The Aloha Quilt (34 page)

She was sewing still when Hinano came upstairs at half-past
six gripping a few plastic bags by the handles. “You hungry?” he greeted her, setting
the bags on the dining table and unpacking a few take-out containers. “I brought plate
lunch.”

Bonnie was somehow both famished and too heartsick to contemplate eating, but he had
already gone to the trouble, so she rolled up her quilt top and joined him. He set
out white rice, macaroni salad, pork lau lau wrapped in
ti
leaves, and something that looked like raw salmon in a marinade, enough food for
at least four people. From another bag Hinano produced a six-pack of beer and a bottle
of Chardonnay; without asking what she preferred, he opened a bottle of beer for himself
and poured her a glass of wine.

He paid attention, she thought, remembering the number of times he had brought her
coffee prepared exactly the way she liked it. She dug around in another bag until
she found paper napkins and plastic utensils, which she set out for them. She felt
his eyes upon her as they took seats on opposite sides of the small, round table and
served themselves, but before he took a bite, he set down his fork and said, “When
do you plan to tell me why you moved out of the Hale Kapa Kuiki?”

Bonnie made herself sample the raw fish; it was sweet and savory, with a hint of ginger
and spice. Delicious, or it would be if she could forget that it wasn’t cooked. “You
mean you weren’t on the phone with your aunt five minutes after you returned to the
music shop?”

He grinned, took a bite of pork lau lau, and let her figure out the answer while he
ate. “Four minutes,” he replied before taking a second bite. “All Auntie said was
that you and Claire had one kine
paio
.”

“If that means fight, then you already know the story.”

“Not the whole story,” Hinano said. “Must’ve been some fight to send you running from
a lifelong friend.”

For a long moment, Bonnie ate in silence. “I learned something terrible about Claire,
something I can’t forgive. I can’t—” She shook her head and poked at her macaroni
salad with her fork. “I don’t want to talk to her. I can’t even look at her.”

Hinano’s brow furrowed. “What did she do, kill someone?”

“She cheated on Eric.”

His eyebrows shot up. “So that’s what it was—unless you’re talking about something
recent?”

“Recent?” Bonnie echoed before understanding struck. “You mean you knew?”

He shook his head, loading up his fork with rice and salmon. “Not if it’s something
new.”

“She said it happened a long time ago.”

“Okay, that I knew about. Or guessed, anyway. About eight years ago, they were going
through some rough times. I knew Eric was upset—”

“Eric knew?” exclaimed Bonnie. “Did he catch her in the act?” She fervently hoped
he had been spared that.

“He never said. I knew they were having trouble, that’s all. Eric was drinking more
than usual, angry one minute and depressed the next.”

“You never asked him what was wrong?”

“If he’d wanted me to know, he would have told me. I took him fishing a lot, pushed
him to join our soccer league—eh, if we were quilters maybe he would have bared his
soul while we stitched squares but we men do things differently, snowbird.” He ate
in silence for a long moment. “There was this one time. He showed up here furious
and told me he needed a place to stay for the night. So I gave him the sofa—Kai was
still in the house then—but I woke him up before dawn and took him to see the sunrise
at the Haleakala Crater.”

“What’s that?”

“Something I should’ve put on your list. It’s a dormant volcano more than ten thousand
feet above sea level at the summit and one of the most amazing places in Maui, maybe
in all Hawaii. Nothing I could say would prepare you for that first look into the
crater, for what you feel when you see the vastness of that landscape and try to grasp
the creative and destructive power of God’s creation.” Hinano inhaled deeply, frowning,
remembering. “Eric hardly said anything the whole way there, just looked out the window
at the night sky while I drove. It was almost dawn when we reached the summit. We
waited in the cold, shivering, until the sun rose and light touched the edge of the
crater. There’s nothing like it in the world. Dawn hits you like a physical force,
stuns you. You realize how finite you are. You can’t help realizing it.”

Bonnie nodded, but his thoughts had turned inward, and she wondered if he had forgotten
she was there.

But after a long moment, Hinano resumed his story. “We hiked into the crater when
it grew light enough to see. Eric didn’t say much until we reached the turnaround
point. ‘I love her,’ he told me. ‘I know I’ll love her for the rest of my life. But
I don’t know if I can stay.’ So I asked him if he thought he could leave her. Which
would be harder? He made a sad kine smile then and said that was the real question.”

Bonnie drew in a shaky breath, Eric’s confusion and anger painfully familiar. She
had struggled with the same question, to leave or stay with the man she loved after
his cruel betrayal. She had given Craig a second chance, and all it had done was delay
the inevitable.

“We talked more the rest of the way as we climbed up the switchbacks out of the crater,
and then on the return drive, but not about Claire, not about the trouble at home,
whatever
it was. But when we got back to Lahaina, Eric thanked me for spending the day with
him, and he seemed at peace.” Hinano shrugged and took up his fork again. “He didn’t
leave, so they must have worked things out.”

“How could anyone cheat on a good man like Eric?”

“I don’t know. How could anyone cheat on a good woman like you?”

“That’s exactly my point,” countered Bonnie. “What Claire did makes her no better
than Craig.”

“You don’t know that,” said Hinano. “It might have been a one-time thing. One huge
mistake that she’s regretted ever since. Craig was calculating, deliberate, and from
what you said, he’s only sorry he got caught. Craig won’t ever change, but Claire
seems remorseful. Claire and Eric’s troubles happened years ago and from what I’ve
seen she’s been a good wife to Eric ever since.”

“As far as we know,” said Bonnie, thinking of Claire shutting down her web browser
whenever someone interrupted her while she was online. What if the affair wasn’t in
her past?

“Eric must think so or he wouldn’t have stayed.” Hinano reached for her across the
table, but stubbornly she pulled her hands onto her lap. “Eric knows what happened
and he stayed. Maybe if you knew the details, you’d understand too.”

But Bonnie didn’t want to know the details. She didn’t need to know.

Bonnie slept poorly that first night, woken by bad dreams of Claire weeping, of Claire
and Craig together. Of course it had never happened that way, but her dreams made
a sort of twisted sense since they had both deceived her. Once awake, Bonnie found
it difficult to fall back asleep. Kai’s bed was comfortable
enough, but Bonnie was all too aware of Hinano sleeping only one room away, and then,
thinking of Claire, she became too angry to sleep.

In the morning she slipped out of the house at sunrise for her morning walk and returned
to find Hinano in the kitchen preparing breakfast. After a transient awkwardness faded,
she found herself chatting easily with him while they ate, and she could almost believe
that she could content herself with remaining just friends. Then he would say something
to make her laugh or grin lazily at her as he stretched and yawned, and she would
find herself imagining how it would feel to go around to his side of the table, sit
on his lap, put her arms around him, and rest her head on his chest. It was impossible
to be friends with someone she wanted so badly to kiss.

Either she would have to change her airline ticket and leave Maui sooner than planned
or find somewhere else to stay.

As the days passed, Claire’s phone calls tapered off until they ceased altogether.
Bonnie went for her morning walks and spent the rest of the day quilting. She met
Hinano for plate lunch and turned the leftovers into supper for them both when he
came upstairs after closing the shop at the end of the day.

But after the friendly bustle of the inn, Bonnie found the isolation of Hinano’s apartment
lonely whenever he was not there. On the fourth day, she returned to the music shop
with him after lunch, hinting that she would like something to do. Hinano eventually
asked if she would help with some accounting chores he’d been putting off too long,
and when Bonnie finished that assignment, he found another task for her. The work
was easy but engrossing, almost like being back in the office of her lost quilt shop.
On the fifth day, Bonnie accompanied Hinano downstairs after breakfast and got right
to work. Over lunch Hinano remarked that she was almost as useful as Kai.

“Almost?” Bonnie retorted.

Hinano made an apologetic shrug. “He knows ukuleles better than you do.”

Bonnie couldn’t disagree. She wondered when Kai would next return home from college.
She would lose both her informal job and her bed.

A week after her arrival, Bonnie and Hinano were cleaning up the kitchen after supper
when Hinano said, “Eh, snowbird, my auntie says they’re hurting at the inn without
you.”

“Is that so.” Bonnie had suspected that Hinano was keeping Midori informed about her,
and that Midori most likely shared what she learned with Claire. Bonnie didn’t like
it, but at least that kept them from worrying and calling.

“Yeah, that’s so,” he said. “They need you to get this quilt camp going. You should
go back and finish what you started.”

“You just want your bachelor pad all to yourself again,” said Bonnie. “You’re afraid
people are going to talk, what with a sort-of-married woman staying with you.”

Before she knew it, he drew her to him and kissed her.

When their lips parted, he said, quietly, “Is that what you think?”

“Yes,” said Bonnie, though she didn’t think so anymore. Her heart pounded and she
found herself drawing him closer to her, pressing herself against him.

He kissed her again, his mouth lingering on hers. “Still think so?”

She couldn’t speak. Eyes closed, she nodded.

He kissed her again, and when she finally found her voice, she said, “I thought we
were going to be just friends.”

“If that’s what you want, I guess—”

“Don’t say it,” said Bonnie. “No more one step forward, two steps back. But—I’m still
married. For now, there are limits to what we can be to each other. I know it might
seem silly since my marriage is all but over—”

“No, it’s not silly.” Hinano held very still for a moment, and then, almost imperceptibly,
his embrace relaxed though his arms still held her close. “All right. There are limits,
for now. And you’re leaving soon. I’m fine with that, but I’m done with missing out
on what I could have with you because of all the things I might never have.”

Overwhelmed, she could not find the words to express the wonder, the hope, the thankfulness
his admission evoked, so she poured all of her feelings into a kiss and hoped he understood
what she could not say.

Later, he returned to the subject she hoped he had forgotten. “They need you,” he
told her. “You can keep Kai’s room if you want. I’d like that. But Aloha Quilt Camp
won’t get off the ground without your help. It’s too much for Claire and Midori, especially
now that they’re scrambling to get ready for the practice camp.”

Bonnie knew he was right, and her conscience nagged her for abandoning her responsibilities.
Claire had hired her for a job and she was obliged to complete it. Even if Bonnie
didn’t care how Claire might be affected by her departure, Midori and their new teachers
were counting on her, and the success of Aloha Quilt Camp depended upon her efforts.
Bonnie had put too much into Aloha Quilt Camp to sit back and watch it fail—and she
and Claire had been friends too long for Bonnie to wish her any misfortune.

She let another day pass, and then another. Hinano could
have refused to let her help him around the music shop so that she would return to
the Hale Kapa Kuiki out of boredom, but he didn’t.