The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings Read Free Book Online

my appreciation would turn into paranoia, and this was before I found the note. I wondered if she was planning to divorce me after I sold my shares. But if that were the case, she probably would urge me to sell to the highest bidder and not Holitzer.
    “Just sell to Holitzer and move on,” she said one night. We were on the bed, and she was flipping through a magazine about kitchens. “The others could back out. And Holitzer is local. His family is from Kauai, comes from a working-class background. Holitzer’s your man.”
    “Why are you pushing this guy?” I asked.
    “He just seems like a good choice. I don’t know.”
    “I think I’ll go with the New Yorkers,” I said, just to see her response.
    “Interesting to see how that will turn out.” She flipped a page in her magazine. “I love that sink,” she said. “Look.”
    I looked at the sink. “It’s just a basin. There’s no room to put anything.”
    “Exactly. Gets rid of clutter, easy to clean. Sometimes the least practical makes the most sense.”
    I saw the edge of her mouth curl up, and I laughed. She had a way of addressing one thing through something unrelated. “Joanie,” I said. “You’re something else.”
     
     
     
    I LOOK AT the highest bidder, a publicly traded firm out of New York that has offered almost half a billion dollars. I’m wary of giving New Yorkers this much land. It just doesn’t seem right, and maybe Joanie thought this, too; she wanted our land in the right hands.
    I think of my father’s funeral, all the people vying for the front pews as though his death were the best ticket in town.
    “People are just waiting for me to die,” he told me one day. We were sitting in his back room; he liked to rummage through his books, where he kept newspaper clippings.
    “Keep living,” I said.
    He flipped through a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and pulled a clipping from the pages to read to me: “‘A heavy downpour of rains reached a crescendo just about the time Princess Kekipi died. The Hawaiians said when rain fell at the time of a person’s death or funeral, Kulu ka waimaka, uwe ’opu, which means “The tears fall; the clouds weep.” The gods mingle their tears of affection with those who weep in sympathy and aloha.’
    “It rains in November all the time,” he said, placing the clipping back in the book. “People were just waiting to get their hands on that land. They couldn’t, and now they’re waiting for me.”
    It must be strange to know that people are waiting for you to die, and now the twenty-one beneficiaries don’t have to wait any longer because my father is gone. I want to go with Holitzer since he’s local, but choosing a higher bid from an outsider may make for a smoother transaction devoid of lawsuits. I don’t want to have to deal with this again further down the road.
    I look at everything. I even try to decipher documents and letters from 1920, imagining what two people I’ve never met would want. The princess, the last in the royal lineage. My great-grandfather, that frisky white boy. What a scandal they must have caused. What fun they must have had. What love and ambition! What do you want, you lovebirds, you rebels? What do you want now?
    I look at Holitzer’s portfolio and see exclamation points surrounding his name and think of Joanie going through all of my work. Passages are underlined for me with notes in the margins. I press my finger on a smiley face. Then I reach over to her side of the bed and open a koa box she keeps on her nightstand. The only thing in there is a necklace, a silver chain with a charm in the shape of a lopsided heart. I gave this to her years ago. She never wears it. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I get up and continue to look through her things—purses, shoe boxes, drawers, and pockets. Then I go to Alex’s room. Something in me needs to be quenched.
    I look through my eldest daughter’s drawers, for divorce papers, perhaps. I look