This Is Paradise Read Online Free

stalls, washing our hands, combing our fingers through our hair, staring at the prints of hula girls hanging on the wall. Finally, we are finished. No more hands can be washed, no more hair adjusted. Lani leans against the door, about to open it, about to leave, when Kaila says to Susan, “Hey, Sista, not my place, but. Da guy you wit’ has prison tatts.”
    “I know.” Susan says, speaking to us through the mirror. Her reflection looks at Kaila’s. “He told me all about it. He got out two weeks ago.”
    Kaila raises her eyebrows.
    Susan laughs lightly. “Don’t worry. He was just in for dealing pot. You know how it is: wrong place, wrong time.”
    “Jus’ be careful,” Kaila says. She turns and faces Susan. “You no know him. Yoa brudda no know him.”
    “You girls really don’t want visitors to have a good time, do you?” Susan shrugs. “Whatevs.” With a tight smile, she snaps her purse shut and brushes past Lani. The bathroom door swings in Susan’s wake, and we are all left staring at the empty space.

    Our final toast is to Kiana’s promotion at the
Advertiser
, and we drain our glasses. “How did it get so late?” she asks. The clock on Bar Ambrosia’s wall insists it’s one in the morning.
    How did we drink so much? How did we laugh so hard?
We feel loose and giggly, the way we always feel after a night together.
    “How did this bar get so—” Esther pauses, palms upturned as if waiting for an answer from heaven. We study the orange walls, the stainless steel tables, the plasma televisions, the chrome salt and pepper shakers.
    “Vegas?” Laura suggests.
    “MoMA in New York,” Kiana says.
    Modern. Moneyed. Mainland
. We take turns adding adjectives.
    “This bar is anything but local,” Paula Gilbert agrees. Paula is the only one of us who’s never lived off island, never left for college. She is the most local of all of us. Paula is also the only one who is married; she has a two-year-old baby boy and is six months pregnant with a girl. In rare moments, we feel a certain jealousy of her.
    As a police officer, Paula manages the rookies as they leave the academy for their stints in Waikīkī. Years ago, she asked to be placed elsewhere—Makiki, Kāhala, even downtown—but now she is resigned to her steady flow of rookies and accepts that Waikīkī is her beat, her trainingground and her kingdom. This resignation we view with both scorn and envy. We can’t understand how Paula can accept her inferior posting, yet we wish that we, too, could be content with what we’ve already attained. Perhaps then we’d have the husband and the babies and the home. Perhaps then we’d have more than our careers and our selves.
    “Anything but local,” Laura repeats. “That’s why I come here.” We nod our heads in agreement. Here, no tiki decorations hang on the wall. Piña coladas and mai tais are replaced with Manhattans. Reality in space-age pepper shakers.
    “Ain’t no Lava Lounge, ladies,” Esther says.
    “Thank goodness we’ve graduated from that place,” Kiana chimes in. We laugh as we remember our days there.
    How old is that place?
We ask ourselves.
Been around forever. Since before we left for college
.
    “Remember the time Esther’s brother was working his first beat as a rookie?” Kiana looks slyly at Esther, and we wait for the punchline, laughing before she says it. “And who comes out of Lava Lounge so drunk she can’t see straight but his baby sister!”
    “And who’s the big attorney now,” Laura teases.
    Esther hangs her head in mock shame. “Yeah, well, remember when Paula met Jason there?”
    “Oh God, that
is
how we met,” Paula says. “I sometimes forget. He and I told our parents we met in church.” Shesends us into fresh laughter. Jason and Paula met the July before the rest of us went into our senior year of college. Paula had just earned her associate’s degree from Honolulu Community. She was already talking about settling down and starting a