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"Well, we didn't get to live happily ever after, honey--Rodney's not here," Molly reminds her gently.
The other women in the book club are all looking at Tilly as she shakes her head. "But how can it be that easy? People of my generation can connect online with potential dates from all around the world, but nobody can find anyone. Okay, everyone knows someone who knows someone who met the love of their life on a dating app, but not in real life."
"Maybe that's precisely your problem," Molly says. "You look and look and you're never satisfied. There's always the chance that the perfect person is just one more click away. It's kind of like gambling, isn't it? The rush of knowing that you might spin the wheel just one more time and hit the jackpot?"
The other women nod; they get it.
"Before all this technology," Sunday interjects, "it really was easier. Life was easier. You met someone, you liked the looks of them, and so you talked and went on a few dates. It either worked or it didn't."
"But I think Molly is onto something," Ruby pipes in. "I think it's way too easy now to distance yourself because of the electronic wall that people put between themselves. Without that, you were present. You met someone, you saw the look in their eyes, and you felt the chemistry. Remember that, ladies?" Ruby looks around the group and they're all nodding, some with faraway looks on their faces.
"I remember the first time Joe walked into the grocery store," Phyllis Stein, whose family has owned Fed Men Tell No Tells for decades, says dreamily. "He was looking for a job, and my dad almost sent him away without even talking to him."
This turn in the discussion is perhaps the only thing that could have shifted attention from Molly's story, as everyone on the island is curious about the open secret that is the relationship between Phyllis, who is in her fifties, and Joe Youngblood, her longtime employee, who has to be seventy-five if he's a day.
"I know it sounds crazy to say this," Phyllis admits, holding her wine glass so that the lower half of her face is hidden shyly. "But I was only seventeen when I saw him, but I knew Joe was the one. And he told me later that he knew I was special from that first moment, too."
There is a fair amount of scandal in this admission, but everyone remains unruffled.
"How come you and Joe never married?" Vanessa asks, leaning forward in her chair so that she can make eye contact with Phyllis.
Phyllis pats her short, frosted hair and smiles. "For so many years it seemed wrong, you know? Just the way things started out." Her smile falls away. "Oh! But nothing happened between us until I was twenty-two--I swear," Phyllis says, looking serious. "Still...it felt like everyone was judging us, and I knew my parents wouldn’t approve. So things are the way they are, and now it’s been so many years that I can’t imagine it any other way.”
“You know, Phyllis,” Molly says, “in a weird way I can relate. Rodney has been gone about as long as you and Joe have been together, and at a certain point youdogrow to accept things the way they are, for better or worse.”
“Can I ask how Rodney passed?” Sunday asks as she nibbles on a samosa. “I know it’s never a delicate question, but I think we’re all curious to hear more of your story.”
Molly looks around the circle. “You all want to hear this? Stories about my Rodney?”
Heads bob eagerly.
“Yes!” Ruby says. “We absolutely want to hear more.”
“Okay.” Molly sighs. “Then I think the next thing you all need to know is that Rodney should have never died the way he did. It was a travesty and a miscarriage of destiny, and I have never been okay with it, regardless of the fact that I’ve accepted him being gone.”
Ella is watching Molly closely; while Molly has never been one for actively engaging the supernatural, she believes wholeheartedly in its existence, and she knows for a fact that people have come and gone from Ella’s shop over the years with amazing stories and healing emotions flowing through their veins because of what they believe Ella can do for them.
“I don’t think you’ve fully accepted it at all,” Ella says, though not unkindly. She’s a delicate-looking woman of nearly sixty, and her flowing clothes and the abundance of silver jewelry she wears enhances her persona. “I think you’re still extremely ill-at-ease with the way he died, and you aren’t sure that he’s actually at peace. You talk to him everyday like he's still here.”
Every face in that circle turns to Ella with matching looks of incredulity, though no one speaks.
Molly huffs. “You know,” she says, “you might be right about that. But let me tell you what happened in Japan.”
* * *
The trip to Japan was the first leg of a journey that only ever began because of Rodney’s death. Had Molly and Rodney never moved from California to Hawaii, and had Rodney never taken the job at Maui Fish Company, then perhaps Molly's life would have gone in a completely different direction. Perhaps, instead of being a widow, she'd be happily married and living in a cottage in the center of a small vineyard in Northern California. Or maybe she'd have had children with Rodney and would now be a grandmother. Oh, the thought of that stuns her! She mostly puts it out of her brain, but occasionally the thought sneaks up on her.
But the move to Maui had set their lives--and Rodney's death--in motion.
The day it happened was nearly a blackout day for Molly. She had spent so many years trying to forget the details that over time, it became a series of events loosely strung together: Rodney, awake before the sun on an October morning; the sounds of him making coffee and filling a thermos in the kitchen; the policeman on their doorstep later that day telling her Rodney was dead. But in between the haze of early morning and the knock on her door that had changed her life? Nothing. Molly had pushed it from her mind.
As for how Rodney died, she was still unsure. There was vague talk of an argument that resulted in a punch that caught Rodney on the jaw and knocked him overboard. But the official word had been a rogue wave that jarred the fishermen--with years of experience amongst them--so hard that they'd lost their footing, their bearings, and their First Mate.
And Molly had lost the love of her life. It almost didn't matter how or why it had happened, because once it had, her life became something else entirely. The only solace she could find was in giving herself a mission and completing it. And for her, the mission had been to complete the round the world journey that she and Rodney had planned, but with a twist: to deliver a bit of his ashes to each location.
Leaving Maui for Japan had been nerve-wracking, but she'd done it. She'd traveled nearly 4,000 nautical miles, eaten food from cans, sang to herself, talked to herself, cried to herself, and finally docked at Nishinomiya port with a rucksack full of personal items and Rodney's urn wrapped up in a blanket.
The city itself was teeming with humanity, and everywhere Molly went she heard the unfamiliar cadence of a language whose intricacies she did not know. Other than simple phrases--please, thank you, I love you, my name is Molly--she knew very little Japanese. Her tall, tanned physique and sun-kissed hair made her stand out like a sore thumb. When she smiled at strangers, hoping for a smile back as a show of kindness, she mostly received curious stares or looks of awe. She shifted her rucksack carefully on her back, not wanting to upset the urn and its contents.
