My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
Skeletons
>> Queen's Medical Center
"I need to ask you something," Quinn Ah Sun said to the woman he hadn't seen in 16 years. "What do you know about Bobo Ah Sun?"
On the other end of the line Quinn heard his mother gasp. "You're not supposed to know about him!"
"Why not?"
Skeletons in the closet, Flo Kajiyama Ah Sun thought as she looked out at the lights of The Strip from her high-rise condo. The trick is to keep your particular skeleton hidden long enough so that within a couple of generations nobody will know it ever existed. That's the way her ex-husband Mits and his brother Sheets planned it, she was sure.
She didn't have visible, physical proof. She didn't know where it was located, but she'd always suspected there was one. She remembered the evening not long after the brothers quit speaking and Sheets, Grace and their kids left the house three doors down in Pearl City and moved to Kailua, and Flo casually asked Mits about Bobo.
She may as well have invoked Capt. Cook's name. "I never want to hear that son-of-a-bitch's name again!" he'd said. "And I do not want Quinn to ever hear it either."
The idea, Flo supposed, was to prevent arousing the usual childhood curiosity and having Quinn ask questions that didn't need to be asked about a person who wasn't a blood relative. But here he was, asking.
"How ... who told you about Bobo?"
"Old newspaper clips. Lily found them and showed me. When I asked Dad about him, he just said he's a distant cousin we lost touch with years ago."
Flo had to laugh. "Newspaper archives! Of course!" The brothers Ah Sun couldn't wipe away every trace of Bobo's existence upon the earth.
"What's so funny?"
"It's a long story. Is there anything in particular you wanted to know about Bobo?"
"I think I'd like to hear that long story."
"How much time do you have?"
"I'm in a hospital bed."
"So we'll start at the beginning. Bobo was not born an Ah Sun, I'm not sure what his real name was. Anyway, times were different back when your dad and his brother were kids, more so because they were really raised by their grandparents, and you grandmother Ah Sun was Hawaiian and followed the old ways. And there was a boy, the father had died, I think, and the mother was never around, out drinking and sleeping with sailors, and the grandmother took him in and hanai'd him. That was Bobo."
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