Chapter 9 #4
Kalea glanced up at me, and nodded once. “Mahalo.”
“Answer something for me,” I said as she turned to leave. She paused, waiting for me to continue. “What happened three months ago? I’ve seen you with Pua. You’re a fantastic mother, patient and nurturing. Why did you abandon her at Aloiki’s like that?”
The question had been bothering me for months, but more so since I’d landed drunk on her doorstep.
Kalea frantically wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Aloiki sold the farm to the club, cutting me off from that monthly income.”
I’d been married to Kalea for years. I knew damn well that the amount of money given to her each month from her share of the farm was not enough to cry over.
A couple hundred, maybe, depending on how many boarders he had.
It wasn’t Kalea’s main source of income, though I still wasn’t sure what she did on her computer when she said she was working.
Additionally, Kalea hated the farm. Blamed it for the death of her parents, and rarely made a reappearance there since she moved into this house when she was nineteen.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I just… I owed someone money, and I needed to get it elsewhere if I couldn’t get it from the farm.”
I lowered the beer from my mouth, my eyes narrowing. “You owed who money?”
I left her a house with no mortgage, and she still drove the car I had bought her for her twenty-first birthday.
Even with the cost of utilities, taxes, gas, and food, a fulltime job should more than cover that.
Why would she have needed to borrow money?
And if she did, why wouldn’t she have borrowed from Aloiki or a bank?
“That’s none of your business—”
“You abandoned your daughter for a fucking week so you could go get money elsewhere to pay back some mystery loan to some mystery person, and you don’t think that’s my business?
” I repeated back to her, sarcasm dripping heavily from my voice.
“Did you take up a gambling or drug habit I’m not aware of? ”
I hadn’t seen any signs of that over the past three weeks. She hadn’t been sketchy or jumpy. Then again, I was at work at random hours. But still, if she was an addict, I should have picked up on something.
“Even if I was, that still is none of your business. You walked out of my life, remember? You left me at the fucking hospital with a sick three-week-old baby! Do you remember that? No note, just that fucking paternity test. You abandoned me!”
“You slept with another man and had his baby. And trust me when I say that my leaving is the only reason you’re still breathing today.”
She paled. “You… You wanted to hurt me?”
I put the beer bottle on the kitchen counter behind me and stormed over to her. “I just found out my wife had a fucking affair,” I growled into her face. “I wanted to hurt a lot of things.”
“I never…” She couldn’t even look me in the eye. Tears trailed down her cheeks. “I prayed she was yours. I wanted her to be yours.”
“Well if you’d kept your legs closed, there wouldn’t have been a question if she was mine.”
Kalea gagged, her hand coming up to slap across her mouth.
She bolted past me and over to the sink where she started spewing up whatever she and Pua had had for dinner.
I let out a long sigh before heading over next to her to gather her hair up in my fist. I had no idea why I couldn’t just let her suffer on her own.
Something I’d come to realize over the past three weeks of being here was that I didn’t hate Kalea.
I hated what she’d done, and I couldn’t forgive what she’d done, but I didn’t hate her.
In some weird, fucked-up way, I missed her.
Even when we weren’t talking, being near her felt natural, familiar.
She coughed and spluttered. I reached into the cabinet to my left with the hand that wasn’t holding up her hair and grabbed out a cup.
Then I turned on the water to fill it. She blindly took it, sipping a little and sloshing it around in her mouth for a second before spitting it back out.
She repeated that process twice before she drank the remaining water.
Her knees buckled, and she started to sink to the floor.
I let go of her hair so it didn’t pull as she twisted, her back riding the smooth cabinet all the way down.
Tears still fell from her cheeks and the smell of bile filled the room.
I took the cup, refilled it, and handed it down to her before I started to clean up the sink, running the garbage disposal several times to help get rid of the smell.
Then I picked up my beer and parked my ass on the tile floor next to her.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I encouraged. Based on what just happened, I half expected her to tell me she was pregnant again.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You won’t,” I corrected. “You didn’t tell me then and you won’t tell me now. How could you even contemplate us patching things up if you can’t even be honest with me? Who do you owe money to, and do you still owe money to him?”
Leaning back against the cabinet with her eyes closed, Kalea shook her head again. “You’re not listening to me, Tangaloa. I can’t.”
My eyes narrowed. Can’t. “What the fuck does that mean? Why can’t you tell me?”
Kalea dropped her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking. “You’re not the only one of the two of us who loved with their whole body and soul. You aren’t the only one who would do anything to protect the other.”
I stared at her, feeling like I was standing at the top of a volcano just waiting for that final shove to push me in. “Kalea…” The words nearly got caught in my throat, but I forced them out. “Are you being blackmailed?”