She put him in the album

Thursday it rained till about one and then quit, which is Hilo, and the appraiser came at two with his shoes still wet. Shane walked him around the outside first. I stay in the chair by the window because the ramp Shane poured is too steep for the walker. I told him that before he poured it. He poured it anyway.

The house is two units. Upstairs is three bedrooms and my mother's kitchen, with the window over the sink that looks at the mango. Downstairs my father closed in half the carport in 1971. One bedroom, a kitchen. The shower he tiled himself, never sealed 'em right.

He put a separate meter on the downstairs because he didn't trust anybody to split a bill, and I read meters for the county thirty-one years and then pau at sixty-two, so I can tell you he was right about that. The downstairs still reads about eleven hundred gallons a month with nobody living in it. That's the flapper in the toilet down there.

The land in Papaikou is a half acre my father left me, mauka of the highway past the old mill road. Guava and hau in there now. Taxes on it are nothing. Shane's been on the deed with me since the stroke, and he wants to sell that and the house both and put it toward Kona, and with what the school costs him he's not wrong about the money. He drives me to Hilo Medical every third Thursday and he never once made a face about it.

Nineteen seventy-nine was wet. Had rain in April three weeks straight. The downstairs was empty after the Yamashiros went out to Keaau, so Pua put a card up at the laundromat on Kilauea Avenue. A hundred seventy-five a month, water included. I shouldn't have said water included but I said it.

Kimo came on the Saturday. He worked nights at the mill up Pepeekeo, so he slept days and he was quiet, and quiet was what Pua cared about because she was already thinking about a baby. He had a truck with a camper shell on it. His toolbox was better than mine.

That first winter the downstairs water heater went. I was going to call somebody Monday. Kimo had the element out and a new one in by Saturday night and he wouldn't take it off the rent, so Pua fed him Sunday. Then she fed him the Sunday after that.

Pua could talk to anybody. I'm not like that. I rode around in a county truck with the same guy nine hours a day for four years and I couldn't tell you one thing about him except his wife's name. Pua had Kimo's whole life out of him by the second plate. The mother in Waimea. The sister who married a guy from Molokai and quit calling. I'd be at the sink with the water running, listening.

Shane came in February 1981. Cold rain that month, we had a heater going in the house, which you don't do here. Pua asked Kimo to drive us to the hospital and he sat out in that truck in the parking lot the whole night.

Nineteen eighty-two was the dry one. We were reading low all summer and Waiakea side got the notice in the paper. In August Pua took the baby to her mother's in Pahoa for a week because of her mother's hip. I brought a wrench back down to him on the Tuesday.

It went on till he moved out, so about two and a half years, mostly Tuesdays, because of his shift.

Eighty-five it rained through most of May. Kimo went to Honolulu in June for a job at the airport, better money. Two Christmas cards. Then nothing.

November 1991 was wet the whole month. The Tribune-Herald had him. Forty-one. The obituary said pneumonia. Pua read it out at the table and then she folded the paper up and went down under the house and watered the orchids.

Pua died two years ago in March. It rained that whole week. I don't do the albums. That was hers, the whole shelf of them, black paper with the little gummed corners, and she wrote on the black paper in white pencil. Under my mother it says Mama, Haili, and my mother played the organ at Haili until she died and Pua never once wrote her name, only Mama.

Shane wants everything cleared before the listing, so he's been in here since Tuesday with boxes and a roll of tape. He found the albums in the koa chest under the punee. He asked me if my blade goes in the sell pile. It's still up in the rafters of the carport. We paddled six out of Puhi Bay and I quit at fifty, and I said leave it, and he left it.

The 1982 book has eleven of him in it.

He's at our table with the rice pot in front of him and his hand coming up because he didn't want the picture. That one's before Shane, has to be, there's no high chair in it. There's one out at Richardson's, him standing in the water with Shane on his hip, Shane maybe ten months, the both of them squinting. The bottom corner came off that one, so it sits crooked when you open that page.

One in the driveway with the hood up on my Datsun and I don't know what year that was. He's asleep on the punee with the fan turned on him and the TV going, and you can see from the screen it's the Sunday golf. The first birthday was at Onekahakaha and there were eighty people at that park that day and he's the one holding the cake.

Under every one of those she wrote his name. Under Auntie Bernadette she put Bernadette, 4th of July. Under him it's just Kimo.

Tuesday night Shane had the book open on the table while I was eating. He said, who's this guy in all of these. I said he lived downstairs. He turned a couple more pages and didn't say anything. I said the downstairs was his from seventy-nine to eighty-five.

He didn't say anything else Tuesday.

Last night he came back to it. He said, Mom took all these? I said your mother took every picture in this house. He said, I know that. He was still on the same page.

I got up to put my plate in the sink, which takes me a while now, and by the time I was back he was on his phone about the ceiling in the downstairs bathroom.