Daniel watched her trying to remember. For the first time in months, he felt like a doctor again, a part of him fearful he’d lost his touch. His careful fingers felt the lymph nodes to each side of her neck, pressed along her side and down her spine, her face open and accepting as a child. He looked at her eyes, into each of her ears, quick and careful and efficient. Then he bent down and rummaged through an inside pocket of his bag, looking for something.

“Shells, yeah!” Mama Natua yelled out, a child’s excitement in her voice.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “You gave him the shells you had collected.” He smiled. “And I kept this one.” He held up a seashell in his hand, no larger than a pikake bud, coral-colored with rows of soft whorls, collected that day on the beach. It had caught his eye and he picked it out of the pail that day and had held on to it ever since.

Mama reached for it, her eyes lighting up with delight. “You’re not Franklin,” she said, her eyes focused on him.

“No, I’m not Franklin. I’m Daniel,” he said. It was the first time in years he’d said his father’s name aloud.

Mama smiled. “You were always a good boy,” she said.

* * *

Mama still needed blood tests and a more thorough exam that Daniel would have to arrange through Hilo Hospital. While Mama clearly suffered from senility, her vitals appeared stable for someone who had never seen a doctor in her eighty-three years. Daniel busily answered Auntie Leia’s and Auntie Nori’s questions about Mama’s health, keeping any questions about his father to himself for a little longer. After so many years, Daniel was surprised how just hearing the name Franklin still affected him, and how quickly his father became flesh and blood again.

As he walked home, Daniel’s thoughts were filled with questions. He cut through an old neighborhood, streets lined with small, rickety houses crowded with roaming chickens, stray dogs; a goat eating from a neighbor’s toppled garbage. A bare-assed little boy clutching a coconut ran toward a house. If Mama had really seen his father and Uncle Koji together after he’d left them, when did he return? And why hadn’t his mother or Uncle Koji ever said anything? As he combed the past for answers, what became abundantly clear was how easily his mother and the entire community had erased all memories of his father from their lives. His mother had stopped speaking of him, while all the tangible objects that belonged to him had slowly disappeared from the bungalow. She’d kept in a box for him a few family photos, a tarnished money clip, and an old slingshot his father had made out of manzanita, but there was little else.