"What is that noise?"
It was the boom of surf, a long buffeting punch, traveling across the beach and through the house; when it subsided with a sigh, there was another, much louder. The winter swell had hit with its ceaseless cannonade. At the edge of the shore the breaking waves collapsed into a mass of foam that creamed the whole beach, sliding and bubbling to the foundations of the house, before percolating through the sand.
The family was waiting, though only the small children were active. Taunting, laughing, hogging the chairs, they seemed to be speaking for the others, who remained silent. Pinky timidly asked for a drink and was given guava juice.
She sniffed a flower. "Nice smell. Ylang-ylang."
It was a mistake to presume, and wrong, in that flower-loving household, to be so specific.
"Pak-lan," Melveen said, correcting her, and Pinky withered and went gray again.
Buddy's room had been locked and secured by Jimmerson, his Honolulu attorney, the day the news came of the disappearance. All Buddy's personal effects were there, with Stella's jewelry, and his photographs and curios, glass-ball net floats, fish traps made into lamps,
potted plants, the big-screen TV, the four-poster on which he had held court, the filing cabinets, the locked safe.
Pinky was taken to the guest room on the second floor, where she remained with the door closed. Sometimes the splintery sound of her weeping could be heard. After two days, she came downstairs, gripping the banister tightly. She looked unsteady, fearful, and a bit feverish, not ailing but seasick, and she walked as though on the deck of a ship in a rising storm. Her makeup had turned her face green.
Pinky found the telephone in the kitchen and, with a scrap of paper in her hand, dialed a number.
Melveen stared at her. "You know some people here?"
"I meet one on the plane."
Melveen's eyes were blank, and so were Bula's, but when they met, they shared the disapproval and uncertainty that was in their hearts.
"Mrs. Pinky Hamstra," the woman was saying into the phone. Everyone listened, everyone heard. Switching to her own language, there was a note of timid inquiry at first, and then a sudden screech of urgency, a sort of sobbing explanation, but her passion made it sound like a beseeching prayer spoken backward.
None of Buddy's eavesdropping children knew the foreign language they took to be Filipino. To them it was grief and a torrent of twanging talk and some sharp rejoinders that resembled warning barks.
This young woman was explaining her plight, one she felt was desperate, to a stranger who was quickly becoming her friend and confidante. They knew this without knowing the language.
When Pinky hung up and stared into space, her eyes glazed and vague with concern, Bula said, "You went invite this woman over the house?"
Somehow he knew that, too — that it was an older woman, that an invitation had been extended, that it was for a visit to the house, that the answer had been yes.
Perhaps it was deliberate on Pinky's part that she was playing with her wedding ring, twisting it against her small knuckle to make the stone sparkle. She was hesitating, as if working up the courage to speak. No one helped her, but after some moments of wringing her fingers she began to speak, asking for something, a keepsake, to remind her of her husband.
"Like a memory relic," she said. "Maybe a watch."
"He wearing it when he died," Melveen said. "Poor old kolohe bugga."
"This house his relic," Bula said. "You standing in one relic, Sister."
It made them sad to think how much had changed since Buddy had died. On the beach, staring at the surf with salty eyes, they were not thinking of the sea but of their father, tossed in it, pocked with fish bites and swollen, his corpse bulging against his clothes. They had seen such corpses on the edge of the beach some mornings, staring blindly at them
with dead eyes and big blue lips. They could not bear to think that he was being nipped by sharks.
The friend's name was Ronda Malanut. She simply appeared in the doorway one day, carrying a large handbag. She was dark and quite plump in a topheavy way — skinny legs, pot belly, large flat face losing its shape.
A gold tooth showed when she laughed her hungry laugh, but not when she smiled her scheming smile.
"I am here to see Pinky."
The woman's bag was full of candles. That afternoon a shrine was set up on a table that faced the ocean: Buddy smiling in a framed picture inscribed, Stick with me, Pinky, and you'll fart through silk, and surrounded by twenty twinkling votive lights and some scattered flower petals.
Pinky Rubaga spent most of the day in her room, except when she was changing the candles on Buddy's shrine. She kept fresh flowers in the vases and a garland hooked on Buddy's picture. Bula noticed that Pinky also began picking the ripe mangoes from the tree at the side of the house. What did she do with them?
Ronda made herself inconspicuous by being helpful. Now she knew where everything belonged and could empty the dishwasher without asking where to put anything.
A strange boy was eating breakfast one morning at the long table.
"Tony Malanut," he said, keeping his elbows on the table, smiling as he chewed.
He was Ronda's son, and he went on moving food to his mouth with stubby fingers. A bracelet with his name on it clanked on his wrist. He was short and stocky, in his late twenties, with a wispy mustache, a big square head, and dark, deep-set eyes. A noisy bunch of keys hooked to his belt made him seem idle and self-important.
"That red pickup yours?" Bula asked.
Tony nodded, his mouth too full for him to speak. He swallowed and said, "Dodge Ram. Turbocharged. Loaded."
"Blocking the driveway," Bula said. "So move it."
The place was filling with strangers — Ronda mopping the floor, Pinky tending Buddy's shrine, now Tony tinkering with his pickup truck. Far from making them seem like menials, these chores gave them an air of authority. Each time Ronda polished or dusted something, she seemed to be taking possession of it.
"I miss Dad," Bula said.
"I miss him too," Pinky said.
"How you go miss someone you know for two-tree days?"
"Five days," Pinky said. "Also five nights."
Bula and Melveen, who had remained in the house, resented their father for choosing this woman. They hated him for dying. They were angry that his business affairs were in such a mess. The bedroom was kept locked, the bank accounts had been frozen until the will could be read and probated. The Hotel Honolulu was his main asset, so I was involved. But the will was an enigma. Melveen, the executoi would not discuss it, taking her cue from Buddy, who had been superstitious about mentioning it.
Unable to enter into the grief, I had stayed away from the house. But one Sunday after a picnic with Sweetie and Rose on the North Shore, I drove past and saw a young woman sitting at a wooden table by the roadside. The table was heaped with green fruit, and on a hand-lettered sign was the word Mango's. The misspelling caught my attention, and so did the woman, who was Buddy's widow, Pinky.
"She say she need money," Bula explained the next time I saw him.
The strangers ranged more freely in the house. Tony Malanut started sitting on the lanai to watch the surf, his feet braced on the rail. Bula hated the man's feet. And that was the very spot where Buddy used to sit and drink, with Stella's ashes in one hand and a drink in the other as he studied the sunset for a green flash.
Buddy's shrine remained, swelling with flowers and trinkets, though the photograph of the man was darkened and its frame scorched from all the candle flames.
Bula called Jimmerson, and in the middle of explaining his anxieties, he became inarticulate and, struggling to speak, was overcome by a fit of sobbing.