with that boy, looking like some kind of ragged drifter. I know exactly what they were doing in there, and she’d never seen me so angry. I’m sure my eyes were flashing fire when I jerked her out of there.”
She paused for a breath.
“We argued, and from somewhere deep inside her, she matched me flame for flame, barb for barb. Everyone around us was afraid to step in. I think there on the beach with the waves roaring behind us, our hair whipping in the wind, and both of us trying to outscream the other, we looked like two enraged witches. I’ve never been one to hang our dirty laundry in public, but I was so mad—and she was too—that we laid out every single grievance against each other we’d been harboring since she was old enough to walk.
“It went on for far too long, but finally we both ran out of steam. When I begged her to come home, she refused. I couldn’t drag her back, so I left her there. I hired someone to check in on her frequently, just to make sure she was okay. It was humiliating. The whole town knew our daughter was down there living like a homeless person, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
“That boy convinced her that she didn’t need us or our money—that all she needed was the clean ocean air and the freedom of the water, and they could live happily ever after on Spam and rice.”
Helen took a drink of her water and cleared her throat, but it was getting raspier the longer she talked. She looked quite ill.
“Do you want to take a break?” Carmen asked her.
“No. It’s too late to stop now,” Helen said. “So Jules might have been the most free-spirited of all my children, but she was also the most stubborn. Her father said she was just like me, but she’d rather spit in his eye than acknowledge that truth. We thought once they went hungry for a time that she’d come crawling back, but she and that boy figured out a way to make a living without our help. They both loved the water, and Jules had a way with people. Soon they went from giving surfing lessons to owning their own small boat where they led scuba-diving charters. But even with some decent money coming in, they still lived a free-spirited kind of life. Finally, they moved up from a tent to a camper, but I still kept tabs on her, because despite the way she turned her back on all of us, we loved her.”
The old woman looked away when she spoke of love. Maybe she wasn’t as hard-hearted as she appeared.
Helen swallowed visibly, then continued, “When she had her first child, Jonah, she brought him to see us, and we tried again to get her to come home, to raise the boy here in a safe place with his cousins and other family like she’d been raised. But she refused. Her visits were infrequent, but she wasn’t cruel enough to completely keep me from my grandson. We called a silent truce so that Jonah could know his grandparents and other family. A few peaceful years went by, and then she had her second child.”
Helen paused, her expression lost in a memory they couldn’t see. Quinn could swear she saw a few tears glistening in her eyes, but if they were there, they were blinked away quickly.
Then she stared at Quinn again. “Her second child was a girl. A tiny snip of a thing she was, her features a blend of her mother’s Native Hawaiian heritage and her father’s Scandinavian one. From the very first week they brought her home, that child took to the water, and her father called her his little Nama, short for Namaka, who was a water spirit and the god of the sea. She was the center of their world, and having her softened them both. My daughter had matured, and her sense of ohana was coming back. She couldn’t resist the pull of family, and, finally, I felt that we were in a place of healing. After some convincing, I even managed to pull together a small wedding so that Jules and Noah would be legal and the children could have his name without complications. As a wedding gift, we bought them a small piece of property near the beach, where they built a humble house. They did nearly everything themselves, insisting it would