Queen Liliuokalani: Royal Prisoner by Ann Hood Page A

asking from the doorway.
    Maisie and Felix looked at each other.
    “Uh…yeah,” Maisie managed to answer.
    “Want some ice cream?” their father said.
    Felix couldn’t answer. He was still seeing Liliu’s face, her braids hanging down her back, the sky behind her still smoky from the fireworks. He was still smelling the hibiscuses and orange blossoms and orchids.
    “Sure,” he heard Maisie say.
    “Come on out to the kitchen,” their father told them.
    He was looking at them oddly.
    “Are you two up to something?” he asked.
    That was exactly what Mom would say
, Felix thought. And that thought made him almost cry. Why couldn’t his parents see how alike they were? How right they were for each other?
    His parents had gotten married at City Hall with a small group of friends by their side. They had an ivory photo album filled with snapshots, his mother wearing a white shift dress, grinning up at his father, who stood beside her in his trademark blue jeans and a white button-down shirt with a brightly colored tie. They looked happy in those pictures, Felix always thought. It was a sunny June day, and his mother clutched a fat bouquet of yellow sunflowers. After the ceremony, the wedding party had gone to Chinatown and eaten themselves silly at Wo Hop. There were pictures of that, too: his parents holding chopsticks and feeding each other broccoli and dumplings; opening a bottle of champagne, the foam dripping down his father’s hand; his father’s arm casually draped over his mother’s shoulder as he made a toast. In all of them, there was no sign that their love would ever end, that they would get divorced and find new people to love.
    In the kitchen, their father pulled out cartons of ice cream: Cherry Garcia and Phish Food and New York Super Fudge Chunk.
    “Why so glum?” he asked them.
    Felix just shook his head.
    But Maisie said, “We miss us.”
    “Us?”
    She nodded. “Our family.
Us
.”
    Their father scooped a ball of each flavor into the bowls. That’s how they did it in their family.
    “So do I,” he said at last. “So do I.”

    The next morning, Maisie and Felix had to go back to Newport. They kind of wished that Agatha the Great wouldn’t be there for breakfast with them and their father, but she was. She arrived fresh from Pilates, her hair in a ponytail, and a purple yoga mat sticking out of her oversize bag.
    They had asked their father if they could have their last breakfast of the trip together at the Bus Stop Cafe, the very ordinary diner on the corner of Hudson and Bethune Street, where they used to go for grilled cheese sandwiches on lazy afternoons, or plain old bacon and eggs on mornings whenthey ran out of milk or just felt like having someone else scramble the eggs.
You really want to go there?
their father had asked. He’d offered them all kinds of special breakfasts—knishes at Schimmel’s, Goldilocks omelets at Sarabeth’s, dim sum in Chinatown—but the only breakfast Maisie and Felix wanted was at the Bus Stop Cafe.
    “Isn’t this cute?” Agatha said when she arrived.
    Maisie noticed how she squeezed their father’s hand and bumped her shoulder against his.
    “It’s not cute,” Felix said. “It’s just regular.”
    “Okay,” Agatha said, giving their father a look that neither Maisie nor Felix could read.
    “The coffee is pretty bad,” their father warned her.
    “No,” Maisie reminded him. “It’s not bad. It’s serviceable.”
    That’s what he always used to say.
The coffee isn’t terrible, Jenny. It’s serviceable.
And their mother would wrinkle her nose and take a sip and say,
You are absolutely right, Jake. This is a cup of serviceable coffee.
    “Okay,” Agatha said again.
    Their father took a swallow of coffee and nodded.
    “Thank you for reminding me, kiddos. This is indeed serviceable coffee.”
    “Inside joke, I guess,” Agatha said.
    They ordered. Egg-white omelet for Agatha. Bacon and eggs for the three of them. With white toast.