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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
End of the day
>> Around Oahu
When doctors at the Kahuku General ER released Chookie Boy Kulolo, saying he survived wiping out on that 45-foot rogue wave during The Eddie at Waimea Bay only because he was incredibly well conditioned, he knew better.
The ambulance crew had told him he was dead until a woman touched his toe, and it jolted him like electricity. He awoke in the ambulance looking up into her angelic face and bonded with her like a baby duck imprinting its mother.
Chookie Boy was her's. So it was that Chookie Boy and Meg Choy Primitivo were checking into Turtle Bay for a night so wonderful she wouldn't think of her schmuck husband Victor once.
Over at Waialua, Lono Oka'aina and Raydean Gonsalves were renewing acquaintances of a baseball nature. Twenty years ago when they were 16, after the Kahuku High FFA club dance, they'd gotten to second base.
That was just before his football teammate Bully Tufitufi started pursuing Raydean and asked her to the junior prom, and Lono backed off. Now, for the first time since last Christmas when Bully left her, Raydean was glad he had. When Lono rounded third, she waved him home and whispered "Where you been all my life?" He whispered back "Waiting for you."
At 2002 Wilder, Dr. Laurie Tang and HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes collapsed into one another's arms. Sometimes even work you love and find satisfying can wear you down. With her head on his shoulder Laurie was finding something she'd never known when she was seeing the senator -- a sense of comfort and security. And Sherlock's gentle touch was its own kind of medicine. As for Gomes, he was merely finding the last piece in the puzzle of a completely fulfilling life.
In town, Lt. Col Chuck Ryan called as he was leaving Pearl Harbor, so Fawn Nakamura and her heavy heart were waiting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel when he pulled the rented champagne Intrepid into the port cochere. Over a late dinner at the Surf Room, Fawn told him about her twin Shauny's apparent disappearance and the troubling phone call from her cell to their friend Lily's answering machine.
Unable to talk about his day interrogating the Philippine Muslim terrorist Muhammed Resurreccion, Ryan tried to reassure her, without much success. Afterward when Chuck turned and started down the steps to the valet station so she could get her car, she stopped. "I want to stay with you tonight. I need to."
"But ... your vow ..."
"I'll still be a virgin in the morning. But I'll be with you."
At her home in Hawaii Kai, Lily Ah Sun spent the last night she would ever sleep alone without Quinn, alternately praying for her friend Shauny and dreaming of the days -- and the nights -- ahead.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com