This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

Author:Kristiana Kahakauwila [Kahakauwila, Kristiana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3626-1
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

PORTRAIT OF A GOOD FATHER

The photograph hung for years in the screened-in porch beside their family kitchen. Even in Sarah’s earliest recollections, the image is faded from sunlight: her father’s deep brown skin has taken on a grayish hue, the white plumeria around his neck appears to have withered and yellowed, and his black, wavy hair is frosted with white. Humidity has caused the photograph to curl from its backing and bubble slightly in its gilded frame, lending the impression that Keaka is turning toward her.

In the photograph, Sarah’s father is nineteen. He is a little thick in the middle, and his hair has already begun to withdraw from its original line like an army in retreat. But he is unmistakably handsome: his aliʻi nose, flat and wide—the nose of King Kalākaua’s line—flares slightly; his full lips are set in a mysterious smile; his chest is broad and hairless with dark, tight nipples. He is squinting slightly into the sun, and the photographer has caught him at a moment of introspection, at an angle, so Sarah can see his left earlobe.

Sarah will spend many hours staring at the photograph while she waits for her father: waits for him to cook her oatmeal before school, to figure out her math homework so he can explain it to her, to come home for dinner, or dessert, or afterward, when it’s time to put her to bed. During these hours of waiting, she will memorize the lines of her father’s neck, the way he tilts his head to the side as if falling into the sunlight, the smile that teases his lips. She will study the curve of his eyebrows, thick like hers, and the bulge of his biceps, similar to her older brother’s. She will know the photograph as intimately as she knows her own self.

In later years, when she is in college on the mainland, and her roommates ask for a description of her parents—she has brought no pictures of them, only pictures of her high school friends—she will describe her father as he appeared in that photograph, at nineteen, before she was born.

Grace is five months pregnant with their first child when she photographs Keaka. They are at the beach and she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when she notices how the afternoon light catches in his black hair and makes his skin appear to glow from within. She has a camera with her and the lei Keaka bought her that morning when he stopped at the grocery store for more of the fruit preserves she likes.

She tosses him the lei. “Wear it,” she commands as she turns on the camera. He sticks out his tongue, and she snaps a picture. He smiles, slightly embarrassed at the attention, and she takes another.

“Das enough now,” he says. She lowers her right hand and rests it, still gripping the camera, on the beach blanket. She pretends to ignore him, picks up the sandwich with her left hand, and takes a bite.

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