Mrs. Whitmore lifted her hand off the tablecloth and slid the folded clipping from The Maui News across to her grandson.
In August 2023, it read, during the Lahaina fire, a wildland firefighter drove a county engine through a wall of smoke on Front Street three separate times to bring out families who could not reach their cars. The paper named her, and it named some of the people she carried out.
Then Eleanor, ninety years old, who had flown in from Connecticut against her doctor orders, looked at Chase. My family is from Lahaina, she said. My younger brother still lived on Front Street. He is in a wheelchair, and he could not get to a car, and he had made his peace with the fire. And this girl you just told to hang up her hose drove into the smoke a third time and carried my brother out on her back.
He asked a waiter if the poke was real Hawaiian, and then mocked the only woman in the room who had run into a burning town three times, once for his own grandmothers brother.
The restaurant went quiet. Chases friends from New York stopped laughing.
I am Leilanis big sister. She touched her plumeria lei and said thank you, Chase, and let him talk, because a firefighter who has driven through Lahaina does not measure herself by a hedge fund analysts jokes. Eleanor reached across the table and took Leilanis hand in both of hers, and Chase had a great deal to think about before that wedding.