CHAPTER 1
MY MOTHER
My mother is dying. We live on different Hawaiian islands, and I fly to hers on the weekends, sometimes with my wife and children but more often alone. My mother and I have begun to talk about the past, now, more than we consider the future. Much of a parent-child relationship lives in the past. On the second day of an infant's life, the parent reminisces about the first.
As I wait in Maui's modern, open-air terminal for my baggage to be unloaded, I remember the former terminal and the old banyan tree that shaded it. The tree is gone, now, but I like to imagine that some of its roots still spread beneath the concrete that covered them.
Tourists crowd tightly around the conveyor belt as baggage begins to revolve. I stand back and wait. My suitcase and box pass three times before there is enough space to politely claim them. I get a hold of the suitcase with one hand and a twined box with the other. Of the two, the box is the more important. It holds pistachio nuts from my recent Las Vegas trip, kalua pig and cinnamon bread from Oahu fundraisers, and the pork-filled buns we call manapua that my mother likes. She can no longer swallow all these foods, but, no matter, her face brightens when she sees them.
A chauffeured van takes me and a Midwest couple to a car rental firm. They appear to be about my age, and, as we ride, I notice how differently we are dressed. They wear matching tennis shoes and flower-print clothes. I wear a T- shirt, brown shorts, and rubber slippers. The man offers his hand in greeting. We shake and exchange names.
"Fujii?" he asks, repeating my last name. "Is that Hawaiian?"
"Japanese," I say. "My grandparents came here from Japan almost hundred years ago."
His wife studies my sun-darkened skin, medium height, and large eyes. "You don't look Japanese," she says.
Her husband nods. "I would have taken you for Hawaiian."
I shrug, used to the mistake. "It's the sun," I tell them. "The sun changed us all."
We reach the car rental firm and the agent assigns me a white Nissan Sentra, the rental car of this year, the trunk that thieves seek out in a crowded parking lot because they figure it will be filled with camera equipment and traveler's checks.
Despite this rented car, I feel at home in Maui. The new roads puzzle me, and the airport seems to grow during every absence, but Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains are the same, and as yet no developer owns the ocean. The drive is easy, only minutes through town, and then I am on the road home, the road to Wainoa — the ocean glinting through the palms on my left, the mountains rising peacefully beyond the sugar cane on my right. Within ten minutes I turn onto a quiet dirt road that breaks the rows of sugar. I pass the sugar mill, a few houses, and I'm home.
My mother has anticipated my arrival and waits at her front door. As I climb the front steps, baggage in hand, I nod to her, a greeting that has devolved from the ancient bows of Japan, and she smiles.
"Come inside, Spencer. I been waiting."
I step out of my rubber slippers — the basic footwear in Hawaii and called thongs and flip-flops elsewhere — and my bare feet cross the threshold to a familiar wooden floor. My lips pass across my mother's forehead easily, and I set down the suitcase.
"How your trip was?" she asks as she follows me down the long hallway to the kitchen.
"Easy," I say. "Easy to come Maui."
"Nice you came."
"I like to come," I remind her.
I set the box on top of the wooden kitchen table. My mother gets some scissors and cuts through the twine to see what I have brought her.
She kneels on one of the two wooden benches that run the length of the table and reaches with both hands into the box. "No need bring nothing," she says as she pulls out a loaf of bread.
"Only small," I say.
"Mrs. Sato going be happy for see pistachio nut," she says as she mentally divides these favorites among her friends.
"Make sure you tell her I came rich on this trip to Vegas."
She laughs at me, the chronic Las Vegas loser. At least once a year I board the plane for Las Vegas. I usually get out of the casinos with a few dollars left in my wallet, but who can walk past that last row of slot machines at the airport? On my return flight to Hawaii, I haven't enough money to rent movie earphones. If the movie tempts me, I read lips.
"Manapua," my mother says, pulling out the small box and opening it. "I been wanting for eat this."
"Go on," I say, "take one. I can put the kalua pig in the freezer for you."
She sits on the bench and politely bites the large oval bun. "Honolulu get the best manapua," she declares, pleasing me with her appetite and apparent health.
I stack the plastic containers of kalua pig in the freezer and look away from my mother so that she may eat in peace. The kitchen is comfortably familiar. As a little boy, I sat at the end of the hallway and watched my mother scrub away sticky grains of rice that had fallen to the floor from forks and chopsticks. When her back was to me, I reached out and with my finger drew slippery circles on the wet floor.
The kitchen table, like the family that gathered around it, is the only one this house has ever had. All four table legs sit in little plastic cups which my mother fills with water to keep ants away from her table. During childhood my brother, Taizo, and I stood at opposite ends of the table and rolled marbles down its length. After he died, I rolled the marbles knowing there was no one to catch them at the other end. They fell to the wooden floor and kept rolling.
An electric stove and microwave have replaced the old kerosene stove upon which my mother used to cook food and heat dishwater. The wick coiled round and round on each of four burners. I could see it when I stood on my toes. A turn of the knob raised the wick toward my mother's lit match.
My mother has finished her manapua and we walk together to the parlor. Not much has changed over the years in this room, either. My mother's home and her easy contentment comfort me. The old koa sofa and matching chairs have new slipcovers; she must have sewn them. Would my mother have sewn new slipcovers if she believed the doctor's explanation that her cancer cannot be fought?
I sit in the flower-patterned chair, big tropical flowers of green and brown, and compare it to the modern furniture in my Oahu home. "Chairs never last this long nowadays," I tell my mother, while patting the wooden arms with my palms. "Every so often we gotta go buy new furniture."
"Only old, this furniture," she says as she lowers herself into the far end of the couch, "and the chair get termites so better stop pounding already. Or else," my mother says and begins to giggle, "the chair going fall apart when you stay on it."
We have begun to ease into another of our weekends. Two months ago the doctor explained to my mother — a woman from a culture that reveres cleanliness — that her liver is failing to cleanse parts of her body she cannot reach. Yet I am not certain she will die, not certain at all. Today I have seen her...
