last summer on Moloka’i had been bittersweet. Barry seemed to relax more in the primal setting of Wailau Valley and the adventure cooled Barry’s animosity. We were using nicknames again but Barry understood we were heading in opposite directions. I knew he’d secretly hold going to school on the mainland against me because I was doing what my father wanted. And then I wondered if maybe Barry had never wanted to go away to college because he was terrified to leave the house. I figured he’d invested so much of himself in being my mother’s savior and proving my father wrong about everything that, without those desires driving him, he’d probably drift aimlessly through life. He was the equivalent of an institutionalized yet rebellious prisoner, only the home was the prison with my father as warden. The Wright family was something I didn’t want to be part of anymore and that was my reason for leaving. The pilot said the sun was rising over the Rocky Mountains. I walked over to the emergency door and gazed out the tiny window. Colorado resembled crumpled brown wrap. I wondered why John Denver got so excited about it. It all felt like a mistake— being with my father, heading east to school, going without a friend. I returned to my seat and watched my father gulp orange juice. Gramma thought I looked like him. The half-moons in his bifocals made his eyes look huge—you couldn’t tell he was Hawaiian unless you noticed they slanted. His hair was more salt than pepper and he’d slicked it back with Yardley Brilliantine. The pomade smelled like a doctor’s office. His sideburns had finally grown in. He folded up his tray and locked it into place in the seat in front of him. He shook a plastic tumbler full of ice the way a gambler shakes dice before a toss. I fingered the plumeria on my leis—the blossoms had turned brown. The orchids were limp. I took them off and crammed them into the compartment in front of me. I checked out the cabin—most of the passengers around us had their necks at odd angles with pillows folded under their heads. A few read. A bald steward walked by and took my father’s tumbler. “Say, fellow,” my father said, “what’s the temperature in Denver?” “In the fifties,” the steward said, “but it’ll warm into the seventies.” “They call it ‘The Mile High City,’ don’t they?” “That’s right, sir. It’s a mile high.” “Cheesus,” he said. We rented a Buick Skylark and drove to The Brown Palace. My father was disappointed Rocky Mountain Oysters were no longer on the menu. We both ordered trout at The Palace Arms, a hotel restaurant displaying guns and swords from the Napoleonic Wars. There were candelabras, crystal
Wright
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