“Never,” Jelly reassured her. “Decided to keep the faith that the flow will still stop. Overslept is all, yeah,” she said. “How’s Mama?”

“Same, last I heard.”

“Nobody stronger than Mama, remember that, eh.”

Nori nodded and watched her cousin reach for the change drawer under the counter and place it in the cash register. From her bag, Jelly took out her worn black Bible and slipped it under the counter. It was given to her when they were girls and both baptized by the same pompous, self-righteous missionary. One of the many who had swarmed to the islands like flies, clutching their Bibles and pamphlets, building churches, preaching and converting and saving. Nori never trusted those stern-faced men and women who seduced and cajoled and bribed the islanders to join their churches. They were the same “saviors” who also brought with them the diseases that had killed so many of the early Hawaiians they hoped to convert.

Jelly had taken to carrying the Bible around after Nobu’s accident. “Calms me, yeah. I don’t understand half of what I’m reading, but trying to keeps me busy, eh,” she’d told Nori, placing the strip of red ribbon between the thin, wispy pages to hold her place.

* * *

Nori walked back to the kitchen to finish up her coconut tarts, rolling out the dough and readying them for the oven. It hadn’t taken her long to dismiss all those missionary folks, their long speeches and demanding God. She’d only been baptized because her mother realized she could get something from the haole missionaries who had come knocking on their door if she let them baptize her young daughter. So, with the promise of two hens and a rooster, along with a leather-bound Bible, Nori had been baptized. Religion in their house had lasted just long enough for her parents to sell the Bible to buy three bottles of ti root alcohol, eat the eggs the hens had laid, and eventually eat the hens too. She never did know what happened to the rooster.

When it came to her own boys, Nori declined all religion. Being baptized hadn’t changed Nori’s life in any way. And while Mariko hadn’t been religious either, she had chosen to have Daniel baptized so he could start out in life with every advantage. She’d attended a handful of services before she stopped.

“Only a bit of water on his forehead,” Mariko always said.

Still, Nori refused to baptize Mano and Wilson, leaving them heathens. “I’ll take my chances, yeah,” she’d said.

It was one of the few disagreements they’d had between them.

“Well, it didn’t hurt him,” Mariko said, adding, “and it might help.”

She wasn’t about to take any chances.

* * *