My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center Weird news
"This is weird," Quinn Ah Sun said from his bed, his right thigh heavily bandaged from a gunshot wound. "This is from the Star-Bulletin police beat, May 21, 1974: 'HPD Officer Mits Ah Sun reported his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38, was stolen out of his car while having a few pau hana pupus at the Pearl City Tavern.' I wonder why my Pop never said anything about this to me?"
Lily Ah Sun and her brother Laird understood. Their cousin had followed his old man into the department. Wouldn't he have shared a little advice about being careful with your weapon?
"Maybe," Laird said, "he was too embarrassed."
"Maybe. Maybe not."
"You thinking it has something to do with the mysterious Bobo?"
"Rule One in my line of work, don't discount any possibility."
Lily, meanwhile, was lost in another set of old newspaper photocopies. The first was Quinn's birth announcement (March 21, 1975), the second her own birth announcement less than a month later (April 20). She skimmed both, and didn't notice that the wording in Quinn's announcement and her's were slightly different.
It was the next reference that puzzled Lily. It too was about her, and appeared in both papers just two days after her birth announcement. What had Lily done to make the papers twice in the first week of her life?
"The birth announcement for Lily Malialani Ah Sun should have included that the parents are Grace and Shitsuru Ah Sun. The father's name was omitted."
That, too, was weird.
And then a photograph caught her eye, in the Star-Bulletin, April 29, 1981. It brought tears to her eyes because it raised long-submerged memories. In fact, Lily was there on that that day when the two sides of the Ah Sun clan were still speaking.
The photo was shot at the State Capitol when Quinn, age 6, was honored as Pearl Highlands T-ball Player of the Year, the award presented by Lt. Gov. Jean King. Lily remembered being so proud of her cousin. My gosh, he was such a cute kid in the photo, still carrying baby fat and a baby face, grinning through a missing tooth. It was Quinn alright, just the way she remembered him for all those years, that image frozen in time -- so different from the tall, lean, muscled man he grew to be.
No wonder she didn't recognize him when he'd pulled her over for speeding! And thus it couldn't be Lily's fault that she'd fallen totally heels-over-head for the handsome young motorcycle cop, and him for her, before she handed him her license and he gasped when he saw her name and they realized they were first cousins.
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