10. Anne
Anne
When Thursday rolled around, Anne was a nervous wreck. She had guests checking in around dinnertime, so Noah had offered to pick her up for a lunch date.
A date. With Noah Kapono.
What sort of wild thirty-year time warp was this?
She hardly remembered the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.
And yet he looked at her in just the same way he had then.
Despite their history – or maybe because of it – she felt incredibly anxious. She tried on every outfit that she owned, cursing her own foolishness the whole time. Who was she trying to impress?
This was Noah. He knew what she looked like.
Of course, he hadn’t actually seen her since before her first pregnancy. Not since she was a teenager, for goodness sake.
A knock came on the door.
“Just a minute!” Anne shouted.
The door opened anyway.
Laurie’s eyebrows shot up, and she paused in the doorway to survey the chaos.
“What happened here?”
“Nothing,” Anne snapped. “Didn’t you move out?”
Wow, Laurie signed. What’s your problem?
Anne winced. Sorry.
“I took most of my stuff to the Madeira place, but I haven’t quite moved in. Mom’s watching Mia today. Halia set me up with a free appointment with a lawyer or a legal advisor or something, to walk me through the divorce process.”
Sorry, she said again. “I’m a mess.”
“You’re really spiraling, huh?” Laurie glanced at the bed, where Anne’s entire wardrobe was scattered in piles.
“Um… yeah. Maybe a little.”
Her little sister smirked, and she had a sudden flashback to thirteen-year-old Laurie acting the exact same way when Anne was freaking out about her first date nearly thirty years before.
Is this all about your date with Noah? Laurie asked.
Yes, it’s about my date with Noah, she signed sharply.
“But it’s Noah. He knows what you look like.”
Anne let out a huff of breath and kicked the door closed. “Our history makes it more nerve-wracking, Laurie. Not less.”
“I don’t see why.”
“What’s a forty-four year old supposed to wear on a date with her highschool sweetheart?” Anne kept her voice low – the last thing that she needed was Claire weighing in – and funneled her frustration into extra emotive signs.
“Um… whatever you want?” Laurie was looking at her like she was crazy.
“The last time he saw me, I was a size two!”
Laurie raised one eyebrow and looked her up and down. “Didn’t you just see each other a few days ago?”
“I mean saw me saw me.”
“Like… naked?”
Quiet! Anne signed, glancing at the door.
“Spiraling,” Laurie diagnosed with a sad shake of her head. Amusement glittered in her clear brown eyes.
“You are so not helping!”
“Anne, you were kids. I am one thousand percent sure that Noah doesn’t expect you to be the same size that you were when you were a literal child. First off, he’s not a creep. Second, he’s not an idiot. I mean, he has eyes.”
“Thanks a lot.” Anne flopped down on her clothes-covered bed. “Ugh. Do you ever just… hate everything that you own?”
Laurie tilted her head to one side. “No.”
“Right. Of course not. Just… look at you.”
“You’re still beautiful. He obviously thinks so.”
“He’s only seen me in, like, my super flowy everyday stuff. Big baggy t-shirts or loose linen dresses.”
“You’re kind of proving my point.”
“What if he gets a good look at me and realizes that he’s not attracted to me anymore?”
“Right… because he’s going to be so upset that you went up a few bra sizes.”
“You don’t get it. You look like a flipping model. Just leave me to drown in my dowdy middle-aged wardrobe.” Anne flopped over to bury herself in her clothes.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I know,” Anne chirped, sitting up again. “It’s kind of cathartic. You should try it sometime.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Laurie said dryly. She shook her head and plucked a dress from the pile. “Here. Try this one. And get a hold of yourself.”
Laurie walked out, leaving Anne feeling… strangely enough, better than she had before. Somehow, it had helped just to voice her worries and have her sister tell her that she was being ridiculous.
She sighed and went back to her one-woman fashion show.
In the end, she just went down in the cotton sundress that she happened to be wearing when he pulled up to the house five minutes early.
It was patterned like a china plate, with blue on white.
It wasn’t the nicest or most flattering thing that she owned, but it was cute and comfortable enough for a casual lunch date.
Casual, she thought again. As if.
There was nothing casual about going on a date with her eldest daughter’s father, however much they might both try to pretend otherwise.
She didn’t want to put any undue pressure on…
whatever this was between them. But at the same time, his enmeshment in her family made it impossible to feel relaxed about the implications of starting something up with him again.
One way or another, Noah was a part of her life. If that old spark wasn’t there anymore, she hoped that they could at least find their way back to the easy friendship that they had shared as kids.
She did a quick mirror check, then looked away from her reflection before her eyes could linger too long on the lines on her forehead or the age spots that got darker with every trip to the beach.
At least her dark red hair was more or less the same. She left it loose, floating around her shoulders as she hurried barefoot down the stairs.
“Hi.” Noah was inside already, looking up at her with a dazed sort of smile.
Anne felt a sudden vertigo, complete with the knowledge that she could fall completely and immediately in love with this man she had known all her life.
Had she ever really fallen out of love with him?
She stumbled, tripped over the hem of her dress, and nearly fell down the last few stairs. Noah stepped forward and steadied her with a hand under her elbow. She regained her footing and smiled up at him in a self-conscious sort of way.
He was gorgeous, even more so now than when they were young.
His deep brown eyes held hers, and all of her petty worries drained away.
He had that effect on her. He always had.
Through everything that had happened, all of the trauma and turmoil, all her stubborn insistence in building a life on the mainland… her deepest feelings had never really changed. She had just locked them away – and with them, a huge part of her true self.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
She cleared her throat and stepped back. “Yep. Just need shoes. They’re on the lanai.”
“After you,” he said, gesturing towards the front door.
She slipped her feet into a pair of sandals and then climbed up into the cab of Noah’s truck.
They reminisced about their shared childhood as they drove north along the highway.
It felt strange at first, but before long they were laughing over trouble they’d gotten into.
Then they both got misty-eyed talking about Kimo.
In Hilo, they stopped at a tiny shop that sold sushi to go. They made their selection, and then they drove further up the coast.
The tranquil two-lane highway rose up along with the land until they were soaring along the cliffs, admiring that magnificent green-and-blue Hawaiian view that no other place could match.
Anne assumed that he was just taking her to some pretty picnic spot – until Noah pulled up to a familiar shop at the edge of a tiny coastal town. An old wooden sign held a single, faded word: Malasadas.
“No way!” she exclaimed. “They’re still here?”
“Of course!”
“I’d forgotten about this place.”
The little no-name shop made the best malasadas on the entire island – at least, Anne’s family had always thought so.
Often, when he had a day off, Kimo would load the whole crew into the back of his pickup truck and drive them up the coast just for this.
Usually they would stop at the beach on the way home.
Those days had been some of the best of Anne’s childhood.
“How could you forget?” Noah asked.
She met his eyes for a long moment. “I don’t know.”
“Lunch first?” he asked, holding up their take-out.
“Yeah.”
They got out of the truck and found a nice spot in the shade, where they sat down in the lush green grass and faced the vast ocean view. They were quiet for a while, eating more than talking.
It felt easy, being there with him.
Then she thought about how little she really knew him anymore, how little she knew about the past thirty years of his life, and she began to feel uneasy.
He knew the basics of her life because he had never really lost touch with her family, but she knew so little about him.
“So… you work in construction now?” she asked.
“Sometimes. Odd jobs here and there.”
“Like… a handyman?”
“If you like.”
There was something guarded in his tone, and she wondered if she had offended him. She didn’t mean anything by it. Her father had worked in construction all his life, and he was the best man she ever knew… but she worried that to say that aloud would come across as placating or patronizing.
Anne cleared her throat and looked away.
Sitting there with him, her focus on her food, her mind clear, had felt like the most natural thing in the world. But as soon as her brain started up again, her anxiety ruined everything.
She hadn’t been on a date in twenty years. And this wasn’t just any date. This was Noah. She felt like a fool for saying yes to begin with. She had too much else on her mind. She didn’t know how to navigate this.
She looked down into her lap and found that she’d shredded her paper napkin to bits.
“Mostly I flip houses.”
“What?” Anne looked up with a start.
“I don’t work many construction jobs anymore. I fix up run-down houses and resell them.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“I’ve lived in ten houses the past twenty years. Mostly, I fixed them up slowly while I lived in them. The first one was just a little one bedroom, not much more than a shack. But I leveled up with time.”
“And you get to be your own boss.”
“Right.”
“Noah, that’s great.”