North Star

10 | sunday morning

2019

On Sundays, we had breakfast together as a family.

It was the closest thing we had to a ritual in our household. Sundays were the perfect setup since it was the only morning we could guarantee to all be home. While our family wasn't religious, we used to go to Kawaiaha'o Church because our tutu was and that was where she had been baptized, even though it was a good forty-minute drive. Once tutu passed away, we stopped going since we had no reason to anymore, but the need to keep Sundays free of any plans remained.

Kanani was always the first one awake, so she started the coffee and made a pot of rice. Once I had awoken, I checked if we had either Portuguese sausage or spam and chopped up that Sunday's selection. (We always had both.) (Every local household in Hawai'i always had both at all times.) Together, we fried eggs and washed the dishes. Leimomi usually came down as soon as we were done and assembled all of the plates, sprinkling extra furikake seasoning on her rice. The shoyu bottle never left the center of the dining table.

Mom was always the last one down. She never liked letting us see how tired she was, but it was unavoidable. If it wasn't her late arrival, it was the clunky way in which she stumbled down the stairs, the dark bags under her eyes, or even the deep sigh she made every time she sat down in her seat. The same chair every weekend; the same chair Dad used to sit in.

My sisters wanted to get rid of the chair a couple of years ago. They thought my mom sat in it too much, more than she usually did. They reasoned that even though a chair was just a chair, it also wasn't just a chair. It held unique characteristics that reminded us all of him. So, they assumed sitting there was obsessive and a means for our mother to cling to the idea of him still being there.

Maybe it was the guilt I felt for not being as present as I should have been after he passed away, but I thought it was a shit take and I felt the need to defend our mother. Overanalyzing her usage of a chair was bizarre in my eyes. I had even asked them sarcastically what the approved daily allotment of chair usage would be so that they wouldn't put some strange pressure on her.

It worked out in the end. The chair never left. Besides all that psychoanalyzing, dumping a perfectly usable chair was just a complete waste. Dad would have scolded them for even considering it.

"Mom, how was work?" Kanani asked after a few quiet minutes allotted for eating. Keali'i ate with us most weekends, but he had work today and wasn't able to make it, which meant Kanani led the charge in the conversation instead of him.

I slathered butter on my slice of Ani's sweet bread and glanced down at my plate I remembered picking up near Chinatown when I was in elementary school. Even with all of its cracks, it still held the food that nourished me.

"That new executive officer started," Mom answered after she finished chewing. "Took all of two days for her to realize how inefficient our office is, but she works like I do so we'll be fine."

Kanani laughed and tossed her a napkin which our mom promptly used to wipe her mouth. "I mean, you do work for the government so we can't have you working too quickly."

"She sure as hell doesn't get paid enough to work faster," I commented. "Take your time whatever you do."

We looked at each other before tapping our forks together. Cheers to doing the bare minimum because anything more would require a raise.

"And Lehua is retiring on Friday," Mom continued. "So I need to bring something for the potluck." She turned to me. "Do you think you can show me how to make the butter mochi again? I can't remember the recipe."

I tried to ignore how she was the one that had taught me how to make it when I was twelve. She used to bake a lot and it would make the whole house smell incredible. Everything back then had been muscle memory for her, working in the kitchen as if on autopilot. Having it flipped to where I needed to teach her reminded me of how long it had been.