My Kind of Town
>> State Library In the news
Compared to 1981 and 1974, the years Lily Ah Sun had already checked in the golden-brown volumes of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser index, 1975 was a quiet news year for the Ah Suns. That was the year she and her cousin Quinn were born --Quinn who lay at Queen's with a gunshot to the thigh and asked her to do the research for him, hoping to find clues to why their fathers had quit speaking 21 years ago.
That the brothers had spoken for the first time today was good, but the mystery remained: what had been so terrible that they tore the family apart for all those years?
As expected, she found both her and Quinn's names.
Ah Sun, Quinn Kalani Ginza -- SB B10 3-22, A C6 3-22.
Ah Sun, Lily Malialani -- SB B10 4-23, A C6 4-23.
Those, Lily knew, were birth announcements, telling the world that Quinn was born on March 21 and Lily, less than a month later, on April 20.
Lily expected to find both references, but was taken aback by a third:
Ah Sun, Lily Malialani -- SB B10 4-24. A C6 4-25.
What had Lily done to make the papers twice in the first week of her life? And why was this the first she knew about it?
>> PanAm Building
To Donna Gomes, it appeared many Hawaii folks were getting over their post-9/11 fear of flying. And she was grateful. The slowdown after the terror attacks nearly killed her young company, Uku Miles Travel, and Donna had to lay off both of her agents, Wili Kalia and Wanda Bone. And now that things were picking up again and she'd brought them back, they both came down with the flu and were out.
Well, Donna thought, there are worse things than being so busy you don't have time to think about not having a boyfriend.
She heard a knock on the door and her big brother Sherlock the HPD detective walked in carrying two plastic bags. He handed her a white bag holding a mochiko chicken plate lunch from L&L, kept the Subway bag with his usual turkey on country wheat.
"You didn't have to make two stops!"
He shrugged. "You said you wanted comfort food." He said it with an implied question mark hanging on the end. He worried about his little sister working too hard.
"Thanks," she said, rubbing two chopsticks together in a flurry of sawdust and splinters. "So tell me more about the trouble Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka has gotten himself into with you."
Donna didn't mention that the senator's aide Machiavelli Yang was also on his way to visit her.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com