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“I don’t know...”
Kai grabbed her hand. Electricity shot up her wrist. She glanced at his strong hand on hers.
“Don’t say no. Just think about it, okay? Take two days.”
Jun wanted to say no. So much about it seemed perfect, which was why a small part of her screamed, It’s too good to be true!
And yet Jun found herself nodding.
“Okay, I’ll think about it.”
* * *
“WHAT’S TO THINK ABOUT?” Jun’s sister, Kiki, said, as she picked up her toddler daughter and held her on one hip. “He’s offering day care and more money than you’ve ever made. And you’ve had a crush on him for a year.”
“I have not.” Jun crossed her arms and leaned back against her older sister’s kitchen counter in her small house near Hilo, about an hour away from Jun’s apartment. Her heart beat a little faster in her chest, making her wonder if she was telling the truth. “He saved Po’s life. I’ve just been trying to figure out how to pay him back.”
“Take the job, then,” her sister said, shrugging as she stirred chicken stir-fry in an oversize wok on the stove. She took a sip of her iced tea. “What? Afraid you’ll fall into bed with him before the first week is up?”
“Kiki!” Jun instinctively glanced at Po, worried he’d overheard, but he was out of earshot, busy playing awful music on his cousin’s baby electronic keyboard, shaped like a smiling Cheshire cat, with the ivories as teeth. He was singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and pounding ruthlessly on the keys. His cousin, two-year-old Rose, squirmed to be let down, and so Kiki put her on the ground. She tottered around “helping” by dancing and shrieking in delight.
“Oh, come on. He can’t hear us, and even if he did, he’d have no idea what we’re talking about.” Kiki tossed an oven mitt on her countertop. “Your problem is you’ve been in mommy mode far too long. You need to think about your whole self. You’re a woman, too, not just a mommy.”
“I’ll have plenty of time to think of that later.” Jun shook her head. “Like when Po is eighteen.”
Kiki sputtered a derisive laugh. “You’ll be shriveled up and dried out by then.”
“Kiki!” Jun slapped her sister’s arm.
“You know I’m right.” Kiki bustled over to the refrigerator and pulled out ingredients for a salad. She handed the lettuce, tomatoes and carrots over to Jun, and immediately she knew it would be her turn to wash them, Kiki’s to cut. She ran the lettuce under the sink and briskly shook it out.
It was no surprise Kiki worried about how much Jun was getting laid. Kiki had always been more into going out and having fun when they were younger. She’d been the rebel who butted heads with their tiger mom for years: getting a tattoo, coming home drunk, showing up with a new boyfriend every month. Jun had been the picture-perfect daughter with the impeccable grades and dreams of going to med school, and yet, irony of ironies, Jun’s one drunken mistake ended with her pregnant at nineteen. And now Kiki was the one who’d gone to college, come out the other side a nurse and had a doting husband, the cozy house, the nice green lawn, while Jun had had to drop out of college and work odd jobs to support Po.
Jun still remembered her mother’s face when she told her she was unmarried and pregnant at nineteen. Her mother had reared back and slapped her hard across the face. If she thought about it, the blow still stung. Her tiger mom, so angry, so completely rigid about her rules, hadn’t even come to the hospital when Po was born. Jun felt her mother had abandoned her then, and when a sudden heart attack took her six months later, it was more like a formality.
“You need to stop living like a nun,” Kiki said as Jun handed her freshly washed pieces of lettuce that she broke off by hand and tossed into a waiting teak bowl. “Po needs a father. All the research says that boys with single moms are at a disadvantage. You don’t want Po to be a statistic, do you?”
The more Kiki had settled down into her white-picket-fence life, the more judgmental she’d gotten, a quality Jun liked less and less the older they both got.
