His words found their mark, better even than he thought they would. Allie suddenly looked as if she might slap him straight across the face.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she ground out, eyes blazing, hands balled into fists at her sides.
“I know you didn’t come to her funeral. What kind of granddaughter does that?”
Allie looked stricken, as if he’d slapped her right across the face. The pain was evident, and Dallas was surprised to see it. He hadn’t thought Allie cared, one way or another. Now, seeing her face, he realized he was wrong. But it was too late to take back what he’d said. The words hung between them like a barbed-wire fence.
Allie said nothing, just turned her back on him and stalked away. He almost called out to her, but something in the way she rigidly moved away from him stopped him cold.
ALLIE FURIOUSLY SWIPED at the tears on her face. She wasn’t the one who’d abandoned her grandmother. When had Grandma Misu visited, even once, in the twenty years Allie and her mother had struggled on the mainland, moving from one job to the next? What had her grandmother ever done for her besides the annual birthday and Christmas cards she got every year, sometimes weeks late because they were sent to an old address?
Sure, she felt bad about missing the funeral. She should’ve gone, should’ve somehow managed the heroic strength to put aside her heartbreak over Jason and just shown up, but, honestly, she’d never asked her grandmother for this land. She had never asked her grandmother for anything. How could she? She lived an ocean away in a different time zone. She knew her grandmother loved her, knew that she hadn’t been swimming in cash, but still. Part of Allie felt as if it was just one more person who wasn’t there when she needed them most.
Long ago, before Allie’s father died, Allie had been the apple of Misu’s eye. That was what she remembered—a doting grandmother who sewed her clothes and played endless rounds of doll tea parties on her breezy veranda. But the car crash had changed all that.
Allie still remembered the screech of tires, the sudden crack of metal and glass like a clap of thunder ripping apart the sky. The car accident had taken her father’s life and altered hers forever. One of the therapists she’d seen once had called it survivor’s guilt. But Allie thought they should just speak plainly: the accident had been her fault. She knew the truth. Her mother knew it. Grandma Misu knew it. If Allie hadn’t been in the backseat of the car that day, her father would still be alive. She’d been the reason he’d swerved into the other lane. Allie wouldn’t have spent a childhood moving from town to town, her mother chasing whatever low-paying job she could find.
After the accident, everything had changed. Grandma Misu changed. Her only son, dead. She wouldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t even hug Allie goodbye that morning she and her mother left.
Allie blinked fast, pushing away the memory. Dallas had it all wrong. Allie hadn’t abandoned her grandmother; her grandmother had left her first. Not that she blamed her. Allie had paid the price for the car accident: she’d grown up largely alone.
It was why she’d fallen so hard for Jason. He had a huge family, and they all lived near him in Chicago. When she’d met them, a big Irish clan that got together every Fourth of July and nearly every other holiday, she felt like at last, she was part of a family. A real family. If she was honest with herself, she missed Jason’s sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles even more than she missed him.
She sat on one of the bamboo chairs on her grandmother’s porch, staring off toward the rooftop of Kaimana’s house, just visible above the coffee trees in the distance. She’d have to go talk to the woman sometime. She hadn’t seen Kai’s aunt in nearly twenty years. She’d been her grandmother’s best friend. She held the paper in her hand, the release paper she’d dug out of her copy of the will, the one Kaimana would have to sign to let Allie sell. She’d love to see Dallas’s face after she managed to get it signed.
She thought about Dallas and then felt a flash of anger once more. She had no idea how he’d wormed his way into her grandmother’s good graces, but Allie didn’t trust him, and it had nothing to do with Jason or her dislike of men at the moment. Dallas was up to no good.
Allie pulled herself to her feet. It was time to talk to Kaimana, see if she’d be open to getting this over with quickly.
She walked down the path of coffee trees and marveled at the bright coffee berries hanging from the branches. Many had turned from green to orange. The breeze brought the smell of the ocean and the raw scent of leaves in the sun. A red bird flew by, landing on a nearby branch. A bright orange, almost red, berry fell to the dirt near Allie’s feet, and she was overcome with a sudden memory of her and Kai playing tag in the thick foliage. She’d nearly collided with her father’s ladder, where he had climbed up high, basket dangling from his forearm as he picked coffee cherries. He’d smiled down at her, a berry dropping from his nearly full container.
“Careful, I don’t want a broken leg, now,” he’d warned her, half teasing, a twinkle in his eye as he grinned, showing off the big dimple in his left cheek.
Allie stopped, the memory vivid as it washed over her. She thought she’d long since cataloged every last image she had of her father. But this one was new. She held the hard berry between her fingers and rolled it, just like she’d done when she was five. She stood awhile in the same spot, waiting for something more to come to her, but it didn’t. That was what memories of her father were like: fleeting.
Like all the men in her life, she mused, thinking about Jason. No pity party, Allie. No time for that.
She glanced at the nearly red cherry in her hand and studied it.
How did it become that brown split bean she’d seen in countless bags of coffee lining store shelves?
She had no idea. Allie liked coffee, okay, as long as it was loaded up with enough sugar and cream that she could barely even taste the coffee bean. Never even had a cup of Kona that she remembered. Funny, she thought. Her father had loved coffee, claimed no other coffee on earth rivaled the richness of Kona. The dark, fertile soil made by the volcano made it so good, he’d said.
She’d never learned to drink coffee straight like he did. Hers was always laden with vanilla syrups and milk, mocha or caramel drizzle. She rolled the red berry between her finger and thumb, thinking as she walked.
The cool breeze coming down from the mountain caressed her bare shoulder. Clouds rolled in off the hillside from seemingly nowhere. A big raindrop splashed in the black dirt in front of her. Odd, she thought, since to the south the sky was a clear blue. Guess it was a tropical shower. She hurried her pace and came to an open clearing, where a bright blue house stood. Where Kai had grown up. It had been painted since she’d been there last, and the porch furniture was different, but she was surprised by how familiar it seemed. She remembered the big mango tree sprouting up in the yard. She and Kai would climb it daily and see who could pick the fruit from the highest branches.
Another raindrop fell, followed by several others, plunking hard in the nearly black lava soil. She barely made it the hundred or so feet to the porch, before the rain came down in sheets, blanketing the rows of Kona coffee trees behind her in warm tropical rain. She shook raindrops from her hair as she eyed the front door. Bright pink-and-white tropical flowers grew near the porch. A huge bird of paradise rose up from the edge of the porch step, a magnificent flower growing like an ordinary marigold.
She rapped hard on the door. Seconds later, a heavyset woman with warm eyes and thick black hair, a silver streak running through it, opened the screen door. Allie recognized the familiar smile. She wore her same old flowered muumuu with a shiny dark macadamia-nut necklace. Besides the streaks of gray in her hair, she had aged little