The Shade Under the Mango Tree: Between Two Worlds Book 5
Evy Journey
Sojourner Books
288 pages
Women’s Fiction / Cultural Heritage Fiction
After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home in California and Hawaii where she grew up. An adventure in which she can also make some difference. She ends up in place steeped in an ancient culture and a deadly history.
Raised by her grandmother in a Honolulu suburb, she moves to her parents’ home in California at thirteen and meets her brothers for the first time. Grandma persuades her to write a journal whenever she’s lonely or overwhelmed as a substitute for someone to whom she could reveal her intimate thoughts.
Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger’s journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don’t stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.
Months later, they meet at a bookstore where Luna works and which Lucien frequents. Fascinated by his stories and his adventurous spirit, Luna volunteers for the Peace Corps. Assigned to Cambodia, she lives with a family whose parents are survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide forty years earlier. What she goes through in a rural rice-growing village defies anything she could have imagined. Will she leave this world unscathed?
Inspired by the healing effects of writing, this is an epistolary tale of love—between an idealistic young woman and her grandmother and between the young woman and a young architect. It’s a tale of courage, resilience of the human spirit, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFMR9SG
Also available as an audiobook:
https://www.amazon.com/Shade-Under-Mango-Tree-Between/dp/B09X7CPYFD/
Barnes & Noble:
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-shade-under-the-mango-tree-1
iBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-shade-under-the-mango-tree/id1606925369
First Chapter:
August 2007
I am home.
I stand on the sidewalk, somewhat lightheaded from the six-hour flight between Los Angeles and Honolulu. I breathe the plumeria-infused air deep into my lungs. Relish the crisp warm breeze that blows my hair on my face. As I grab the handle on my luggage, I scan the neighborhood. Nothing much has changed since last summer.
I roll my luggage across the concrete entryway, pass the hibiscus hedge, and stop to pluck a bouquet of its flaming-red flowers. Its home is a vase on the coffee table in the living area. To signal I’m back. While visitors surf, tan on the beach, don flowery muumuus and shirts, and slurp maitais or Hawaiian punch while ogling hula dancers, I look forward to domesticating with Grandma.
Grandma’s house—a two-story of stained wood in Waipahu, Hawaii—is where I left my innocence.
I pause at the foot of the six steps to the trellised porch. A tinge of sadness never fails to temper the joy of arriving. Two months are never enough. Just when I’m getting used to the pace and pattern of languid days with Grandma, I must leave again. Back to the modern stucco in the burbs of Los Angeles I left nine hours ago.
Life keeps going forward, like Mom says, and I must march along with it. This summer will wane. I brush the thought aside and reassure myself: another is sure to come.
Gripping the handle on my luggage, I drag it up the porch. The house has been home to Grandma since the mid-sixties when she married my grandfather. Grandpa’s parents had built it before sugar plantations dating back to the 1850s were transformed into a town, their history and artifacts ensconced in a museum and a park a couple of miles or so from here. Before streets—including where Grandma’s house stands—were sucked into housing subdivisions of cookie-cutter stuccos like my parents’ California home. Before mango and papaya trees and an occasional lychee tree replaced sugar cane.
The Kamakas have lived here for four generations, two more than other families in the neighborhood. Yes, time marches on. And I must march along with it.
Before I can press the buzzer, the door opens, releasing a familiar scent much like the Lady Emma Hamilton rose in Grandma’s garden. A rose fragrance with an undertone of lemon. It wafts past me to blend with the salty open air.
“Green mangoes?” I say, as Grandma’s petite frame emerges from behind the door. I have grown half a head taller than she is.
Her mouth turns up ever so slightly at the corners in that familiar little smile. Her hazel eyes beam their welcome at me. It’s Grandma’s eyes, more than her mouth, that have always revealed her emotions.
“Here I am again.”
“Luna, my little keiki! Right on time.”
“Big keiki, Grandma.” I stoop to receive her kisses and hug and kiss her back.
I pick up traces of the scent of green mangoes from her hair, mixed with the lingering bouquet of jasmine. Grandma has never worn perfume or cologne. Instead, she picks jasmine from her garden every morning and tucks it under her long hair, pulled back and twisted into a bun above the nape of her neck. The first few years of my summer visits after returning to my family in California, I slept with Grandma on her king-sized bed for a week or so. I often fell asleep, snuggled close to her, inhaling the hint of jasmine from her loosened hair.
“Go, take your bags to your room and come to the kitchen. Lunch is almost ready.”
My bedroom on the second floor was carved out of a bigger one Mom had shared with her sister, Auntie Juanita. As in previous visits, it’s much like it was when I went back home last September. The same red-and-green-striped spread on the bed, its padded headboard lined in cotton printed with a Ti-leaf Haku lei—a crown of green leaves from the ti plant—large enough to span the bed’s width. The wooden desk by the window that belonged to Mom, bare now except for a couple of children’s books on top. The old, dark-brown, wooden chair where my three dolls sit. I place them there on the last day of every visit and imagine them waiting for my return.
Minutes later, I sit on a high-backed bar stool at Grandma’s long butcher block work table. The same stool Grandma fitted with a child seat when I was a toddler. The kitchen-dining room with its high, sloping ceiling is bathed in early afternoon sunshine by a skylight above it. She hands me a tall glass of fresh iced coconut water.
She continues blending some sauce with a whisk. When she’s not in her garden, she spends her waking hours at this table, sitting on a chair of cane and wood, preparing meals and snacks, managing her now-reduced household, writing cards or letters, and reading magazines she stashes on open corner shelves that—along with cabinets—line an outside wall.
The chunky butcher block is the hub around which everything happens when the Kamaka family get together. It’s cleaned, adorned with flowers from Grandma’s garden, and outfitted with as many chairs and dinner settings as required by the expected number of visitors.
I gulp a mouthful of coconut water, trying to chase away the unease creeping up my chest as I watch Grandma. She’s graying faster every year, and becoming a little more bent.
“Mango salad?” I force myself to focus on her twirling hand as she whisks lime juice, fish sauce, sweet chili paste, and garlic. The sauce releases a pungent aroma, making my mouth water.
With a small spoon, Grandma scoops a few drops of the mixture for me to taste. The sauce tingles my taste buds and I nod in approval. Her green mango salad is legendary.
She stirs the sauce into a bowl of peeled and julienned light-green mangos and scatters torn leaves of mint and Thai basil on top. She takes a pinch of the salad and tastes it.
She passes the bowl to me and I put it on the breakfast table in the dining area. “Are these Tanaka mangos?”
“Maggie came by early this morning and gave me a few. I think they fell from her tree.”
“Are they okay?”
“Oh yes. Firm. Fresh. Good lemony green mango smell. Knowing Maggie, she couldn’t have left them on the ground an hour. Anyway, I peel them. How was your flight?” She glances at me.
“Good. Good. Nice summer weather for flying. I’m starved. What are you serving with your mango salad?”
“A bit of grilled tuna and some poi.” Her eyes twinkle, lips pursing to suppress a smile.
I crinkle my nose. I never liked poi and she knows it.
Ten minutes later, we sit at the breakfast table by the window. She doesn’t serve poi. She has dug a few potatoes and picked zucchini from her garden, and grilled chunks of them along with the tuna.
From where I sit, I see the mango tree in the front yard rising above the rooftop of her house. Its lowest branches dip below the second story—a lush green canopy of waxy leaves that protects anyone looking for shelter from rain or sun.
But this mango tree has a problem: it doesn’t bear fruit. It soars, sprawls and flowers, promising a bountiful harvest. But in the first thirteen years I lived here with Grandma and two aunts, I’ve never seen those flowers morph into yellow kidney-shaped fruit. Even one mango hanging on one of its branches would have given cause for some celebration. The last four summers I’ve returned on vacation, nothing has changed.
Grandma and Grandpa never doubted the mango tree would fruit. They planted it thirty years ago, a few years before he passed away. It had been grafted from another tree that bore large green mangoes speckled with red and yellow.
But something had gone awry. The mere twelve feet of a semi-dwarf tree they expected grew more than twice as high. They waited for it to bear fruit, but ten years later, it gave great shade but not a single fruit. They would have settled for the speckled green ones from the stock into which the yellow mango was grafted. On a street where every house has at least one fruitful mango tree, the fate of Grandma’s tree is a small tragedy.
“Tanakas’ mango trees still bear fruit?” I ask Grandma before I shove another big bite of mango salad into my mouth. The Tanakas live two houses up the street.
“Oh, yes, lots. Maggie takes care of them like they’re her kids, now that they’ve all moved away, like your mom and your aunts. Especially, the big one with yellow fruit.”
“That’s a beautiful tree when it’s got lots of bright yellow-orange fruit. Like large nuggets of gold in a sea of dark green. I’ve seen passersby take pictures.”
“She keeps all the yellow mangos for her family. I can’t blame her. They’re as soft and sweet as custard. Juicy and fragrant. A hint of tartness to tease the taste buds.”
I see and taste a succulent yellow mango in my mind and wish I had one to sink my teeth into. Instead, I ask, “Can you make salad out of them when they’re green?”
“You can, but why? They’re better eaten ripe out of hand. You can peel them like a banana. But I’m grateful she shares a lot of the fat green, speckled ones with me and your aunts.”
“Generous of Mrs. Tanaka,” I say.
“Keeps your aunts from complaining about my tree. Anyway, the speckled kind makes a better salad.”
My aunts grew up with the Tanaka children who gave them more mangoes than they could eat. Grandma made good use of leftover mangoes, cutting and freezing them for smoothies or mango bread when the season was over.
By the time I changed residences the summer before ninth grade—when my parents took me back to send me to the same public school my brothers went to—my grandmother had become philosophical about her barren tree.
“It’s beautiful, your tree. Lush. Can cover the three Tanaka trees put together.”
Grandma smiles, pleased. “You can sit under it even when it showers. I’ve had many restful hours under its cool shade. Besides, it might surprise us yet.”
So far, though, no surprises. But every year, Grandma and I thrive under its protective spread of large waxy leaves. We sit on the beautiful Adirondack-style wooden bench one of Maggie’s brothers—who’s a craftsman—built for her.
Grandma’s mango tree does have a distinct function for the neighborhood. It’s a landmark you can’t miss. It’s on a corner of the main street, is taller than her house, and you can see its wide umbrella of green luxurious leaves from afar. Locals use it as a reference point when giving directions to the area.
Years ago, my aunts tried to persuade Grandma to cut the barren tree down. She smiled but told them to “leave my tree alone.”
Grandma lives by herself. During the day, she tends her chickens and a garden while opera music soars out of her decades-old boom box. She gets help every Monday from a large and pretty Japanese Hawaiian house cleaner who’s been coming since I was little. By now, she must be almost sixty. When her chores are done, she stays for another hour to chat with Grandma over iced tea, wasabi nuts, or rice cracker.
About Evy Journey
Evy Journey studied psychology (M.A., University of Hawaii; Ph.D. University of Illinois). So her fiction spins tales about nuanced characters dealing with contemporary life issues and problems. She believes in love and its many faces.
Her one ungranted wish: To live in Paris where art is everywhere and people have honed aimless roaming to an art form. She has visited and stayed a few months at a time.
Website: http://www.evyjourney.net
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ejourneywriter/
Goodreads: https: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14845365.Evy_Journey
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