Nori loved these early morning hours best. She began rolling out the dough for the sweetbread, pausing only to take down a jar of mango jam from the cupboard. Nothing made her think of Mariko more than the sweet floral scent of ripe mango every time she cut up the fruit to make jam. It always felt like Mariko was there in the kitchen with her, young again, urging her to finish up so they could take the boys across the road to the bay. “Let me help, yeah, the boys are anxious to go.” Nori could hear their shrieks and laughter out in the market. Nori urged her not to wait for her, but she refused. “Together, yeah,” she said. “Like always.”

Mariko had been married to Franklin for seven years, of which he’d been away working for more than half the time, leaving her and Daniel alone. Nori wondered how she had put up with it. “The Hilo Aunties and Hearts, yeah,” Mariko once told her. “You all saved me.”

In the end they hadn’t been able to save her. Mariko was gone now, leaving them all behind. Nori couldn’t recall how she’d gotten through the first year after Mariko’s death. It was a struggle, like having lost a limb and relearning how to live without it. Mariko was always there, from the time they were young girls in elementary school. She was Nori’s first real friend who didn’t ridicule her about wearing the same old clothes all the time, or going barefoot when she outgrew her shoes, and who didn’t care where she lived and who her parents were. When her parents eventually died, first her mother, and then thirteen months later her father, it was from drinking enough ti root alcohol to leave a big hole in their stomachs. She was fifteen and felt nothing but relief. Mariko and the Natuas were the ones who had always taken care of her. Nori fingered the faint scar on the back of her right hand, the burn mark left there by her mother when she was ten years old and dared to hide a bottle of ti root from her. Nori wanted her lucid for one night. “Just for tonight, Momma,” she begged, thinking she could still help them. Her mother had smiled, pulled on the cigarette she was smoking until it burned a bright orange full moon before walking over to her and snuffing it out on the back of her hand. Nori couldn’t remember if she had screamed, couldn’t remember feeling anything at the time. Only later did she recall the sharp, stinging pain and awful char smell of her burning flesh. The discolored scar would remain a constant reminder; if she couldn’t save them then she had to save herself.

* * *