My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
Girls’ night out
>> Queen's Medical Center
The more Quinn Ah Sun listened to his mother's recollections of events 21 years ago, the more he was sure that the mysterious Bobo Ah Sun had something to do with the feud between his father and uncle.
Bobo, who owed his father a couple grand, had been back in town and was going to play cards in Waimanalo with his father and uncle, but his father said Bobo never showed (chasing wahine, probably), and then his father had surprised his mother by showing up early at the Pearl City Tavern, where he proceeded to get hammered, and when they discovered his car trunk had been broken into and his .45 stolen, he seemed almost relieved.
Within days Uncle Sheets and his family were packing up and leaving their neighborhood, and the feud between the brothers Ah Sun was on.
"Your dad was never quite the same after that," Quinn heard Flo Kajiyama Ah Sun say from Las Vegas.
"How?"
"Tight? Angry? Secretive? All of those."
"I don't remember that part."
"You were only 6, for heaven's sake. And that was when he started giving me a hard time abut gambling. Said it wasn't right for the wife of a cop to be gambling -- even though he liked to play cards with the boys. He even got his friend at Sears to offer me a job as a sales clerk in kids wear. I lasted almost a week.
"I just had a thought! What you said about the DNA test, finding out Lily and Laird have different fathers. Oh, God, I think ..."
She paused, Quinn could almost hear the wheels turning in her brain.
"About a month before Sheets and Grace were married, she had a girls' night out bachelorette party, mostly her friends from Kamehameha and work, but she invited me too. We hit every place, Scruples, Spats, Trappers, Rex's, ended up at Nick's Fishmarket because Grace wanted to hear Gary Compton. But Bobo was sitting in.
"It was getting really late and one by one the other girls left. I was Grace's designated driver and could see she was going to be in bad shape the next day -- she's not a drinker. So I tried to drag her out of there, but she was having fun, she and one other girl wanted to stay and close the place, and Bobo said he'd drive them home.
"Quinn, Bobo had come on to me in the past -- at family get-togethers. That's just the way he was.
I guess today they call it a sex addiction. I think it was insecurity, but whatever, he couldn't keep his hands off women."
"You think ...?"
"I think Grace was drunk and Bobo jumped her."
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