Chapter 8 #3
The front door opened and closed, and I heard the quick pitter-patter of unsteady feet on the floor a moment before a little girl with dual black braids high on her head came running into the kitchen. She went straight to the fridge without even realizing her audience.
Kalea’s laugh filled the house, assailing my mind with memories and making my heart twinge. “You need to wait for me, Kealoha!”
I winced at the endearment. I’d held a minutes-old Pualani in my arms and called her the same, my beloved child.
Kalea froze in the doorway of the kitchen, her arms weighed down by grocery bags. “What are you doing here?”
That really was a good question. I still hadn’t figured out why I’d ended up on her front lawn in my drunken state. I certainly hadn’t intended to walk here.
I shrugged, taking a bite of my sandwich. “Waiting for the laundry to be done.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she continued into the kitchen to put her bags on the table.
She nearly knocked my plate onto the floor in her ire.
Like most Pacific Islanders, Kalea had tanned skin, dark hair, and dark eyes.
Kalea also had a narrower jawline, almost pointed, similar to her brother.
She wasn’t overweight, but she also wasn’t skin and bones.
In the three weeks we’d stayed in the hospital waiting to learn Pualani’s fate, Kalea had been weak, her body still recovering from the birth.
I hadn’t seen her since. Not until last night when I’d been drunk out of my mind.
She looked…good. But then again, she always had.
I didn’t have a specific type when it came to women, but I was a big guy, so I tended to prefer taller women with some heft to them.
Once I realized my feelings for Kalea weren’t brotherly, and I’d started looking at her as a woman and not a teenager, I thought her perfect for me.
I’d heard a lot of men over the years talk about how pregnancy had ruined their women’s bodies, but that certainly wasn’t the case with Kalea.
She was even more beautiful than I remembered.
But then again, I’d always liked to rile her up. She’d been such a shy teenager, and getting to see her feistiness had been a turn on for me.
“When I didn’t see you on the lawn, I figured you’d called someone for a ride. Not that you’d broken into my house to eat my food,” she looked me up and down, “and use my shower.”
“I also drank your coffee,” I informed her. “You left the pot on again.”
A noise behind her stopped Kalea’s rebuttal. As she hurried over to her impatient daughter, she hissed at me in a low tone, “Just cover yourself. I do not need her seeing all of you.” At the fridge, she got out Pualani’s sippy cup and a small tray of crackers and cheese.
I looked down and noticed that the towel was so small around my waist that my entire right leg was showing.
Neither frank nor beans were revealed, but a small twist would change that.
I wasn’t that much of a dick where I wanted to flash the child in the room.
I glanced up at the bags of groceries in front of me, and snorted.
Kalea couldn’t cook for shit, but she certainly loved her cooking magazines.
I pulled out one that was all about tomatoes, rolled my eyes, and draped the open pages over my groin.
Pua hurried over to the table, where she struggled to get up into her booster seat.
Kalea easily lifted her up, setting the plate on the table in front of her.
Pualani eyed me over the rim of her sippy cup, but she did not stop drinking long enough to ask me who I was or why I was here.
Kalea’s expression said that she was unimpressed by my efforts to become decent.
“Mahalo, Māmā!” Pualani exclaimed.
My heart squeezed tightly in my chest at her innocent, little voice.
I’d never heard her speak before. Just before we’d gone to Russia, I’d held Pualani for the first time since she’d been three weeks old.
Aloiki had been injured in the raid that had destroyed his house, and Lu needed to go to him.
I took Pualani from her so she could help Tommy with Aloiki’s injuries.
It had been surreal, to say the least. In that moment, it hadn’t mattered her parentage. I just needed to know she was safe.
Kalea started to put groceries away. I continued eating my sandwich. Pualani ate her snack like crackers and cheese was a gourmet meal prepared by Gordon Ramsey, completely oblivious to the tension between her mother and me.
I truly had no good answer to Kalea’s initial question.
Why was I here? She was correct in that I could have called for a ride.
I might be banished from Bacon’s house, but I wasn’t out of the club.
I was still the VP. I could have ordered anyone but Aloiki to come and get me, and they would have to.
So why didn’t I? Why, instead, had I gone into her house, the house we had planned to raise our children in, and basically made myself at home?
Why was I still here?
Groceries away, Kalea sat down across from me with Pua on the end of the table in her booster seat. She popped the top off a glass bottle of Mexican soda. “Want to talk about it?”
“Nope. Want to talk about why you cheated on me?” My sandwich was gone, but I played with the crumbs on my plate like they were a puzzle I could piece together.
“Nope.” She took a sip of her soda.
On the other side of the house, the washing machine’s buzzer went off.
Now wearing my pair of freshly dried shorts, I ducked under the sink to take a look at the garbage disposal.
Pualani sat in a plastic playpen in the living room playing with a set of building blocks while Kalea worked on her laptop.
I didn’t know specifically what she was doing, but it involved more typing than playing Solitaire would.
After our very awkward snack and the laundry was switched over to the dryer, I used Kalea’s phone to call Shakaloha.
I didn’t have any of the club’s numbers memorized, and I had to pull that number from the brewery’s website.
Unfortunately, I had the misfortune of having Hops answer the phone, and as soon as he learned it was me, he hung up.
I supposed I could understand why. I didn’t remember much from waking up on the brewery’s floor yesterday morning, but I did recall puking my guts out.
Hops took the cleanliness of his brewery very seriously, and even though he wasn’t the owner anymore, the brewery was still his.
If it was shut down by the health department, a lot of local businesses, not just the club’s, wouldn’t have a place to launder money through anymore.
And nothing for nothing, Hops knew his lagers. I certainly didn’t want to be forbidden from being allowed to drink his beer anymore. I was probably done with whiskey for a while. I’d need to find a way to get back on his good side.
Rather than calling back and trying to apologize, though, I called Doodles’ tattoo shop instead.
Like the brewery, I had to find the shop on the internet first to get the number.
Regardless of it being the middle of his work day, I ordered Doodles to stop what he was doing and go find my bike and my phone, pack me some clothes from the barn, and to bring them to Kalea’s house.
Since I couldn’t tell him the location of either my phone or my bike or my keys, there was no telling how long it would take him to bring everything here.
Still, I gave him a deadline of two o’clock.
While I was on the phone with Doodles, I heard cursing from the kitchen and went to investigate. That was when I learned that the garbage disposal had been acting up, even after Kalea had paid a repairman to come out and fix it already.
Without thinking, I told her not to worry about it and I would take care of it once I was off the phone. I truly didn’t know which one of us was more surprised by my offer, and I couldn’t even blame the words on being alcohol induced.
So here I was under Kalea’s kitchen sink taking apart the garbage disposal like it was still my responsibility.
I had my clean shorts. I could go. I could wait outside for my bike and phone. Even waiting on the front stoop should have been better than staying inside, right?
Yet when Kalea stopped working to make a late lunch, and she set a plate out for me too, I sat down at the table to eat like I’d done so every day for the past two years.
Pualani got to eat avocado slices, blueberries, and chicken nuggets while I got stuck with egg salad, cottage cheese with honey, and edamame.
My silent grievance about this seemed to amuse Kalea enough that she ate her lunch, which was the same as mine, with glee.
It was nearing five-thirty by the time there was a knock on the door. I’d fixed the garbage disposal, mowed the lawn, cleaned out the gutters, and weeded out most of the garden. Kalea brought me lemonade during the afternoon, but otherwise we kept our distance.
Doodles came riding up on my bike with KD riding in a cage behind him. I was fucking pissed when I saw the state my bike was in.
“What the fuck did you do?” I roared. My paintjob was scratched to hell and the front wheel looked off somehow. Was it thinner?
“Brah, don’t even start with me. Do you have any idea what I have gone through the past six hours?”
I’d known Nalu Leo for years. He’d been the one to add, and then cover up, Kalea’s name over my heart. It was probably the only reason he spoke so familiarly with me. Still, it was not something I was going to let stand. Not while he wore that Prospect cut. He wasn’t my brother yet.
“Watch it,” I snapped.
Seeming to realize his misstep, Doodles cringed.
“Sorry, man. It’s just been a really long day and I had to reschedule four appointments for this.
” He waved a hand towards my bike. “You crashed it into a ditch behind Shakaloha. If Neo hadn’t pulled the footage while we were trying to find your phone, we wouldn’t have even found it! ”
I winced, both at the implication that I’d driven drunk and the damage done to my bike. I’d also forgotten to mention to Doodles that I wanted him to keep this crusade between the two of us. At least KD and Neo now knew of my latest activities.
“We put a donut on the front, but you’re going to need to get that looked at by a professional. I think you bent something with how it shook on the way over here.” Doodles’ voice was sympathetic. He held out my keys and my phone, which didn’t look in much better condition than my bike.
What the fuck had I done to it?
Well, the damn thing was dead, so I wasn’t going to find out anytime soon. Probably for the best. I wouldn’t want to turn it on and find out that I’d been sending unsolicited dick pics or bought several dozen surfboards to add to my already large quiver.
“Mahalo,” I begrudgingly admitted.
Doodles glanced behind me. I turned to see Kalea in the doorway of her house with Pualani on her hip. “Tell me if it’s none of my business, but are you okay, brah?”
My eyes narrowed. “It is none of your business,” I growled. Because I was the furthest thing from okay.
“Shoots!” Doodles put his hands up in surrender and took a step back. “I’ll go. Just… I’m worried about you, man. This isn’t like you.”
My laugh was cynical. He didn’t even know the half of it. “Get out of here, and tell no one where I am.”
He nodded once before hurrying to the cage where KD waited for him. They both threw me a shaka out their respective windows, and then KD backed out of the drive.
I stared down at my bike for a long minute before I heard the front door clap closed. I thought at first that she’d gone back inside, until I heard the crunch of gravel behind me on the drive.
Kalea came to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, Pua on her opposite hip than me. She took a moment to examine my bike in the setting sunlight before asking, “Want to talk about it?”
“Nope. Want to talk about why you cheated on me?”
“Nope.”
Well, at least we were still on the same page as this morning. We stood in silence for another couple of minutes, both just staring at my bike.
“I’ve got dinner in the slow cooker and was going to take Pua to the park for a bit while it’s baking. Want to come?”
My eyes narrowed on the setting sun. “Is it safe?”
“I wouldn’t take her if it wasn’t. They’ve renovated the park since you left. Lots of lighting, new bathrooms, and the cops regularly patrol it.”
I nodded slowly, still not liking the idea of her walking alone to and back from the park at dusk. But with me at their side, the only place safer would be Bacon’s house. I waved her past my motorcycle. “Let’s go.”