Free The Last Good Paradise by Tatjana Soli Page B

earned good money compared with her cousins in Tahiti, but still she resented the easy, careless lives of these tourists, resented Loren’s loafing and lechery, leaving all the work to her and Cooked while he holed up in his shack. None of their family could ever afford to vacation there, and that seemed wrong.
    She pondered the brown bottle on the shelf. Local moonshine that should knock the new guests off their feet for days, although when she had used it on Dex and Wende they had asked for a refill. Cooked said it was long past time to start making trouble. Trouble was what probably had got his brother in jail so long. Titi used Teina as a cautionary tale to keep Cooked in line. She poured all the juice into an ice-packed cocktail shaker, then held the brown bottle over the frosty canister, lost in indecision, when she again heard Loren’s sour yell for her. She was just about to pour when she heard him tell the new guests of her family’s claim to fame: Titi’s mother, Faufau, had been one of the great beauties of the islands, descended from royalty. Her grandmother had greeted Thor Heyerdahl when he landed on the shores of Raroia on the Kon-Tiki .
    A few years before, Titi had been paid by a publicist to be on the same beach when the explorer’s grandson Olav re-created his grandfather’s expedition sixty years later. Hearing the story always pleased her, but she still would have poured if the new lady guest hadn’t kissed Titi’s cheek when she held out the lei. The lei stuff was Hawaiian tradition, started up for tourism, but since Loren insisted, what the hell? But the kiss had touched her. This lady didn’t deserve to drugged, with a wicked hangover to boot, for Loren’s crimes.
    Titi had bigger concerns. Cooked was on his way to big trouble. He lectured her on how the islands were like the children of France—the neglected stepchildren—much like the two of them were the neglected children of Loren. Loren had won the islet in a poker game from an old Frenchman long dead, while Titi’s family had grown up, made love, married and had children, worked and died on these islands, generation after generation slowly forced to sell off their family lands to survive the rising costs brought by these foreigners. On top of that, there was Moruroa, the leaking of radioactive poison into the waters. Cooked’s involvement in protests put him on a police list of troublemakers.
    Like a fist, she, too, felt the pressure to fight. Newly resolute, she was about to tip the bottle into the shaker when Cooked whistled through the window to her. When she looked up into his face, she could tell he was amorous. He had placed a hibiscus flower behind his ear to lure her. It would be a full afternoon of lovemaking, and she didn’t want to risk sick guests interfering with that. She stuffed the cork into the brown bottle and put it back on its shelf, splashed some of Loren’s expensive dark rum into the shaker, swizzling with her index finger and licking off the drops as she poured. She winked at Cooked. Revolution could wait another day.
    *   *   *
    After they toasted their arrival, Loren, Richard, and Ann, still clutching her tote, made their way to a thatch bungalow, what they called a fare on the islands.
    “List of amenities—sun, ocean, sand. No electricity. No refrigerator, no phones, no computers, no WiFi, no radios. No exceptions, don’t ask. Welcome to paradise.”
    Loren plopped Richard’s light backpack down on the teak wraparound lanai and tucked his hands against his lower back, as if the minute-long walk had strained him. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Only two other couples here. Automatic upgrade to the Royal Kahuna Suite. Everyone else canceled.”
    “Why is that?” Richard asked as Ann pushed past him and walked into the room, pleased with the open-air lava rock shower, the grass-bottomed plunge pool with flowers floating on top. So this was what white-collar exile looked like.
    “They