“Must have belonged to the bar, yeah, though it doesn’t look like it was ever used,” Nori said, stepping back to see if they’d hung it straight. There wasn’t a pinprick on it. “Maybe it’ll bring more folks in and out if they can leave messages on it.”

“Let me start,” Jelly said.

Nori watched her write something on a piece of paper and pin it in the middle of board, the lone slip strangely enticing on the big, empty board. It read, “Leave your message here. If you’re reading this, others will too.”

Within three months, the Okawa Fish Market became the community’s center of communication. The locals checked the board religiously, knowing they could find whatever they needed on it. They’d tacked up everything from newspaper clippings to job openings to items for sale: snippets of white paper offering hope. Entire lives came to cover the board announcing births, marriages, and deaths. By the end of each month, it was blanketed with layers of flittering paper in all sizes and shapes. Nori and Jelly tried to take down all the outdated slips, only to have it cluttered again in days. She had no idea that the bulletin board would become the main conduit among all the locals in the community.

The only thing Nori asked Jelly never to remove from the board was the brittle, yellowed-edged newspaper photo of her, Mariko, Leia, and Noelani, the Hilo Aunties playing Hearts, taken more than twenty years ago. It remained in the lower left-hand corner, the anchor that always held her steady, her eyes immediately drawn to the photo pinned there by Mariko so many years before. Nori’s fingers again whispered across their young faces, frozen in laughter. It felt just like yesterday.

* * *

The Hilo Aunties had played their first game of Hearts in October 1910—six months after the Okawa Fish Market opened. Nori was just twenty-three and shadow rains lingered that wet Saturday afternoon when she invited Mariko and Leia to come to the market after the lunch rush. Nori missed spending time with her two closest friends. Mariko brought along three-year-old Daniel to play with Mano. Leia was the oldest of them at twenty-five, and she brought along her vivacious and pretty sixteen-year-old sister Noelani, born unexpectedly to their middle-aged parents. Nori served plates of sliced pineapple and sweet mango from Mariko’s tree, took out a new deck of playing cards, and announced that they would be playing Hearts.

“What’s Hearts?” Noelani had asked.

“A card game, you’ll love it,” Nori teased. “It’s full of scheming at every turn.”

Nori had learned the game from some local fishermen, and liked to watch them play because it involved thought and cunning and losing “tricks” so that the player with the lowest score was the winner.