Read Online The Queen of Tears by Chris Mckinney - Free Book Online

enunciation irritate him, but the voice also suggested that it was saying something important to a lot of people, while most of the time, it was saying something meaningless, either trying to guess at something that couldn’t be predicted or stating the obvious.
    Just then the cocktail waitress appeared and poured everyone a glass of champagne. Donny caught Kenny looking at her ass as she walked away. He smiled and raised his glass. “Am I going to have to toast myself?”
    Kenny laughed. “Sorry. To Donny and Crystal. All the happiness in the world.”
    Donny quickly emptied his glass, then refilled it. He enjoyed getting drunk. It took the edge off. Everything looked more round. There weren’t sharp edges, nothing around that could cut him. The world felt safer when he was drunk. Even his mother’s sharp eyes, nose, elbows, and tongue seemed less likely to cut him. He emptied his second glass and poured himself another. He really wanted to smoke a cigarette.
    After Donny finished his fifth glass of champagne, the blue and red of dusk blended into a hazy purple, and the clanging dishes and chattering voices faded into a dull hum, a mountain began to slide into the dining room. Donny thought he was seeing things, so he looked around the dining room, but saw that even all of the tanned, white faces were seeing the mountain, too. Maybe it wasn’t a mountain; mountains don’t move, instead it was a glacier slowly and deliberately moving towards them. Suddenly Donny waited for a male member of the dinner crowd to yell, “To the lifeboats! Women and children first!” The voice never came, but Donny could tell that he wasn’t the only one thinking it.
    The glacier was a man who was a combination of professional wrestler, prison movie hammer, and geology on the Discovery Channel. He was tanned and had short, curly clown-red hair. His worn aloha shirt, which had faded pictures of Hawaiian hieroglyphs, men with spears, failed to completely cover his stomach. Below his faded black shorts, Donny saw calves the size of his thighs, and slippers the size of canoes. But the most impressive thing about this man was his neck. Donny could easily imagine a guillotine shattering like glass on this man’s neck. This was not a Hawaiian Canoe Club member. And despite his roundness, he looked very sharp and dangerous to Donny. Donny put on his sunglasses when the glacier reached the table. The man rubbed his red goatee that turned into a light blond as it crept up his upper lip. Donny thought the contrast of the red hair with the blond looked ridiculous, but he wasn’t about to mention it. “Hi Sis,” the man said.
    Crystal jumped from her chair and hugged her brother Kaipo, whose look pulled more Caucasian than his sister. He lifted her off the ground and she let out a girlish squeal. He put her down and smiled. “So dis mus’ be da new family.”
    Donny shook Kaipo’s hand, or it may have been just one of his enormous fingers, like how babies shake an adult hand, then he watched him go around the table and shake everyone else’s. Donny noticed his flawless use of the old plantation pidgin English. And when Kaipo got to Kenny, and Kenny stood up, shook his hand, and said, “Eh, wassup bradah,” Kenny’s pidgin lacked the same fluency. It was like he was forcing the old language. Donny had heard the phrase “coconut” once to describe Hawaiians like Kenny. Brown on the outside, white on the inside.
    Kaipo smiled and sat in the empty chair next to Darian. When he put his forearms on the table, it looked like he was about to have make-believe tea with a group of little girls. He looked around. “Ho, dis place is like haole central, ah?”
    Won Ju laughed and said sarcastically, “Hey, this is the Hawaiian Canoe Club, we’re all Hawaiians here.”
    Kaipo smiled. “Yeah, whatevas. Jus’ because dese white guys paddle Hawaiian canoe, no mean dey Hawaiian. Hawaiian is one race, an I no mean one canoe race, not one