Chapter 15

Hawaii was excellent, and very expensive. I spent time on three of the islands. Five days on Oahu, seven on the Big island, Hawaii, and nine days on Maui. I didn't really do much of the typical tourist sightseeing that people expect you to do. Instead, I went around looking for things that could be easily bought and sold.

When I first got to the islands, one of the first things I noticed was that, by and large, the residents weren't very active when it came to buying and selling things outside of stores. I found a lot of things that I could have bought and made a good profit selling. If I lived on any of those islands that I visited, I could easily make a good living doing much the same thing I did back home.

Several times I stumbled upon things that I would have loved to buy, especially at the prices being asked for them. If I'd had access to a truck, there was this antique cherry wood dresser being offered for sixty bucks. It was in excellent condition, easily more than a hundred years old. I knew a woman down in Lake Elsinore who'd have paid me five hundred for it, without even batting an eye.

I saw quite a few whalebone artifacts this one guy had for sale in his home. These were mostly old carvings, done by whalers, back before the turn of the twentieth century. His grandparents had been collector's, but he had no interest in keeping it all together as a folk art collection.

When I spoke with him about the carvings, his position was that most of them were amateurish looking, not as well crafted as samples he had seen in some of the tourist oriented gift and souvenir stores. I did buy up eight of the smaller pieces, paying him less than a hundred dollars for the lot of them. All eight pieces, even well wrapped, fit inside a toiletry kit I purchased at a garage sale right after I bought these carvings.

Mostly, I did a lot of walking around. I'd get up in the morning and go out walking on side streets and paths away from the tourist centers. I had no interest in seeing any hula dancers, or in going to one of those commercial luau's I kept seeing advertised.

I almost went on one of those charter fishing boats when I was staying on the big island, but they wanted three hundred dollars for the day. The three hundred wasn't for me to go out alone with them either, they said I'd be going with either one or two other people who wanted to go out fishing, and they'd be paying the same amount I would have been. It looked like it might be fun, but that was a lot of money just to go out fishing for a day.

I'd brought my laptop to Hawaii with me, and there were lots of places that had free wireless connections to the internet. I mostly used the computer to keep in touch with how things were going back home.

It was from an email Delilah sent me that I learned about Danny almost dying from having a ruptured appendix that had burst on him while he was helping carry a couch up the stairs leading to an apartment a friend of ours was moving to. He wound up spending almost a month in the hospital, mostly because the surgeon's accidentally cut into a part of his bowel when they performed an emergency appendectomy, and he got a really bad infection afterwards, when waste from that leaked out into his body cavity.

When I talked to Danny about it later, I came away convinced that he had mostly acted like it was more painful than it really was, because, whenever he complained about having too much pain, they kept giving him some kind of strong pain reliever to help him with easing it. Danny had always liked his drugs, but, when all he had to do to get them was to make a complaint, I don't think he would have ever voluntarily allowed them to discharge him. They finally kicked him out when they could no longer find any trace of either infection or fever in him.

Delilah wrote me another email, letting me know that Leslie wasn't acting like she was planning on vacating her apartment in my garage. I'd asked her, before I left, to drive by once in awhile to make sure nothing bad was happening to my house.

When I finally got bored with Hawaii, I changed my plane ticket to an earlier flight, and flew back to Los Angeles. At the LA airport, I bought a round trip ticket to Seattle, Washington. I stayed there for three nights before deciding I'd had enough vacation to last me for awhile. Seattle's weather hadn't agreed with me. I much preferred the dry air of the desert. Seattle was cold and damp, with overcast skies the whole time I stayed there.

Back in LA, I got my truck out of the long term parking lot where I'd left it, and drove myself back home to Hesperia. I'd been gone less than a week short of a month, and I figured that was definitely long enough.

Two days before I'd left Seattle, I'd emailed Leslie, telling her that I was going to be on my way back home in the next day or two, and that I expected her to be completely moved out of my garage by the time I got back to my house.

I could see her van still parked in my driveway as I drove up to my house. I can't say that her not being moved out was a complete surprise to me. I'd known that she seldom did anything she didn't really want to do. She was mentally tougher than most people, probably to compensate for being so much weaker than everyone else, physically. It was my property she was now squatting on though, and I wasn't really in the mood to put up with any foot dragging on her part about going somewhere else to live.

I'd never asked her for a penny in rent, so that made her a house guest, and thus not a real tenant. I'd also given her plenty of notice that she needed to be moved out by the time I got back from my vacation. The fact that she hadn't moved out already spoke volumes to me about how she believed that she was the one in control of things, not me. That was what had started our original problem, and I could see she hadn't learned anything, despite the consequences of her earlier actions.

I finally got myself worked up enough to go down there to have it out with her about her failure to move out like I'd asked.

"Hi, Jimmy. I see you're back. Have you had enough time to quit pouting yet?"

"I sent you that email telling you I was coming back. I thought we'd agreed you'd be moved out when I came back from my vacation?"

"You must be having delusions then. I never said I was going to leave. Why should I? I know you have some right to be mad about what I said to Delilah and Bridget, but it wasn't enough to justify you throwing such a big tantrum over. I got jealous, and maybe I didn't have any right to, so I'm sorry, okay?"

"You can't just keep living here, Leslie. It was different before, when we were working together. Now we aren't, so you'll have to move."

"Are you mad about that time I stayed over at Richard's house? We didn't do anything, if that's what you were thinking. I would never have even let him kiss me. He's my cousin anyway, so that would have been too creepy."