Margaret Dunn
Fiction
Lani and Jo. Jo and Lani. Lani the dashboard doll and Jo the driver. Jo who was given the dashboard doll and named her Lani. Lani, who has a straw skirt and tapioca skin and springs between her torso and her hips and Jo, Jo who forgets her turn signals, who sucks cherry pits beneath her tongue, who smokes blunts and clove cigarettes and taps the ash into the console, or out the open window, but not when they are in the reserve, in the low, wet, green of the reserve, and not when there are families in the backseat. Freckled mothers and young sons, children who wear pajamas and who are still asleep. Children who want to go to the hotel, to go back home, want to just go back. Sometimes there are no children. Sometimes it is just a man and a woman, or sometimes a few women, a few men. Tonight it is a man, a woman, and their child: a daughter in a sea-colored dress. She clambers over the backseat and asks her father, in the passenger, for his phone. To pass it, he must take his hand off Jo’s thigh. It has happened before and will happen again.
Lani knows the signs that lead to the Big House.
ʻŌmao Park 2 Miles
Injured? Call Frank, Esq
ʻŌmao Park ½ Mile
She sees them on the other side of the road, as one would leaving, because she faces the wrong direction. Still, she sees lots of things this way, like men squeezing Jo’s thigh. After passing the phone, the man’s palm finds its way back, and Lani sees and sees the woman see. The woman’s neck is long and white. She touches it, then looks at her lap. Jo slows the car in front of the Big House. The man opens his door; the woman opens hers. The daughter leans over the console toward Lani. Her hand is grubby and warm around Lani’s torso. Jo doesn’t know that the woman knows. She didn’t see what Lani saw. The woman hurries up the steps of the Big House. The man waits for his daughter.
Jo loosens the girl’s fingers, then rests them on Lani’s hips.
—There you go, she says. Now she’s dancing.
***
Jo’s father is Dutch and her mother is Hawaiian. That makes Jo half Hawaiian. You are a whole Hawaiian, her mother says, you are not half of anything. Her mother says: Elbows off. Two hands on the wheel. This is she, not her. Her mother works at the Big House, too, and at night they drive the van inland to the split-level they share. Because her mother has worked at the Big House since she was pregnant with Jo, they’re allowed to use the car like this. It’s basically Jo’s van. Jo and Lani’s.
—Lani? her mother says. You may as well have named her Moana.
***
Mostly Jo brings guests to and from the airport. These guests wear soft, shapeless clothing and those departing don’t make conversation the way those arriving do. Today a mother and son. The mother asks about the traffic and the construction and the noise while the son looks at Lani and adjusts his sweatpants. ʻŌmao Park ½ Mile. When Jo pulls up to the Big House, other workers are there with leis and frothy, citrus drinks rimmed with salt and cuts of lemon. One of the junior managers, Gabe, leans against the side of the van and asks Jo to come to the office. Gabe has a wispy beard and wears a polo that is a darker, more serious shade of blue than Jo’s.
—But I’m supposed to do a pickup, Jo says.
—It’s been re-assigned.
Jo pulls the van around back and checks the gas and wipes ash from the console with a eucalyptus-scented wipe and blots her skin with blotting paper. She is confused, yes, as to what this could be about. Jo didn’t see what Lani saw.
***
When Jo is upset, she drives out into the reserve. The air is hot and wet, loud through the open windows, and the hills are shaped like tongues, empty except for overgrown hopbush and pukiawe, long green leaves that slap the fenders and glass as Jo takes the curves quickly, too quickly, with the radio going—traffic and weather, honk to keep the country country, you’re listening to 97.1—and shutting it off, the road easing out into a straightaway so cars can haul boats to the lake, though Lani has never seen a boat here, and they come often, past the signs announcing distance to the water, though Lani only sees the backs of them now—rusted, colored in streaky tendrils of graffiti. Jo brakes so hard it makes Lani shake and Jo’s hands are shaking, too, as she reaches into the glove compartment—to a shell pink pill tin, pinching out a blunt and resting it between her lips as she fiddles with a spark wheel. Lani cannot see the wide, flat water in front of them but can see the road they came down: cluttered, branch-filled, and then the flash of the motorbike among the koas, ridden by a man in a dark blue polo, a darker, more serious shade of blue than Jo’s, that pulls up alongside the van. Gabe yanks at the door of the passenger seat, and for a moment, Jo is not going to unlock it, but then she does, and he slides in and is breathing hard.
—Fuck off, Jo whispers.
—If you’d said that to the guy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Gabe wears a puka shell necklace below a shark tooth necklace below a puka shell necklace and spends his days untangling one necklace from the other. He’s fifty and overly sunned, with wrinkles that curl in around his eyes and lips.
—You wanted me to say that? Jo asks. With his wife and kid in the car?
—You could have told management what had happened, and we could have spoken to him privately. Some part of me feels like you kind of liked it.
—Fuck you, Gabe. Maybe I didn’t complain because I thought the guy would tip better. It’s not like you guys are paying me anything.
—I’m sorry. I’m being a dick. I just don’t like someone treating you like that.
They are quiet, then, and then Gabe is touching her shoulder and Jo is letting him, kneading at the skin, her eyes closed, and then their lips come together, softly at first, and then harder, with a glint of tongue, and Gabe is pulling her shirt off, and then his own, to where his chest is spotted with sun damage, and he’s draping his polo over Lani, the world going dark—not dark but navy, a serious blue. The outlines through the polyester, one body on top of another.
***
Lani knows she is beautiful. Lani knows what she looks like because she knows what her sisters look like. Twelve of them at the airport boutique, arranged in two lines of six, all with one arm raised and the other dropped. A lei and coral bikini and tidal-blue eyes, ankles swarmed in plumeria. Lani has round, large breasts that slope away from her while Jo’s are flat. It doesn’t help that Jo is always slouching, whereas Lani has a dancer’s posture—shoulders back, the neck of a bird. Sometimes she feels sorry for Jo and her peach pit-like breasts. Likely Jo inherited them from the Dutch half. She is not a whole Hawaiian, like Lani, no matter what Jo’s mother says.
***
ʻŌmao Park 2 Miles
On the drive to the Big House, Jo does not tell her mother about Gabe in the reserve or about the man or about the man’s hand on her leg. Jo’s mother has sciatica that makes it hard to work. Lately she only goes to the Big House once a week. She rubs menthol cream on her lower back and then the van upholstery smells of it. Jo has to plug an air freshener called sea foam breeze.
Injured? Call Frank
ʻŌmao Park ½ Mile
Men and women line the sides of the road, some standing, others in lawn chairs. The bubble letters of the signs get smaller toward the edge, squeezing, some dropping to the space below. Honk to keep the country country. Jo would honk, but she’s in the van with BIG HOUSE written on the side. Instead she lowers the radio to hear others honk. The Big House has asked her to have the radio playing so she can hear the traffic announcements and adapt routes. Because of this, and because of the new construction, the air is filled with jack hammering and ads for the new Nissan Ultima—twenty-eight hundred down, classic hits and modern country, come to Wash and Lube, 1877CARS4KIDS. Maui is rebuilding, visitors help pay for that, so why pass a bill that costs jobs? Classic hits and modern country—and Jo’s mother is rubbing her temples, asking Jo to turn down the volume, to close the windows. There are plenty of ways to spend money but few ways to make it, here on the island. With Jo’s mother’s sciatica, changes have to be made, tight belts tied tighter. Jo asks for more shifts but Gabe insists he can’t give her preferential treatment, let alone act like he knows her. She combs the seats of the van for coins. Soon, Jo gets another job helping older women in her neighborhood, who have wrist and joint and tendon pain, like her mother. Jo shuttles them to appointments in town. These women all have faces like canyons. Lani likes these women. Most of them are native, like her, whereas Jo is not. There is no money here, the women say. The whole island is becoming an Airbnb, and there is no money for those who want to live here, and not rent their homes to a family from Pasadena.
Lani knows Jo believes money is a problem. Jo’s mother tells her to ask her father for help. She calls him, then calls again. He never answers.
Jo’s father had been the one to purchase Lani at the airport. It was the first and last time Lani saw him. He wore a collared shirt and picked her out from all the others. His daughter had turned sixteen a few months ago, he told the girl at the register, and could finally get her permit, so this would be a good gift, did she think so?
—You can get it at fifteen, here, the girl told him.
—Oh, he said. His teeth were stainless. I wouldn’t know.
***
Two men. One chinless, the other with jellyfish welts on his legs, poking out from beneath the lip of his shorts. Jo drives them to dinner at a restaurant known for pink snapper and its view of the sea. The two men talk to Jo on the way, telling her about themselves, then asking her things in return. They are from Los Angeles. They like Chambord. Does she like Chambord? It’s a black raspberry liqueur, good with gin and mussels, best with clams. She will have to try some. The chinless man is older, and he works for the other as his agent or manager, something like that, because the younger is an actor. The chinless man wants to show him a good time and takes it personally when Jo says no, the stereo can’t go any louder, no, the roof doesn’t open. She will have to come and visit them in Los Angeles, the younger man says, with their long, hot highways. Will she be the one to pick them up? What will she do in the meantime? Does she want them to order her boxed pink snapper to go? The two men laugh at that—boxed pink snapper—but do bring it, in a styrofoam container, after dinner.
—How was the Chambord? Jo asks as the van eases back onto the highway.
—They didn’t have it, the younger replies. I think there’s some at the mini bar at our villa, though.
—How was the sunset, then?
—It looked flammable.
—It looked fuckable, the older nods.
The men are staying in a private bungalow at the edge of the Big House property. It’s a low, flat-roofed structure outfitted with floor-to-ceiling glass. The road there turns to gravel that makes Lani shake.
—I’d like to see you dance like that, the younger man says.
—Oh, yeah. She just makes me laugh, Jo replies.
—Do you want to come in? He asks as the car slows. We can smoke some weed.
—Oh, that’s nice of you, Jo puts the car into park. I’m not allowed to fraternize with guests.
The younger man licks his lips and climbs out. The older roots through his wallet and passes Jo a few bills.
—Jesus Christ, she says. This is too much.
—There’s more where it came from, the older man says. Come in and hang out. Eat the snapper before it goes bad.
***
Jo gets back to the van in the wet, early hours of the morning. Lani had watched the sun rise—white coming through the banyans, illuminating the algal scrim and the mayflies drifting on the surface of the pool. Jo is breathing heavily. Top unbuttoned, her bra in her hands. Clasped between the cups is a wad of cash.
***
Jo goes back to their bungalow that night, and the night after. The next week, after those men have left, friends of theirs come, and they request Jo as their driver. These men have receding hairlines and wallets made from alligator skin. They like Jo. Some nights Jo joins them in the pool or the bungalow, then jogs back to the van early in the morning, her hair still matted with chlorine, paper bills wrapped in a rubber band. Jo uses the money to pay for her mother’s flight to the mainland, her hotel room there, an appointment with a sciatica specialist. Jo’s mother kisses her palms as they say goodbye in the traffic of the departures terminal. Jo pays to get their basement fixed so the baseboards no longer swell with rainwater. She pays to get her nails painted the color of honeydew. Then there’s the night, the night with her honeydew nails looking so sugary against the steering wheel, where Jo drives around a few men who had requested her. Some have wives, and one of them shows her a picture of his newborn. Adorable, Jo says. Still, Lani watches them go inside the bungalow that night, and watches later, sometime around midnight, as a singular headlight moves through the banyans and slows beside the van. Gabe on his motorbike, with his serious blue shirt, his salted face and hair. He kicks out the kickstand and comes to the van’s window, hands cupped around his eyes. He looks at Lani, then he looks at the bungalow.
***
The next morning, Jo parks the van in the lot beside the Big House and goes inside. The sun is the color of conch, climbing, then descending, as Lani waits, watching other shuttle vans come and go, trucks arriving with produce—crates of nectarines and mangos, coolers of fish in ice, racks of ironed sheets and towels. No Jo, not as the light purples, deepening like a bruise.
The following day, it’s Gabe climbing into the passenger seat, adjusting its height, and bringing guests to the airport, to scuba, to dinner. There is no Jo. For weeks, there’s only Gabe and a man named Dan and a stringy teenager named Cal. Lani does not dance for Gabe when the car rattles over gravel or takes a sharp turn and doesn’t dance for Dan or Cal, either, because where is Jo? Cal points this out to Gabe one day in the lot beside the Big House.
—Look, not even when you flick it.
His fingers thwack Lani’s hips. Lani doesn’t move.
—I never knew why Jo kept that thing anyway, Gabe says. He grabs Lani and then there’s a bodily, suctioning sound and she’s coming through the window, everything so bright and strange and shifting around her.
—Piece of shit is probably made in China, Cal says. Plastic that’s going to outlive us all.
—Close. Gabe holds Lani in a way that the world hangs from the sky and the sky is the ground. Thailand.
***
Gabe leaves Lani in a drawer in the office. There’s no light, only flashes of it, when someone opens the drawer, searching for something, and then closes it again, and only in that second can Lani see what’s around her—nodules of pink chewing gum wrapped in thin paper, manila folders, pens. At all times though, she hears voices and the whir of paper shredding. Time passes like this: darkness, punctuated by the cut of light when the drawer opens, then darkness again.
Lani marks years through holiday music. Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say. One Christmas, another, a fourth.
Lani misses Jo. She misses Jo’s smoking. The cherry pits beneath her tongue. She misses the reserve, with its hills like long, curving backs—being swallowed in that green, in the quiet. She misses who she thought she was with Jo. Thailand? Not native, then, but Lani had judged Jo like she was. A piece of plastic garbage, Cal had said. Plastic that would live forever.
***
A conglomerate wants to purchase the Big House. Lani overhears this from the drawer. They want to raze the structure and construct a new hotel from glass and volcanic stone, with soaking tubs and driftwood sculptures and tiered pools down to the beach, stilted villas and an aquarium of eels and yellow tangs and women in silicon mermaid tails, who swim among the coral, waving through the glass. When the sale is finalized, some employees are told they can keep their jobs, but most are not. All will be let go during construction. The conglomerate says construction will take two years but Gabe says seven. The office is cleaned out. People open Lani’s drawer and close it again. Finally a man in a white ponytail picks Lani up and the world shifts—rush of sterile air on her chest, her face—and then warmth and darkness again, as she’s slid face down into his back pocket, so she smells the sweat of him, the tobacco, and can’t see through the denim. Hours pass and then they’re outside, and she’s expecting the chirping of ʻElepaio, of crickets and the katydids, but there’s nothing—only this far-off hammering, and when the man takes her out of his pocket, she can see that the wing of the Big House is already gone. The man kneels beside the grill of a red pickup. He uses a chain to secure her to the bars beside several colorless, stuffed Beanie Babies, their fur bleached from sun.
***
The roads of the island are full. Exhaust rises from tailpipes and cooks in the heat. Gravel gets kicked up by other cars, chipping the paint off Lani’s body. Lani tries to appreciate the sun. The glimpses of the sea she catches between sixteen-wheelers. ʻŌmao Park 2 Miles. The man with the ponytail spends most of his day on the road, Lani at the bow. Injured? Call Janet. ʻŌmao Park ½ Mile. The Big House has been torn down. Some nights he drives the truck to a strip of bars, parking it there, and as people are walking by they see Lani and the Beanie Babies and laugh, maybe take a picture of them. One night the sky is swollen with rain, ready to give out, and tinny music blasting through the opened windows of the bars, when a man stoops to rub Lani’s breasts, calling to his friend, saying it must be like good luck, or something.
—Fuck are you doing? A woman asks, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips.
—It’s just a joke, the man says.
—Who’s laughing?
The men murmur to one another, then continue on. The woman is wearing a sheer dress the color of seafoam, coming closer, crouching down beside the grill. Jo, thinner than she ever was, her skin balmy. Hollow in the cheeks. Lani sees in her eyes that Jo recognizes her, too. Jo walks away down the curb and Lani wants to scream, but then Jo is back again, holding a rock, pounding it against the chain holding Lani, the metal coming loose, and Jo’s fingers are warm around her, slipping her into a purse—tubed mascara, pepper spray, cosmetic tape—and above her, through the purse’s lip—there’s a hot, bright light and Jo covering her eyes. A man’s voice.
—We told you not to come here, he says.
—I wasn’t doing anything. Jo hoists the bag over her shoulder.
He sighs. It’s a tired sigh, exasperated in the way that it is late, about to rain, and that he has done this before—they have done this before.
—You want to go back to jail, Jo?
***
Jo drives with Lani in her purse on the passenger seat. Stop and go, the axle pulling left. When Jo takes her out of the bag, they’re in the last row of an empty lot beneath koas. Jo holds Lani in her lap, looking at one another. They fall asleep like that, or Jo does. There’s a warmth in Lani’s chest. A swell she sinks into.
In the morning, the sky is lotus-pink and soupy with clouds. Jo opens the car door and steps out into the humidity. She rinses her hair with a bottle of water and lets her curls lie wet on her back, darkening her t-shirt, and tilts Lani under the stream. She dries her with a rag and tries to touch up the flecks of missing paint with a red Sharpie, the ink chemically sweet. Jo tries to press Lani to the dashboard, like where she used to ride in the van, but the suction cup won’t grip. Jo fishes the cosmetic tape from her purse and holds Lani there, wrapping the material across the base.
***
Jo’s mother has passed. Lani learns this from Jo talking with girls—other working girls, with their halter tops and cowgirl boots and peroxide hair, who are so kind to Lani, cooing at her, telling her how lovely her dancing is. They are so gentle when they press her hips, and one uses turquoise nail polish to fill in the leaves of the plumerias. The girls are thin, like Jo, with sugar-sweet laughter and hips bones that jut out like whelks. Jo isn’t just thin, though. She’s like something wrung out. Are you eating? The girls ask from the passenger seat. Sleeping? Jo insists she is. Sometimes at night it’s hard, though, to find a spot, and she has to drive the car from place to place—from strip mall lots to low, wet farmland, which Lani prefers, because there isn’t so much honking there. There is always noise. The frothing highway, far off music like the buzz of mosquitos—a constant irritation. Months of this. Jo squirming, trying to lie flat on the seat. Sometimes she just sits awake with her eyes open. Every few days she calls her father, less out of hope that he will pick up, more because it was something to do. His voicemail becomes part of the noise, wholly known to Lani. Other things are known to her, too. How untethered Jo must feel, hearing him. Lost and rootless. Jo drinks more. She drinks before meeting clients, yes, but also other times. Cheap vodka, peach tanqueray, gin. Jo’s breath is sour, like damp swimsuits, and in the morning she pours the liquor into a styrofoam cup used for coffee. One of the working girls—who is actually a boy, but a boy who talks to Jo in a loving, girlish way—finds a shooter in the glove compartment and pours it out. He has a gap between his teeth and a crimson ʻapapne tattooed on his neck. He tells Jo to try, really try, to find another job, because this one chews up some girls and boys faster than others. Jo asks what job? Were there any jobs? He writes the name of a hotel that is hiring on the back of her hand. Jo kisses both of his cheeks.
For days, she does not wash the name of the hotel from her skin. The afternoon of the interview, Jo presses her blouse by laying it flat across the hood of the car and covering it in stones. The hotel is on the bluffs. Lani and Jo drive with the windows down—the air buffeting them, thick with brine. Jacarandas swell over the gate as Jo pulls her car into the back lot. There are others there—other cars, other men and women, milling around in wrinkleless blouses. Lani watches through the rear windshield as Jo joins them. Every fifteen minutes, the hotel door opens, and an older man calls someone inside. It’s evening, then, when Jo is called, the sky burnt out. Jo stalls for a moment—examining the door, the man waiting, and then disappears. Jo’s interview is shorter than the others. She comes out after a few minutes, jogging to the car, to Lani, her face pink and slick with sweat. The white-blonde man follows. He’s weathered, almost familiar-looking. Jo’s hands shake. The man knocks two knuckles on the glass as Jo works the key into the ignition. Lani knows him, yes. Gabe.
—You can’t blame me. His voice is muffled from the window. They can’t have someone working here like that, like you. Even if you’ve stopped–
—Just get out of my face.
—Jo, I’m sorry. Please, lower the window.
His eyes are tidal blue. Jo grips the wheel and takes a shuddering, loud breath. She cracks the window, and his voice comes through, dry like a smoker’s.
—I am sorry, Jo.
—I know.
—You got another. He nods at Lani.
Jo says nothing.
—It is good to see you,. I miss the Big House—those years—like, a lot.
—Yeah, Jo says. Me too.
He rubs a hand over his chin, then leans closer.
—How much? He murmurs. For an hour?
The words hang there. Jo stares, then shifts into reverse.
Gabe backs away.
Jo eases onto the gas, then throws the car into drive, angles the wheel toward him and guns it. Lani can’t see Gabe’s face, but she can imagine it. Jo slams the brake and the jerk sends Lani off the dash and onto the lining in front of the passenger seat, a silty film over the rubber.
Someone slaps the hood. Once, then again. Gabe cursing fuck yous.
Jo vircles the car out of the lot and back onto the highway, then leans over to grope for Lani on the floor, and sticks her back onto the dash—only facing front. Lani can see the sky through the pollen-smeared windshield, black and pricked with stars. She can’t see Jo’s face, though, but can hear pressure building as she drives—that second when Jo thinks she can hold it in, and then can’t. She goes fast. Lani can hear her moving, swallowing something. Liquor, probably. The engine revving and the flick of a spark wheel. One side of the road is green. Lush hopbush and piki‘awe, long leaves slapping the fenders, the air hot and loud—while the other is razed earth and stilted floodlights. Lani realizes where they are, what’s changed. The reserve, with its low, wet hills like tongues. Acres being consumed and combed over. They pull onto the straightaway they’d traveled down so many times before, trees engulfing them again, though through the gaps Lani can still see the sterile lights in the distance.
500 FT TO WATER
Jo is crying now, the sound guttural, strangled beneath the radio—twenty-eight hundred down, classic hits and modern country—
300 FT
The car keeps veering to the side, then snapping back. Lani thinks of the sound of Jo’s father on his answering machine—come to Wash and Lube, discounted now through the end of the month.
100 FTWhen Jo’s body hits the wheel, it crumples back. There’s a sudden feeling of weightlessness, the water seeping in, rising at a tilt. Lani watches it crest over the seats, the tops of Jo’s thighs. Her eyes are still closed. The water reaches the radio, and the noise sputters out. Lani’s legs, then—the cosmetic tape lifting, so she is weightless too, tethered in place by a remaining single strip. The cabin fills, lightless and silent. Though Lani can’t see Jo in the dark, she feels warm, knowing she’s there. They could just stay down here, yes, the two of them, where it’s so quiet. Lani is plastic, after all, and now Jo can sleep.
Margaret Dunn holds an MFA in Fiction from Boston University, where she was the Senior Teaching Fellow and a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from SmokeLong Quarterly, The Broad Ripple Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Princeton’s Nassau Literary Review. She is the recipient of the University of Pennsylvania’s Honors Thesis Prize for her 2023 short story collection. Other work has appeared in Esquire, The Cut, and Curbed.
Photo Credit: Rebecca Anderson is a writer, visual artist, self-employed mental health clinician, and local elected official who works from her small farm in central Maine. She completed her MFA at Mississippi University for Women’s low-residency creative writing program, where she completed full-length manuscripts in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and playwriting. Rebecca was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2019 and the 2024 Pushcart Prize. She was a 2025 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference participant in poetry. IG: @rebeccatellsstories
L'Esprit Literary Review 