Outside, the sun was warm and the smell of smoke and sulfur lingered. The streets were crowded again, groups of men smoking and playing cards on the sidewalk, hoping to get work down on the docks if they waited long enough. Nori hurried through the crowds and walked up Ponahawai Street toward the Natua house. She usually visited eighty-three-year-old Mama once a week, bringing her the salty dried plums she liked to suck on, but missed seeing her last week because of the eruption.

Today nothing could keep her away.

When Nori was young, she liked to pretend Mama was her real mother. Her feelings hadn’t changed over the years; Mama would always be special to her, loving and no-nonsense, the woman who had taught her what family meant. From the time Nori was six years old, slight and dark-eyed, a mix of Japanese and Portuguese, Nori knew by the tone of her father’s or mother’s voice if a fight was coming, the sharp sting of ti root alcohol souring the air, followed by that rising pitch that made her stop whatever she was doing and listen, waiting for the waves to come crashing to shore. “Not picking one more damn pineapple,” her mother started, followed by glass shattering on the floor or against a wall. As their voices grew louder, Nori would quickly climb out her bedroom window, or slip out the back door and hurry along the road to Mama Natua’s house, the small cluttered bungalow with a screened-in front porch to keep the mosquitoes away. Nori had spent much of her childhood in and out of the Natua house, playing with Leia and her younger sister, Noelani, and staying overnight when her drunk and volatile parents had a particularly bad fight and the hitting began.

Nori slowed down when she saw the sagging roof of her paint-stripped, childhood house, black wattle and barbwire weeds swallowing it up whole. Her muscles tensed and her stomach churned like that young girl again in no hurry to get home, black and blue blotches peppering her arms and legs like dark clouds. Her mother liked to pinch and push, slap and shove, while her father sat, too drunk to stand. Going home every day meant becoming invisible to them and staying out of the way, and it meant not being able to see Mariko until the next morning at school. Mariko had been her best friend, the keeper of all her secrets from elementary school until her death, while Mama had been her home. Nori caught her breath and shook away the sad memories. Her parents were dead now, the road to the Natua house the last thread tied to her childhood, and with it, Mama Natua, whose mind and body were fading.

* * *