“Skydiving?” Pops says. “You’re crazy, mate.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Josh says.
After we go and get our stuff from Mr. Orange and settle into the tiny twin bed guest room at the end of the house, Uncle Robbie invites Josh to sit outside with him while I’m talked into helping Aunt Shelley and my grandfather with the hāngi preparations.
Our hāngi are held on the beach at Bland Bay, even though traditionally they’re held on a marae. I know a few of the neighbors probably started earlier today. Basically you dig a pit in the sand, start a fire, and then place hot stones on top. The stones heat up for hours and hours, then the food is added. Right now we’re preparing wild boar, lamb, mussels, kumara, potatoes, zucchini, and pumpkin. Then you cover it all with sand (naturally the food has been wrapped in aluminum foil) and the food cooks for a long time. By the time the meal is ready, everyone has been on the beach for a while, having a few laughs and drinking the night away. That’s why Auntie Shelley is preparing snacks; it’s going to be a long night.
“So Gemma,” Pops says while he cuts through the pork with a hefty knife.
“Mmmm?” I muse, pulling the disgusting hairy ends off the mussels. Blah.
“I had a talk with Jolinda the other day,” he says.
My heart starts to speed up a bit. “Oh yeah?”
“She told me you lost your job.”
I exhale sharply through my nose. “Yeah. That sucked.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do?”
I’m silent for a few moments, concentrating on the mussels, though I can feel Pops and Auntie Shelley’s eyes on me. “No,” I eventually say. “I guess try and start from scratch.”
“Personal training and all that?” he asks.
I nod. “Yeah. I guess. I mean, what else can I do? That’s all I know.”
“That’s not all you can do, Gem,” he says. “You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re only twenty-two years old. You’ve been out of high school for, what, four years? That’s nothing. You’re a baby.”
“I am not a baby,” I say, about to give him a look but remembering to rein in my feelings and show my respect at the last minute.
“Aye, I know that. What I’m saying is, you’re young. No one has their stuff together at your age. Believe me, I didn’t know anything at that age. It took years to know what I wanted, and years after that to know who I was. Take it from me, I’ve been around. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” he says pointedly. “I can tell. You’ve always been hard on yourself. Over time, it makes you hard. Get my drift? You’ll be all right, though, if you believe you’ll be all right.”
“Has my whole family banded together to give me pep talks?” I ask, giving the two of them incredulous looks.
“We’re your whānau and we’re worried, that’s all.”
“You never seemed all that worried before.”
He smiles calmly at me. “We’ve always been. Maybe now you’re finally seeing it.” He whacks his knife into the pork. “What was that saying again? When the student is ready the master will appear?”
“Sounds very Karate Kid.”
He laughs. “Gemma, you aren’t old enough to remember that movie. That’s how young you are.”
“Here,” Auntie Shelley says, pushing me gently out of the way to take over the mussel duties. “Go wash your hands and take the food out to Robbie and Josh.”
“Now who’s the pushy one?” I point out but gladly oblige, eager to run away from the serious grandfather talk. I go into the sunshine where Uncle Robbie and Josh are sitting in wooden chairs and staring at the bay and smoking, Barker spread out on the grass.
“Gemma, what’s wrong with you?” Uncle Robbie asks me as I bring over the tray of biscuits and fruit, setting it down on the driftwood table between the chairs.
“What?”
And then I see that he’s not smoking a cigarette at all but a joint and passing it to Josh, who puffs back like an old pro.
“Josh here tells me this is the first New Zealand grass he’s smoked this whole trip,” he says. “You’ve been driving around our islands in a VW bus, listening to Pink Floyd, and you haven’t even had a spliff? You’re a disgrace to our culture.” But he chuckles. Josh only grins at me happily.
I give Uncle Robbie a look. “Well, I guess he needs to work up an appetite if he’s going to the hāngi tonight.”
“You ain’t wrong, girl,” he says as I sit on the arm of Josh’s chair. Josh wraps his arm around me, blowing smoke in the other direction.
I playfully pull at his hair and he momentarily closes his eyes in pleasure. “Is my uncle being nice?” I ask, shooting Uncle Robbie a wary look.
“Yup,” Josh says. “I’ve been filling him in about the trip.”
“Oye, Gemma,” he says, adjusting his baseball cap, “Josh here tells me that you had to give away all my old Penthouse magazines. Is that true?”
I eye Josh and grimace. “Yes. And I don’t regret it for a moment.”
“All right, all right,” Uncle Robbie says, relaxing back in his chair. “I thought maybe he was spinning a yarn and keeping them for himself.”
This conversation has the ability to get all sorts of weird, so I get up.