“Why you think I told you all about me?”

She pushed at his shoulder. “You’re good at this.”

“Whenever you’re ready, I’m all ears.”

“Okay, okay.” Off a dirt road she found a path and a wooden gate, pushed it open. They followed more paths past more short lava rock walls. She pointed out macadamia trees and little vegetable gardens, yet another chicken coop. The farm sat on an incline. They passed donkeys that stared back and Hawaiian Japanese children who stopped playing—Kanani whispered something to them in Japanese and they smiled and ran off. Lett spotted faded Japanese writing on a shack. The scene probably would’ve scared the hell out of a GI vet from the Pacific, but he found it exotic. She gestured toward rows of trees in the distance and various structures of graying wood. “There’s the kuriba,” she said, “oh, and the hoshidana. The mill and the dryer. Dis one coffee farm, Wendell. Family kine.”

They huddled inside the ruins of a stone house. “This was a tenant farmer’s once,” Kanani said. “The Ushidas are nice. My mother knew them. They’ll leave us alone.”

The kids brought them a small basket of macadamia nuts and ran off again for good. Kanani pulled a canteen of water from her carpetbag.

“Where you want to start?” Lett said. “With Frankie, or that bungalow? Maybe the gold lighter?”

She pushed at him again.

“You have your own angle,” Lett said. “Am I right?”

“Right. Us Hawaiians, we’re all citizens of the Territory of Hawaii. Right after Pearl Harbor, we were living under martial law all the way until October of ’44. US Military Government, you call it. My full name is Kanani Alana, sure, but my mother’s maiden name? Ogawa. So maybe you see where this is going, Wendell. My Japanese mother, Yoko, she came to Hawaii as what they called a ‘picture bride’—she was ordered from a photo by a white factory manager on Oahu. That man, he abused her before hightailing it for the mainland, never to return. Leaving Mother to fend for herself. She ended up working on plantations with other Japanese, here on Big Island mostly.”

“Thus, the Japanese I heard,” Lett said.