It was small. Faded. Curling at the corners. A beach. White sand. Turquoise water. Big dark cliffs on one side. A little island out in the water, shaped like a turtle.
He’d turn it over and over in his hands. Like he was trying to read something written on the back that wasn’t there.
“What’s that beach?” I asked once. I was twelve.
“Makapuʻu,” he said. He said it carefully, the way you say a name you love.
“What’s it like there?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“The rain is warm,” he said. “And you can smell the ocean before you see it.”
“I know,” I said. “You always say that.”
He smiled.
“Because it’s true,” he said.
Somewhere in my childhood, Hawaii became a word we didn’t say at the dinner table.
I don’t remember exactly when. It wasn’t a rule anybody announced. It just happened. Like a draft you stop noticing in an old house.
If Dad mentioned it, even something small, like we used to eat mangoes straight off the tree, or my mom made the best chicken long rice, Mom would get up from the table. She’d say she forgot something in the oven. Or she needed to check the laundry. Or she had a headache.
Once, when I was fourteen, Dad was telling me about how his uncles taught him to throw a net for fish off the rocks. I was laughing. Mom set down her fork so hard it bounced off her plate and hit the floor.
“Can we please,” she said, “for one dinner, not talk about how wonderful everything was before you came here?”
The kitchen went silent.
Dad looked at her. Then he picked up her fork from the floor. He wiped it on his napkin. He put it back next to her plate.
“Sorry, Lin,” he said quietly.
He never finished the story about the net.
I was angry at her for that. For years.
I couldn’t stand hearing her shut him down. I couldn’t understand why she took it so personally. It was his home. His childhood. His mother and his sister and his cousins. Why couldn’t he even talk about it?
“She acts like you missing Hawaii means you don’t love us,” I said to Dad once. I was sixteen. We were in the garage. He was changing the oil in Mom’s car.
He didn’t say anything for a while. He just kept working.
“It’s not fair,” I said. “You’re allowed to miss things. She misses Grandma. She talks about her all the time.”
Dad slid out from under the car. He sat up. He wiped his hands on a rag. He looked at me for a long time.
“Try to understand your mother, Annie,” he said.
“I’m trying. I don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t,” he said. “But if you knew the whole story, you wouldn’t be angry with her.”
“Then tell me the whole story.”
He looked at the garage door. At the gray rain falling outside.
“It’s not mine to tell,” he said. “It’s hers.”
He slid back under the car.
I wish I’d asked what he meant. I wish I’d pushed. I wish I’d gone inside right then and asked my mother.
I didn’t. I was sixteen. I thought there’d be time.
There were other things I noticed. Things I didn’t understand until later.
Every December, a card came in the mail. Red envelope. Honolulu postmark. Addressed in neat, old-fashioned cursive handwriting. Kainoa & Linda Akana.
Mom always got the mail first. She’d look at the red envelope. Her face would close. And she’d drop it in the kitchen trash. Unopened.
And every December, sometime that night, Dad would take it out of the trash. I saw him do it once. I was eleven, sneaking downstairs for cookies. He was standing at the trash can in the dark, carefully lifting the red envelope out from under the coffee grounds. Wiping it off with a paper towel. Putting it in the inside pocket of his work jacket.
He didn’t see me. I went back upstairs without my cookies.
I never asked him about it. It felt like something I wasn’t supposed to have seen.
Every month, on the first Sunday, Dad drove to the post office downtown. By himself. He said he was mailing bills. We paid our bills online.
He’d come back an hour later. Quiet. He’d go out to the garage for a while.
And every year in March, for one day, he’d be different. Very quiet. Very gentle with everyone. He’d go for a long walk alone. He’d come back with his eyes red.
“What’s in March?” I asked Mom once.
She was washing dishes. She didn’t turn around.
“His mother’s birthday,” she said.
And that was all.
Two weeks ago, my father was in a car accident.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. Raining. Of course it was raining. A pickup truck ran a red light on Coburg Road and hit his car on the driver’s side.
He was fifty-four.
They said he died before the ambulance got there. They said he didn’t feel anything.
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.