I think,” he said, “I’m gonna sell my body. The mahus get my ōkole and the ladies get my boto. I’d do that for us.”
“I’d do that for you,” he followed, after pausing a moment. He had his shirt off and was looking at himself in our long mirror. “I mean, check ’um, yeah? All the sex waiting in this body.”
I giggled and hugged him from behind. I spread my hands over each pectoral and ignored the way they were starting to sag a little toward bitch tits. “I’d probably pay money for these,” I said.
“How much?” Your father grinned in the mirror.
“Well,” I said, “what’s included?” I let my left hand drift down, worked it into his waistband.
“Depends,” he said.
“Mmmm,” I said. “What I’m feeling’s probably worth two or three dollars.”
“Hey!” He pulled my hand out.
“I’d be paying by the minute,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, and your father snorted. But then he paused.
“We’re going to have to sell more than my dick,” he said.
We both sat down on the edge of the bed.
“We’ve got Kaui and Nainoa wearing Dean’s old clothes,” I said. “They get free school lunch.”
“I know.”
“What did we have for dinner last night?” I asked.
“Saimin and Spam.”
“What did we have for dinner the night before?”
“Rice and Spam.”
Your father stood back up. He walked to our desk and leaned down on it, placed his palms on it like he was going to push it this way or that.
“Fifteen dollars,” he said.
He stood, sighed, laid his palm on the dresser. “Twenty-five dollars.”
“Forty,” I said.
“Twenty.” He shook his head.
He went this way, touching each thing he could see: a seven-dollar lamp, a two-dollar picture frame, a closet full of five-dollar clothes, the sum of our lives not more than four digits.
* * *
AND I WAS never good at math but I could see the other end of this and there were dark lights and payment plans and bucket showers on the other side. So three days after those calculations we got you kids to school and I was at the roadside, hitchhiking with your father’s hunting knife in my bag, getting forty miles to Hilo on no cost just to walk in the sweaty rain to the Section Eight division of County of Hawai‘i and start our application. “What brings you here today?” the woman at the counter asked, not unfriendly, and with her dark and freckled arms, the extra folds of skin outside her sleeveless blouse, she could have been my sister, was my sister.
“What brings me here,” I repeated. If I had the answer I wouldn’t have been standing there, steaming Hilo wet, begging for the housing vouchers.
* * *
AND THAT WAS how we were when the third sign came. We couldn’t cut any more corners. But Royce had come through, as simple as a phone call to your father and a phrase, “I think I got something for you, cuz,” and suddenly everything pointed to O‘ahu. We’d sold some of our stuff and then we sold more, roadsiding it in Waimea, by the playground, across the street from the Catholic church, where all the trees grow up over the parking strips and everyone has to drive past if they’re headed to the beach. We’d made enough from those sales, the food bank’s help, and Section Eight to get a cushion, enough for five tickets to O‘ahu with something still in the bank.
Your father had a plan for the rest of the money—a glass-bottom boat cruise on the Kona coast. I remember telling him no, we couldn’t do that, we needed to save every last penny for O‘ahu. But he’d asked what kind of father would he be if he couldn’t give his children relief?
“They deserve more than they get,” he said, I still remember this, “and we gotta remind them that things is gonna get better.”
“But we don’t need some tourist cruise,” I said. “We’re not that kind of family.”
“Well,” he said, “maybe just once I wanna be that kind of family.”
I had nothing to say to that.
So Kailua-Kona, Ali‘i Drive, small stone walls and swerving sidewalks fronting the scoops of sugary beach and luminous ocean, then all the little storefront tourist traps, leading back like breadcrumbs to the beach hotels. Your father and I stood at the Kona dock, each holding a ticket for the boat ride, plus one for each of you kids, and we watched the tides surge and all the clean glossy boats rock and dip and shine slick with each swell. The pier was long and blacktopped and spined with fishing poles, and halfway along the dock’s edge a group of local boys were pitching themselves off, into the water, over and over, exploding into the ocean-froth of the boy who’d jumped before, chee-hoo’ing and slapping their wet feet across the wood steps back to the edge.
Then we were out away from the dock of Kona, sitting in a plush jointed couch on the Hawaiian Adventure, a trimaran like the types we always see drifting in the haze of the Kona coast, especially at sunset, boats with slides off the back and lobster-colored tourists jabbering on the covered decks. But this one had a middle hull with thick glass in the bottom that let us look down into the ocean, and as the engines pushed a mellow vibration again and again across the deck, the water went from something green-blue to a deep, almost purple color, and the coral grew up thick and knotted, in sections stuck out fingers or bloomed brains and the spiked red fans of sea anemones, swaying like the tide was a wind. I could smell the sun, the way it heated the old sea salt on the edges of the boat, and the sharp too-sweet fruity Malolo syrup in the fruit punch, and the sting of diesel fuels belching from the grinding engines.
Mostly we sat inside, all five of us in a row right down front in the plush stadium seating, looking through the glass bottom, me telling stories about which animal was which god, how they saved or fought the first Hawaiians, your father cracking jokes about how his Filipino forefathers only eat dogfish or the black fish with long noses, and the sun slanted in under the ceiling and the motor kept churning its hum up through our seats. I was somewhere warm and slow and Kaui was asleep in my arms when I woke without knowing why.