My Kind of Town
>>Honolulu Soap Co. No speeches
The driver of the faded gray sedan smiled as he started the engine. The next time he saw the babe who drove the teal Beamer that was parked in a space reserved for "Lily" she would be coming home. To him. A big Polynesian guy in an aloha shirt, talking on a cell phone, watched the piece-of-bleep car go past.
"He's moving," he said.
Half a block away on Democrat Street, the black SUV with the engine idling in front of the Local Boys Cafe and Democrat Market started rolling.
>>Honolulu Soap Co.
Happy Friday the 13th, Lily thought, hoping it wasn't an omen. This was such a big day. The day she would learn if she would take over the Honolulu Soap Co. now her father was retiring. He just had to agree with her plan to reorganize. She had been involved almost from the first. Wasn't Lily the one who had given her father his first fancy soap, and thus his first recognition? Not to mention his first big profit?
She smiled, remembering that day at home in Kailua when she was 7 or 8 and she'd accidentally spilled most of a Quaker oatmeal cylinder into a batch of experimental soap her father had brewed and left to harden in a Tupperware bowl on the kitchen counter. She tried to scoop the cereal out, but only succeeded in pushing it down into the still-liquid soap and mushing it all around. The mixture dried by the time Sheets discovered it, and he scolded her at first, but not that much, because she was still "Daddy's girl" in those days.
Because her father never threw anything away, he cut the mix into bars, used it and realized he was onto something. The oatmeal acted as an abrasive, like the Japanese scrub cloth in the shower. And something in the oats seemed to be good for the skin. Oatmeal soap sounded silly like hell, Sheets liked to say, but it sure sold!
>>State Capitol
Grace Ah Sun, the senator's executive secretary, should have been offended. But all she could manage was a blush. Contentedly married, the mother of three, Grace felt a surge of adrenaline bolt through her like she hadn't felt in years.
"Oh, Mr. President," she said, the flutter in her voice echoing up from somewhere near her ki. "I'm speechless."
"I'm not asking you to give a speech, Grace," the President said in the sincere voice that was largely responsible for his election. And then with his down-home chuckle that put everyone at ease: "All I'd like to hear is a 'yes'."
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com