It’s Saturday morning and Franklin is back home for a few weeks. Tonight he’s taking us out to dinner. This afternoon he and Daniel are going to the Wailuku River, while I go to the market to play Hearts with the aunties. It’s our second anniversary and a welcome tradition I love, being together every Saturday after the lunch rush to play Hearts, a deck of cards waiting on the back table, along with a bowl of rice crackers and plates of sliced papaya or pineapple or mango, our voices tumbling over each other. It makes it easier moving through the week, yeah, knowing I’ll see the aunties at the end of it, like the pot at the end of a rainbow. It’s become my mainstay.

When I arrive this afternoon, the aunties are excited. We sit at our back table like schoolgirls again because a photographer from the Hilo Registry has come by, wanting to take a photo of us for the newspaper.

“Why us?” Nori asks.

“Human interest story,” the photographer says. “Good to have, yeah, when it’s a slow news day and we need fillers.” He holds up the folding pocket camera with red bellows and stands back. “Act natural, yeah, and don’t look at the camera.”

I hear the camera click followed by a bright flash as we all look down seriously at our cards. We rarely look serious when we’re together. It’s only when we look up and laugh that the flash explodes again. The photographer talks to Nori for a moment, and I’m relieved when he leaves and we get down to the business of playing Hearts.

I grab the deck and shuffle the cards.

In the past two years, we’ve each developed our own small habits and superstitions when handling our cards—Nori likes to wait until all the cards are dealt to her before she picks them up, immediately ordering them according to suit: spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts. Leia stacks hers into a neat pile before fanning them out, one by one, yeah, while Noelani never keeps to one way of doing things, just like the way she lives life. If I wasn’t dealing, I’d immediately pick up my cards as they’re dealt to me. I look down at my growing pile. And there it is again, that small jab, the feeling that there’s no time to waste.

I listen to Nori and Leia talking about the new Hawaii Volcano Observatory Center being built by two mainlanders, wondering how they’d gotten all the financing, and if it will bring more tourism to Hilo. Along with the railroad and the burgeoning sugar industry, Hilo town seems to be expanding each week.

“More people, just what we need,” Leia says.

“Good for business yeah,” Nori adds. “You remember when it was so quiet here, a sneeze brought excitement!”

We all laugh.