True to Me - Kay Bratt Page 0,74
school in Oahu at the head of my class and then moved to Maui with my parents and siblings. I never chased the boys, but one chased me, and I made him marry me before trouble could find us. We built a house on the same property that my parents owned, and he went to work for my father. He worked hard, and we had four children. My sister also married and began to raise her family on our family land, all of us together like our culture is meant to be. Soon my sister had five mouths to feed, and the place was filled with the sound of children. The kids grew up like siblings, and we cared for them as a group, sharing the work between our two families and their very hands-on grandparents. The children were together for meals, homework, and especially playtime.” She paused to catch her breath.
Quinn didn’t know where this was going, but the woman was describing an idyllic life, something akin to how Auntie Wang had described her own childhood. Once again, Quinn felt a longing stir for what might have been had her mother not decided to leave Hawaii. The family life was so strong here, but her own childhood had been more than a little lonely.
“It wasn’t only to build strong family bonds that we lived our lives so closely. It was also for protection. Our family was met with more than its share of bad luck, but we tried to shield and protect the children from it as much as we could. Some of it they understood, but much of it we were able to hide from them. Despite some bumps in the road, most of them did well. But a few had their troubles, and let me tell you, do you know what it’s like watching your child grow into adulthood and fall into the wrong crowd? Or to see them follow some ignorant way of life—the morals and values we instilled in them just dropped by the wayside like a bag of trash?”
She continued, her voice escalating, becoming harsher, “You feel helpless, that’s how you feel,” she said. “It tears your heart out to watch them make mistake after mistake, knowing that the damage they are doing can follow them for the rest of their life. We spent their childhoods emphasizing family loyalty, and then in a wink, when things get gritty, they couldn’t care less.”
“Skip ahead, Helen,” Carmen said. “She doesn’t need all that background.”
Helen calmed down and lowered her voice. “My sister’s children didn’t give her half as much heartache as mine gave me. I feel like I spent most of my time apologizing to school administrators and other mothers, always defending my kids for whatever mess they found themselves in. You see, I knew they were rebelling because things at home weren’t what you’d call pleasant. Their grandfather was an angry man. A righteous man. And bad luck followed him everywhere he went, with much of it trickling down to those of us under his care. We all lived on the family land, but no matter that my husband was also a strong man who tried to rule his own household, my father refused to step aside and let us raise our own families. He ruled everything, and I wanted to move away. But everyone else wanted to stay.”
She paused, looking lost in a memory before she focused again. “Finally, after high school my oldest two straightened out and began to fly right. My father found a way to get through to them when their father and I couldn’t. I think it was the threat of losing their inheritance, but however he managed it,” she said, waving a hand in the air, “it worked. But that left Jules, my youngest and most stubborn child. She hated how the community judged her and the way her classmates considered her a spoiled rich kid; therefore, she rebelled more than all her siblings put together. When she was eighteen, she met a boy who came from the mainland. Noah. At first I thought it was a relationship that would pass quickly. But with his free-spirited ways and reluctance to follow society’s rules, he won her over immediately. A few months later she snuck off and joined him in one of those tent colonies along the beaches.
“But I found her. You should’ve seen her face when I lifted the flap of their tent and saw her all tangled up