The first time I saw my father stand in the rain on purpose, I was seven years old.
It was November in Eugene, Oregon. The kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air, gray and cold, soaking through everything. It had been raining for eleven days straight. My mother kept saying she was going to lose her mind.
I was sitting at the kitchen window, drawing on the fogged-up glass with my finger. And I saw Dad walk out the back door.
He didn’t have a coat on. He didn’t have shoes on. He walked barefoot across our muddy backyard, past the swing set, past the dead tomato plants, all the way to the middle of the lawn.
Then he stopped. He tipped his head back. He closed his eyes. And he stood there with the rain falling on his face.
I watched him for a long time. He didn’t move.
I put on my rain boots and went out to him.
“Daddy,” I said. “What are you doing? You’re all wet.”
He opened his eyes and looked down at me. He smiled. But it was a sad smile. I didn’t know yet that smiles could be sad.
“Just checking something, Annie girl,” he said.
“Checking what?”
He held out his hand, palm up, and let the rain land in it.
“It’s cold,” he said quietly. “The rain here is always so cold.”
“Isn’t rain supposed to be cold?”
He laughed a little.
“Not where I come from,” he said. “At home, the rain is warm. Like bathwater. It comes in the afternoon, just for ten minutes, and then the sun comes back out, and everything steams. The whole island smells like flowers and wet dirt.” He closed his eyes again. “And you can smell the ocean before you see it. Wherever you are. Even way up in the mountains. You can always smell the ocean.”
I tipped my head back and closed my eyes like him. I tried to smell the ocean.
All I could smell was wet grass and the neighbor’s wood smoke.
The back door opened. Mom was standing there in her bathrobe.
“Kai,” she said. Her voice was tight. “Come inside. You’ll catch your death.”
Dad opened his eyes. He looked at her for a moment. Something passed between them that I didn’t understand.
Then he picked me up and carried me inside, and he dried my hair with a dish towel, and he didn’t say another word about warm rain.
That night, I heard them in their bedroom. Not shouting. They never shouted. Just Mom’s voice, low and shaking, and Dad’s voice, very gentle.
I only caught one sentence. Mom’s.
“I can’t keep hearing about it, Kai. I can’t. Every time you talk about it, I feel like you’re already halfway gone.”
My name is Annie Akana. I’m twenty-six. I teach second grade at an elementary school in Springfield, Oregon, about ten minutes from the house I grew up in.
My father’s name was Kainoa Akana. Everybody called him Kai.
He was born in Waimānalo, on the east side of Oʻahu, in a little green house a mile from the beach. He grew up swimming before he could walk. He grew up eating fish his uncles caught off the rocks and poi his grandmother pounded by hand. He grew up with his mother, Malia, and his little sister, Leilani, and about forty cousins who all lived within a mile of each other.
He left at twenty.
He got a scholarship to Oregon State. Engineering. He was the first person in his family to go to college. He flew to Portland in September with one suitcase and a lei of plumeria flowers around his neck that his mother put on him at the airport. By the time he landed, the flowers were brown.
He kept them anyway. Dried. In a plastic bag. In his sock drawer. I found them when I was ten.
In his junior year, he met my mother at a coffee shop in Corvallis. Linda Doyle. She was nineteen. A nursing student. Red hair, freckles, a laugh he said he could hear from across a parking lot.
They got married two years later. Mom wanted to stay in Oregon. Her mother was sick. Dad got a job designing bridges for the state. They bought a little yellow house in Eugene.
He never moved back.
He never went back. Not to visit. Not once in thirty-one years.
I was always Daddy’s girl.
I could tell him anything. Every secret. Every crush. Every bad grade I hid from Mom. When I broke the neighbor’s window with a softball at nine, I told Dad first. When I got my heart broken at seventeen, I cried on Dad’s shoulder in the garage while he fixed the lawn mower. When I decided to become a teacher instead of a doctor, which my mother had always wanted, I told Dad first, and he hugged me and said, “Good. The world needs more good teachers than it needs rich doctors.”
But he never told me his secrets.
Not the real ones.
Sometimes I’d come downstairs late at night and find him sitting alone at the kitchen table. Just one light on. The one over the stove. And he’d be holding a photograph.
Specialty: Emotional Turning Points
Rachel Monroe writes character-driven stories about betrayal, second chances, and unexpected resilience. Her work highlights the emotional side of family conflict — the silences, the misunderstandings, and the moments when someone quietly decides they’ve had enough.