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Jun liked the idea of Kai standing up for her, but she doubted it would work. “Dante is like six-three and two hundred pounds.”
Kai shrugged. “I bet I could still take him. I’m fast and scrappy.”
Jun laughed against his chest.
“What did you do? I mean, after? Did you take him to court?”
“No,” Jun admitted. “I didn’t have the money to take him to court. And even if I did, I didn’t want anything from him.”
“I don’t blame you,” Kai said. “My own father left my mom, too. He was a deadbeat.” The resentment in Kai’s voice reverberated through the room. “Then my mom remarried. He was a good guy, a stand-up guy. But then they both died in a helicopter crash, so that left Jesse and me orphans.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Aunt Kaimana raised us.”
Jun’s heart broke for him. Just when he got a stable family, that family was whisked away. She thought about her own situation, about how she’d learned the hard way you couldn’t rely on the people closest to you. Kai had learned the same lesson but in a different way.
“Did you ever see your biological father? Did you ever want to?” Kai was more like Po than she’d known. She’d often wondered if Po would want to see his dad. So far, the subject hadn’t come up too much, but she feared he would eventually.
“I saw him at my mom’s funeral. He came to bring me back to the mainland. But I didn’t want to go. I went to visit him in Chicago when I was in high school. He’d remarried and...he was this great dad to them. I just... I never got over that. He left me, but it seemed like he did it so he could start a new family somewhere else. Like my mom and I weren’t good enough for him. That he wanted something else. I didn’t want to live with him. To be reminded of that. I haven’t talked to him since, and he hasn’t reached out, either.”
Jun snuggled into Kai’s chest, wishing she could take away that hurt for him.
“Really, if I hadn’t had surfing, I probably would’ve ended up some kind of delinquent,” Kai said. “I channeled all my stuff into that. You can’t be thinking about how your dad did you wrong if you’re trying to survive a seventy-foot wave.”
Jun nodded. “It’s hard when people close to you disappoint. My mom...she...she never approved of Po. She died when he was a baby, and she never saw him. Not one time.”
“Not one time? Never?”
She told Kai about her mother shunning her, refusing to have anything to do with her pregnancy. About how she’d cut her out, told her she had to be on her own. That she wouldn’t help.
“She didn’t even want to see the baby?” Kai sounded incredulous. “I don’t understand.”
“She was trying to make me strong,” Jun said, although even to her own ears the excuse sounded flimsy. How many years had she been making excuses for her hardheaded mother?
“No,” Kai said. “No, she was being stubborn, and so she died not even meeting her own grandson. She turned her back on you when you needed her most. That’s not ’ohana. That’s...something else.”
Jun tried to push herself up away from Kai, but he held her tightly. He hugged her against his chest, and eventually she stopped fighting. His embrace felt warm and good and safe, and she realized he was right: her mother might have tried to make her strong, but she’d done it by turning her back when her daughter needed her most.
“And if she’d lived, would she have ignored Po? Think of how that would’ve hurt him.”
Hot tears pressed the backs of Jun’s eyes. Kai was right. She knew he was, and yet she didn’t know how to live with it.
“My mom never made mistakes,” Jun protested.
“Yes, she did, Jun. She made a mistake with you and with Po. I can see that clear as day.”
Jun had always thought her mother had been perfect. She couldn’t reconcile what she’d done with a mistake, but at the same time, part of her believed Kai. But admitting her mother had made a mistake would mean that she’d been fallible, that she’d made a poor choice, that she hadn’t had all the answers, as Jun had once thought. It made her feel both sad and relieved simultaneously. Maybe her mother had just been doing the best she could, just as Jun did with Po. Maybe she hadn’t been this perfect person who always had all the answers. Could her mother have been just as scared as she was?
