Three Parts Rum

Here's a short fiction story I wrote about six years ago. I was never good at fiction writing...making something out of nothing...but I had to come up with something to pass my class...it's nothing much.

THREE PARTS RUM
by Aubrey Andel

I saw his tattoo before I saw his face. It was of a naked woman straddling a Harley with the words “Born to Ride” encrypted in bold, black lettering. When he flexed and released, it looked as if the woman was humping the motorcycle. He was turned towards my mother on the couch, flexing and releasing for her amusement as I walked into the living room.

“Don’t stop Fred, that’s just Mina,” my mother said as Fred turned to me and winked. “God, that’s so funny,” she said and slapped his thigh. “I bet you didn’t even flinch when you had it done.”

“I’m a big boy baby, I never flinch,” he said.

That was my second impression of Fred.


“Don’t you want to hear about my new boyfriend?” my mother had asked me that morning when she came home.

“Maybe when I wake up.”

She sat on the edge of my bed and nudged me until I peeled the blanket off my face.

“He’s a keeper.”

She told me how she met him last night at Duke’s Canoe Club where she spilled her drink on him while she was attempting to hula dance to the music of Henry Kapono. They ended up sharing a jumbo Mai tai and watched the sun set over Waikiki. As newlyweds walked by they tried to guess how many months or years it would be before they split up. She told me his parents immigrated to Hawaii from Samoa when he was just a boy. I even knew he preferred almonds to macadamia nuts and that they ended up at his place. I went back to sleep with the mirage of a large, tan man lurking in my dreams.

He was bigger than I had dreamt. The mid-day, summer sun filtered through the mini-blinds, streaking shadow and light lines across his figure. I knew Samoans were big, but I hadn’t anticipated that The Incredible Hulk would be indenting a crater on my couch. As Fred shifted his weight from one butt cheek to the other, my mother gracefully rearranged herself into the newly created nook.

“Hello,” I said cheerily.

“Hiya kid.”

“Isn’t she a doll? She’s half Hawaiian you know,” my mother said. “She gets the dark hair from her father and the green eyes from me. Luckily she got his Polynesian complexion too, God knows I’m always in need of a tan.”

“I’ll take you to Kailua Bay tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll get some sun and watch the windsurfers. Pack a picnic and chill out. How’s that sound?”

My mother curled her petite self around Fred and began scratching his bicep. She purred with excitement as I headed for the kitchen.

“Honey, while you’re in there, could you make two rum and cokes for me and Fred?” she asked in her best Marilyn Monroe voice. “Just a tiny bit of ice, you know.”

“I know.”

I made them the way she taught me: one part coke, three parts rum, two ice cubes and a twist of lime. The same drink I made for her several times a night after my father left the island to join his mainland mistress. A year earlier when the taxi in front of our apartment departed with my father in the back seat, my mother held me so tight that I could hardly breathe. She whispered in my ear, “Now I don’t have anyone.”

As I came out of the kitchen with the rum and cokes, the French doors of my mother’s bedroom closed with a click. I set the glasses down on the coffee table in the deserted living room and got ready to go to Mr. Suki’s.


I started working at Mr. Suki’s soon after my father left. My mother said to me one evening when she came home after styling hair all day at Kokua Kuts, “Mina, you’re sixteen now. If there are two mouths to feed and only one income, one mouth will be left unfed.”

I responded to Mr. Suki’s help wanted ad in the paper the following morning. I became his errand girl.

I rode over to Mr. Suki’s on my moped, a ten-minute ride away. His house was near downtown Honolulu, close to the water. He always left the door open when he knew I was coming so I could walk right in. When I arrived, he was wearing a kimono as gleaming white as a milkman’s uniform, meditating in front of his Koi fish tank. He slowly rose from the ground and turned to me.

“Ah, Mina,” he said in his calm, soothing voice. “Today you go to Chinatown to get groceries for Mr. Suki.”

He walked over to his tea tin on the kitchen counter where he kept his cash and unrolled a twenty-dollar bill.

“Here now. You take money and list and go.”

I wasn’t like Mr. Suki. I could never stay focused on what I was supposed to be doing. I wandered into a dozen stores, entranced by scarlet, char-sui stained hanging chickens, almond-eyed toddlers playing behind cash registers and the exotic scent of jasmine that permeated imported products packed onto tiny shelves. I bought myself a steamed pork bun from a toothless Chinese woman. She coaxed me with, “Yum, is so good.” It was. I eventually gathered the items on the list and headed back.

A jar of bean paste, three papayas and a ten-pound bag of rice were a lot for me to carry. I should have charged Mr. Suki by the pound like the market. He once told me about the rice paddy workers from Japan; how they labor all day long under the sun and never complain.

“What for? Is no good. Family first, sore back second.”

It was hard to abide by his mantra when I still had a quarter of a mile to walk and the papayas kept taking turns dropping from the plastic bags. My job was not so bad except for those market days when I would haul back Mr. Suki’s groceries. I had my moped but Mr. Suki said I should rely on my feet more. “It’s good for the soul,” he would say.

When I returned from my journey and walked through his door he came to me and said, “Ah, my little one. So strong, so strong.” Those were the words he always said to me when I finally made it back. I placed Mr. Suki’s groceries on the kitchen counter as he added twenty to my weekly pay figure posted on the refrigerator.

“That all for today Mina,” he said. “You go home now. You take good care of mother.”

I went back home that evening ready to take a long, hot shower. I was wrapped in my towel, walking towards the bathroom when my mother tapped me on the shoulder.

“Mina, why don’t you let Fred take a shower first? I know how long you take. He’ll just be a couple of minutes,” she said as she dabbed her wrists with orchid perfume. “He really needs to get ready.”

“I didn’t know he was still here,” I said. “Can’t he go home and take a shower?”

“He’s taking me out tonight. We’re going to a Thai place.”

She shoved a five-dollar bill into my hand.

“Here honey, don’t make a scene. I don’t want anything to ruin my night.”

She kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’ll even bring you home the leftovers.”

I waited in my bedroom for half an hour as Fred soaked in my shower.

During the following weeks my mother occasionally handed me a five-dollar bill. I noticed there was always a large bowl of almonds on the coffee table. When I opened a Barnes & Noble bag one day I found two books about Samoa inside.

“I’ll read the books and tell Fred all about his home country,” my mother said as she stroked the covers. “I think I can teach him a lot.”

A couple of times a week my mother and Fred would go out to eat at a cheap, cozy restaurant. Sometimes I would run errands for Mr. Suki after school and he would send me home with musubi and teriyaki beef to share. On other evenings, the three of us would attempt to cook a nice meal together.

“Well, the mahi-mahi is definitely burnt,” Fred said as he took a dish out of the oven with his mittened hand one night. “But don’t worry, I think it’ll taste alright if we smother it with enough of this delicious, gourmet pineapple salsa.”

My mother and I laughed as he whipped out a wooden spoon from his apron and attacked a can of Dole diced pineapple. We listened and swayed to a tape of ukulele music as we ate our blackened fish.

After dinner the two of them would usually go for a motorcycle ride. It was funny to see my mother in a helmet and boots.

“Now this is glamorous,” she would say as she twirled into the living room in her riding gear.

I would watch them climb onto the motorcycle from the window and then wave them goodbye as Fred revved the engine. They were usually gone for at least an hour. Sometimes I pulled out the photo album I kept in my closet that was full of pictures of my father. My mother never liked it when I looked through it in front of her.

“Put away that silly album,” she said when she caught me flipping through it one day. “That was my past and I only want to look ahead. Nothing good came from him and nothing will.”

The photo of my parents cutting their wedding cake was my favorite photo. My father and mother both had frosting on their noses and goofy expressions on their faces. They were really young and it looked like they had so much fun together.

As the months went by I started to place my thumb over my father’s face in the photo when I looked at it. I tried to imagine Fred there and wondered if he and my mother would ever get married and if it would last for her the second time around.


One evening, Fred dropped my mother off at our apartment after a motorcycle ride. She came in wearing her helmet. When she took it off I could see that she had been crying.

“It’s over,” she said.

She went straight to her bedroom and closed the door. I could hear her crying all night. In the morning she said he didn’t really give her a reason why he broke up with her.

“It just wasn’t meant to be,” my mother said in a cool, collected voice. “Can you believe he said that? As if he couldn’t come up with a better reason.” She picked up her bowl of cereal and stared at it.

“It just wasn’t meant to be?” she asked the bowl.

She began requesting rum and cokes again. I tried to put in more coke and less rum.

“This isn’t how I taught you to make them, Mina,” she said. “Do your mother a favor and try to follow a simple recipe.”

She went on sabbatical from her job at the salon and hardly left the apartment. She began watching television all day long, even infomercials which she always said she couldn’t stand. She would watch them for hours. She began to look even paler than normal and her diet consisted of Cheerios and canned corn.

I came home one afternoon with some food Mr. Suki gave me.

“Here, try some of this,” I said as I placed a plate of udon noodles in front of my mother. “Mr. Suki says noodles always make him feel better.”

I turned down the volume of the Thighmaster program.

“Is good because they long,” I said in my best Mr. Suki voice. “The longer the food, the more time it take to eat. Ah, when you eating, you no worry so much.”

She grabbed the noodles and threw them at the television. “Don’t treat me like a child, Mina,” my mother said as she jumped off the couch and marched towards her room. “I’m a big girl. I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

She slammed her bedroom door. I left the apartment and walked over to my friend Kalani’s house. She kept me distracted with her positives versus negatives list of the three surfers she had crushes on. Great bod, no brain; best surfer, worst kisser; great smile, lousy style.

I returned after the sun had set and found my mother back on the couch in front of the television.

“Are you okay? Can I get you anything?” I asked her.

“No.”

“The plumeria tree’s in full bloom. Would you like the windows opened?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes.”

She cradled the drink in her hands, the ice faintly tapping the glass. I walked towards the door and was about to exit when my mother sat up straight and looked at me.

“Mina.”

I held my breath as I waited for her to say that she didn’t want me to go.

“If you think the Jap can take better care of you than I can, then why don’t you just stay with him?” she asked as she narrowed her eyes. “I’m sure he has a spare mat you could sleep on.”

He had more than a spare mat; he had a spare bedroom. I moved in with him that weekend.

Our bedrooms were the exact same, furnished with a black futon, a bedside table with a small lamp on top, a dresser and a fern. The only thing different was the direction the beds faced: towards each other. I would stretch out my toes at night, wondering if Mr. Suki could feel the tension we created: the yin and yang, the tai and the chi, or whatever opposite forces there are out there that are supposed to keep the world in perfect harmony.

I would try to call my mother or visit her everyday. Sometimes she would talk to me or let me in the apartment and sometimes she wouldn’t. Soon enough I got used to living with Mr. Suki. Every morning Mr. Suki would carefully spoon out the seeds from a papaya and mix them in his tea as if they were a delicacy, a poor man’s caviar. I religiously watched for any sign of papaya parts to appear among his tufts of white hair. In the evenings when he smoked his pipe, I would try to inhale the sweet scent before the smoke drifted away like uncoiling ghost entrails.

I tried to disturb him one night while he was meditating just to see how focused he was. I tiptoed into the living room and unrolled a tatami mat in the corner of the room. I sat down Indian style, closed my eyes, placed my wrists on my knees and began softly humming, “Ooohhhhmmmmm.” He didn’t flinch. I carried out my experiment for five minutes but he outlasted me by thirty. When I returned to my bedroom that evening after finishing my errands, my futon mattress was gone and did not reappear for two weeks.

I was able to work for Mr. Suki even more than usual while I stayed with him. He sent me to Chinatown one afternoon to get groceries for him. As I weaved my way around bins of fruit and fish on the sidewalk, I saw Fred. It was the first time I had seen him since he left my mother a month ago. The two bags of groceries he carried looked like petite clutch purses against his huge body. I walked over to him, ready to slug him with my bag of rice.

“Hey Mina, how are you? How’s your mother doing?” he asked.

“Oh, she’s doing well,” I said. “She stays in the apartment all day long watching infomercials and I’m living with Mr. Suki because she kicked me out. Everything’s great.”

“I’m sorry Mina,” Fred said. “I didn’t know things were going to turn out this way.”'

“So what happened, why’d you leave her?”

“It just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. Those words drove her crazy!” I yelled. “So you come into her life, you lead her on and then you leave her, you fat fuck!”

“Jesus, girl! Back off. That’s what people do,” he said as he rolled his eyes and set his bags on a bench. “They try out different partners until they find the right one. You just wait, soon enough you’ll see. So just calm your pretty little head down because I’m not in the mood to deal with your temper tantrum.”

I threw my bag of rice on his sandaled foot. He yelped and hopped backwards. I began punching him in his stomach. It felt like my fists were kneading play-doh. I kept on punching him as he tried to push me away. He finally shoved me and my cheek smashed against a pole. I collapsed to the ground. People surrounded us as Fred knelt down beside me.

“I didn’t mean to do it Mina,” Fred said. “I’m so sorry. Mina, are you alright?”

I looked up at the crowd and then I turned to Fred and said, “That didn’t hurt.”

He wanted to take me home but I wouldn’t let him. After a couple of minutes I got up and started walking as everyone looked on. When I was out of Fred’s sight a taxi driver who had seen the incident offered me a ride home. I looked at my face in the rear-view mirror. It wasn’t bleeding at all; there was just a big, blue sphere on my cheek.

Mr. Suki called my mother when I arrived at his house. It took her almost an hour to get there. When my mother came, Mr. Suki left to visit his neighbor. She asked me what happened and I told her the same story I told Mr. Suki, that I got in the way of a boy who was swinging a baseball bat around in circles. She seemed to believe me; Mr. Suki had eyed me suspiciously.

We sat on steel chairs in front of the Koi fish tank, silently watching the fish glide past one another.

“God, they’re so plump,” she finally said. “I wonder how they would taste as sashimi.”

My mother sat and stared at the Koi fish. When I got up to go to the bathroom she said, “Mina, while you’re in there, could you make me a rum and coke?”

“Mr. Suki doesn’t have rum or coke.”

“Can I at least get a shot of sake?” she asked.

I brought her a shot of Ginseng tea.

“Ahhh, that hit the spot,” she said as she sank back into the chair.

“I bet it did.”

When Mr. Suki came back he said that I should leave my moped and ride with my mother.

“Come on, get in,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?” my mother asked.

“To the mainland.”

“Sorry honey, this isn’t the Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang car. It doesn’t float and it doesn’t have wings. I’ll just start driving and you tell me when you want to stop.”

“Okay.”

We circled the island and as we drove along the North Shore I saw a sign ahead for Waimea Bay.

“Let’s go there,” I said.

We parked on the side of the highway and hiked down the path leading to the beach. The Waimea Rock jutted out from the ocean, two stories tall and fifty feet from the shore. As soon as it came into our view we started running towards it, losing our flip-flops in the sand. We swam through the ocean in our tank tops and shorts. The climb up the rock was slippery and sharp. At the top, there were ten guys taking turns jumping off the rock.

“Look what we have here gentlemen,” the first guy who saw us said. “We have a couple of brave ladies in our midst.”

“Whenever you girls are ready, just tell us and we’ll clear the way,” another said.

“We’re ready,” we said in unison. We stood at the edge of the rock with our toes clinging to the coarseness beneath us.

My mother started counting, “one, two…,” On the count of three she grabbed my hand and we jumped. A ripping pain surged through my body as I broke the surface of the water. She bobbed up beside me with a look of anguish on her face.

“Should we jump again?” I asked my mother as I tried to fight back the tears.

“No,” she whispered. “Never.”


My mother always said ocean water is the best styling product. It adds texture and volume to hair naturally and it’s plentiful and free. She beckoned for me to sit in front of her on the couch so I could be her hair model. I could feel her breath on my neck as she tried to decide which salty chunk to deal with first. My mother twisted my damp hair into pin curls, taking a piece at a time, twirling it around her fingers and then securing each section to my head with a bobby pin.

“In less than an hour you’ll have gorgeous, wavy hair,” she said. “In the meantime, why don’t we go and get your stuff from Mr. Suki’s?”

Mr. Suki helped gather my belongings and load the bags into the car. He packed us some freshly made unagi rolls to eat at home.

“You and mother share. Eat together,” he said.

He seemed to be pleased that I was finally returning home. He bowed goodbye and said, “Ah…my little one. So strong, so strong.”


As I began taking out the pin curls, I could hear my mother in the kitchen preparing a bag of ice for me. She walked into the living room after the last curl was released.

She looked at me and said, “Perfect.”

She brushed the hair away from my face and placed the ice on my bruise. We both knew that the mark would soon disappear, that it was only a matter of time before the healing process would be complete.


p.s. I'm horrible with endings (and middles too) so if anyone has any suggestions for an alternate ending (or middle), tell me about it!