My indifference didn’t seem to bother her, which irked me.

Merilee and Bea set their backpacks under the shade of a banana tree. I followed with Mirabelle as a sweet but malodorous scent inched up my nostrils.

“What stinks?” I shouted.

Mirabelle pointed to where dozens of mangoes had fallen, dotting the ground, split open, overripe, and half-eaten by birds and insects. She walked to the edge of the water. The middle was dark like an eggplant, deep and foreboding. As the pool fanned out to the shore, the color turned violet, then lavender, dissolving to a light, glassy green. Mirabelle took off her shoes and waded in up to her ankles.

“It’s refreshing,” she called out. “C’mon, Jackie. Take off your shoes.”

I walked over dipped in my fingers. “Yikes.” I shuddered at the ice-cold water. “I thought all water in Hawaii was set at bathtub temperature,” I said wiping my hands on my shorts.

My mother laughed and Bea thumped me on the back as though I were her good buddy. They gave each other a thumbs up and untied their sarongs, revealing bare naked bodies. They weren’t even wearing bathing suit bottoms. I turned away, pretending to be busy with my backpack, embarrassed. Then, I wondered if the word “embarrassed” was derived from “bare assed,” and filed that thought away for when I talked to Nicole. Boy was she in for an earful.

As Merilee and Bea spread towels under the banana trees, I sneaked a peek at my naked mother. Her big boobs had gotten saggy, and her butt was a lot bigger than I remembered, but her legs were still great. Most of her fat sat around her middle, probably from drinking, though she swore up and down that she hadn’t touched alcohol in a year. “Marijuana maintenance,” she called it.

Bea was the opposite body type with little tube-shaped boobs that protruded and then kind of drooped at the end, a skinny torso, and a flat stomach that stretched into wide hips and a pancake ass. They both needed a bikini wax, or preferably, a bikini bottom. Even their armpits were unshaved. Merilee wouldn’t be caught dead with hairy pits in her Malibu days. Now she’d turned feral. They kicked off their flip-flops and waded out into the water, clutching one another and shrieking as each descending body part was exposed to the chill.