Here Today, Gone to Maui by Carol Snow

Author:Carol Snow [Snow, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-03T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

After everyone left, I did what I do best: I restored order. I washed and dried the mugs and put them back in the brown plastic cabinets. I cleaned the coffeemaker and took out the garbage. I folded my clothes precisely (a skill acquired that summer when I worked in a clothing store with Katie Rothman) and stacked them in the appropriate drawers, and then I gathered my toiletries and jewelry from their piles on the carpet and put them back into their quilted cases. When I got to the anklet Jimmy had given me, I stopped cold. He’d bought it after spending the morning with Tiara, I now realized. It wasn’t a token of love, as I’d assumed. It was a token of guilt.

I picked up Jimmy’s clothes one by one—his board shorts, his T-shirts, his boxers and flip-flops—and threw them against the wall, grunting as I did so. I kicked his duffel bag as hard as I could. It barely budged.

I collapsed on the floor and cried for a really, really long time. And then I got up, washed my face, gathered Jimmy’s clothes, and tucked them neatly into the bag, which I shoved into the back of the closet, where I wouldn’t have to see it. Having handled the clothes, my hands smelled faintly of Jimmy, so I scrubbed them with a bar of the Maui Hi’s cheap white soap.

Next I made a grocery list: milk, coffee, crackers. The list was so short there wasn’t really any need to write it down, but putting everything down on a piece of paper felt so routine and normal that it gave me the faintest sense of control.

The Safeway was a couple of miles down the road, just where Mary had said it would be. It was just like grocery stores on the mainland, only it carried a lot more suntan lotion and beach mats, plus all the customers were so happy. Well, everyone except me, of course. Sunburned families strolled the aisles, negotiating over breakfast items. “But we always get Pop-Tarts on vacation,” I heard one kid say.

Inspired, I took a box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts off the shelf and dropped it into my cart. They were my favorite when I was a kid. It had been years since I’d bought them, but what the hell: you only live once.

I was about to go to the checkout stand when I saw the rack of sundresses in the front of the store. I don’t normally buy clothes in the same place I buy my milk (well, except for Target, of course), but these were so perfectly Hawaiian—filmy rayon things in all different colors. I scooped up a long blue one patterned with green turtles. It had spaghetti straps and fringe at the hem.

That was two things I bought that weren’t on my list. Oh, yeah, I was living on the edge, all right. But it was Monday, and I was stuck in Maui until Thursday night: I might as well pretend to be on vacation.

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