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light, a woman pulls up beside them in a car that looks weldedtogether from many cars. Her face is bruised, one eye shut. She sees the cabbie staring and leans out of the window
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    “Ey! Wha’ choo looking at, manong?” Then she floors the gas and takes off
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    The Filipino driver glances at his passenger in the rearview, a pretty woman in a suit. “Rough neighborhood out here. Sure you know where you going?”
    Anahola smiles at him. “This town holds all of my mistakes.”
    They turn up Keola Road and drive past a pond where piggeries discharge their waste, past an old school bus oxidized to rust, then small neat houses with pretty yards full of flapping laundry. They turn into the potholed driveway of the house
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    In high heels and a pongee suit, she stands in the living room amongst them, self-consciously handing out cartons of cigarettes and See’s Candy from San Francisco. She has forgotten to take her shoes off at the door; the family stares as her heels sink into termite-ridden floorboards. She totters slightly, stylish, well cared for, out of place
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    Yet here she is to show that she has not forgotten them. She sits and drinks a beer that someone offers, and dips her hand into a bag of soggy, boiled peanuts. Food seems to float across the room, great bowls cupped in big, dark hands. Laulau dripping good, good grease. Poi, and lomi salmon. Steaming mounds of rice and fish
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    While she eats, she glances round the room. Same old rusty flit gun on the windowsill. In the kitchen, same Bull Durham bag wrapped round the faucet for the drip. She shifts her weight, looking farther into the kitchen and sees the kerosene string still tied round each leg of the Frigidaire to ward off ants. Food relaxes her elders and makes them somewhat confident. They ask about California, the weather, about jobs. Do folks eat poi there? And kimchee? They do not ask who she is living with. She will tell them that in time. Or not
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    “How is Uncle Noah?” she asks
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    They laugh, pointing to his room, where he sits at his window, a sentry at his post. Later, she knocks and steps into his room. “Noah. Pehea oe?” How are you
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    He turns from the window, her father’s younger brother who saw too much combat in Korea
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    She moves forward and holds him. “Don’t hate me. I had to go. I had to.”
    What she wants is for him to say that it’s all right. That life will be right. Instead, he pulls her to the window and they gaze out for a while. His hands are broad like her father’s had been and now he takes one of her hands in his, following her lifeline with his finger. He turns it over, smoothing her knuckles,then balls her hand into a fist and squeezes it over and over, as if to say, Be strong. Be strong
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    For a while she sits in the bedroom with little Ana, surrounded by rickety bamboo furniture, and old flower leis gathering bugs and mildew on the walls. She smokes a cigarette, watching the child dig under the sheets, hiding from her, too frightened to talk to her. Each time she reaches out her hand, the girl scuttles deeper and deeper away from her, so that only her feet show, sienna-tinted from red dirt
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    “Who can blame you?” she whispers
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    Wanting to give her privacy, folks had moved out to the lānai. Now she stands in the living room alone, and in the silence hears the drip. drip. of stewed guava sieving through a cheesecloth. She knows it will drip all night for ‘ono guava jelly. She writes a check and leaves it discreetly under the sugar bowl. Finally, she steps outside and hugs each one good-bye, then slides into the cab, still smelling stewed guava, and the iron-rich soil of Nanakuli
.

KULA ‘IWI

Here My Bones Began
    T HE SUMMER OF HER TENTH YEAR WAS SO DRY, BARKING DEER stumbled down from distant mountains, licking windows of air-conditioned stores. The piss of boar-hounds sizzled on tar. Ana watched mongooses crawl under their house, coughing and sucking at the pipes, while everywhere the earth cracked open