Here Today, Gone to Maui Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Afterword

  More praise for the novels of Carol Snow

  Been There, Done That

  “Snow’s humorous, wise debut serves up romance with a bit of social commentary on the state of singledom and the benefits of maturity in a youth- and romance-obsessed society.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] witty, entertaining read.”—Kim Alexander, XM Satellite Radio

  “Often hilarious, frequently poignant . . . This is a wonderful book, with well-developed characters and interesting plot twists that make it a joy to read.” —Romantic Times

  “Been There, Done That is a totally unique story with heartbreak, a look at what your college student is really doing, and how friendships and relationships change before our eyes. A book that will make you think, Been There, Done That will introduce you to a different sort of romance.” —Romance Reviews Today

  “Using humor as a delightful way to lampoon contemporary life, Carol Snow provides . . . a terrific investigative tale filled with pleasant but surprising twists.” —The Best Reviews

  “Carol Snow dares to explore some ‘what ifs’ of college life in a novel full of zany adventures, reflecting the wisdom of an adult revisiting the past and trying not to make the same mistakes. The author’s subtle digs at ethics in journalism are right on target for her character’s development, but this story has plenty of surprises. Been There, Done That is insightful and fun, with a hint of mystery and romance.” —Fresh Fiction

  Getting Warmer

  “With its entertaining combination of a realistically flawed heroine, sharp writing, and tart humor, Getting Warmer is absolutely delightful.” —Booklist

  “[Snow] cleverly combines wit and drama in a page-turning novel. Readers will be drawn to the primary characters with their effortless charm and unique ability to reinvent themselves when meeting new people. Snow’s charismatic writing style is superb, making this a true winner.” —Romantic Times

  “Another great read exploring the lives and loves of likable emerging young women. This refreshingly honest story reveals some funny, sexy and meaningful moments, and that’s no lie!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A fast-paced story and interesting people.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Getting Warmer is a terrific look at relationships . . . The support cast, mostly those connected to the school, her family, or his stalker, enhance the prime romance while two other love stories also provide depth.” —The Best Reviews

  “Carol Snow does a wonderful job creating realistic, likable characters. Natalie is genuinely flawed, and readers can’t help but like her for it . . . I’ll be waiting on pins and needles for her next release.” —Curled Up with a Good Book

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  HERE TODAY, GONE TO MAUI

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Carol Snow

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

  author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition: January 2009

  eISBN : 978-1-440-66031-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Andrew

  Acknowledgments

  I couldn’t have written this book without a lot of help (and my husband’s frequent-flier miles).

  For sharing their expertise, I’d like to thank divers Kris Billeter and Rebecca Topping; human resource maven Rita Mould; and Sergeant Jamie Becraft of the Maui Police Department. Any inaccuracies in this book are entirely my own fault, and I look forward to hearing about them in Amazon reviews and anonymous email messages.

  Thank you, as always, to Cindy Hwang, Leis Pederson, Stephanie Kip Rostan, Monika Verma, and all of the other talented people at Berkley Books and the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

  Thanks to my parents, Tom and Peggy Snow, for their vacation wisdom; Jeff and Diane Palumbo for the tour of Wailea; and Mel and Marilyn Rueben for their terrible taste in T-shirts.

  And, finally, to the people of Maui: Mahalo for sharing your beautiful land.

  Chapter 1

  In the weeks leading up to my Maui vacation with Jimmy, I considered all of the things that could go wrong.

  Illness ranked pretty high. I could catch a cold, which in turn could mutate into a sinus infection—hardly a rarity in this dirty Southern Californian air, and notoriously resistant to antibiotics. I could contract food poisoning or one of those nasty tummy bugs that my coworkers occasionally import from their kids. I could get the flu (some odd and potentially lethal strain not included in my annual shot), conjunctivitis, or shingles (which are reputed to be extremely painful, despite the comical name).

  As our travel date approached without a cough, itch, or looming workplace epidemic, I turned my attention to traffic. Jimmy and I live at opposite ends of Orange County—he on the fashionable end (Laguna Beach) and I in the not-so-fashionable, forty-minutes-inland town of Brea, which is the Spanish word for “tar.” Actually, Brea is a nice, unpretentious, wholesome kind of town—just the k
ind of place where you’d like to raise your kids, if you have them.

  I don’t.

  Jimmy offered to drive to the airport because my car was nicer and more apt to be stolen. Without traffic, Jimmy could make it from Laguna Beach to Brea to LAX in an hour and a half. But since we weren’t planning to drive at three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, we could assume there would be traffic. With traffic, the trip could take three hours. Or five.

  There are some things you just can’t control.

  Like flight delays. Or cancellations.

  The odds of weather problems between Los Angeles and Maui were slim (though not impossible), but the flight originated in Atlanta and had to cross the entire country before embarking on the final tropical leg. After ten years here, I’d practically forgotten about weather, which Californians define as anything over a hundred degrees or under sixty, but I knew it was out there. I watched the Weather Channel. At least, I had ever since Jimmy asked me to spend a week with him in Maui.

  There was an inch of snow in Denver. It was ten below in Chicago. In Brisbane, Australia, the month was the driest on record. (There’s only so much they can say about local conditions on the Weather Channel, and I found the international segments oddly compelling.) But as for the weather between Atlanta and Los Angeles, and Los Angeles and Maui? The skies were clear.

  It wasn’t until Jimmy showed up at my condo on the day of our flight that I realized what all of my worrying had been about. He was an hour early—a relationship first. When I saw him standing in my doorway in a pale blue polo shirt, his sunglasses hanging from a cord around his neck, I burst into giddy laughter, equal parts joy and relief.

  I had never really been concerned about sinus infections, I realized. About traffic or flight delays. All of that was just a diversion, a way to avoid thinking about the worst possibility of all.

  I was afraid that Jimmy wouldn’t show up.

  I didn’t think he’d stand me up or anything—he wasn’t that unreliable. But he had a way of calling at the last minute, as I was applying my mascara or turning off the Weather Channel. Stuck in a meeting, he’d say. Buried with work. He’d make it up to me, he’d promise. Cross his heart and hope to die.

  And today he’d come through. If a trip to Maui wasn’t making it up to me, what was?

  I never once worried about what would happen once we landed in Maui, after we’d gathered our luggage and set off for the resort.

  As long as Jimmy showed up, the week would be perfect.

  Chapter 2

  “I gave myself an extra hour for traffic,” he said as I put my arms around him.

  “So you’re on time.”

  “No, I’m an hour early.” He kissed the top of my head and strode into my condo. “Something smells good.”

  “I made walnut bread this morning.” He was in the kitchen now, nosing around. “It’s on the counter.”

  He was already opening the fridge to get butter. Slicing the homemade bread, he made what I called his Hungry Jimmy noise: Mmmmmmm. He sounded like an airplane. In our first month or so together, Jimmy made that noise whenever he saw me coming out of the shower. Now, five months later, he made it when I baked. I take my baking very seriously, so I wasn’t as offended as you might imagine.

  He took a big bite. “I luff yer walnut bread.”

  “I know you do.” I gazed at him for a moment and resisted the urge to say, And I love you.

  It still shocked me, sometimes, to be going out with a guy as good-looking as Jimmy. I’m no troll, but Jimmy—blond, tanned, sculpted—had that kind of freak-of-nature beauty that makes people stare.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” my sister, Beth, asked last fall, after I’d e-mailed a photo. “I mean, dating a guy who’s prettier than you are?” (Rude, yes, but Beth is my only sibling, so she gets away with it.)

  “You haven’t seen me in a while,” I told her. (Beth lives in New Jersey.) “I got my hair layered, and I’ve lost three pounds. Plus, I’ve started wearing this new mineral-based makeup. It’s supposed to make your skin look airbrushed.”

  “I’m sure you look great,” she said in a tone generally reserved for the stupid and infirm. “But this guy looks like a model.” She said it like that was a bad thing. “He must have girls throwing themselves at him.”

  “He’s given me no reason to doubt him,” I said, suddenly wondering when he would.

  Ten years earlier, I had moved to California on a whim. It was the first and seemingly the last spontaneous thing I ever did. I had just graduated from college in Boston, and one of my roommates, having received a job offer in Los Angeles, asked me to join her for the three-thousand-mile car ride. I said yes immediately, images of a new life already forming in my mind.

  In California, I would live in the moment. I would take foggy-morning strolls on the beach; at night, I would fall asleep to the rhythm of the waves. I’d learn to surf, maybe even scuba dive. Surely California would make me a different person: freer, wilder. I pictured myself sporting a year-round tan and wearing colorful sarongs over my bikinis. (I never did master the sarong thing. It always looks like I’ve knotted a tablecloth around my waist.)

  When we arrived in L.A. my friend spent two tearful hours on the phone with her Boston boyfriend before announcing that she was going home to marry him. (I missed the wedding. I missed the divorce, too.)

  But I stayed. My first year was spent in a cramped, shared rental in Hermosa Beach, two miles from the Pacific. I could smell the ocean but I couldn’t hear it. Mostly I heard traffic, sirens, and my roommates having sex with an assortment of boys, most of whom seemed to be named Jason.

  A temp agency found me a clerical job with a company that made cement fiber roofing. They were so impressed with my collating and copying skills that they hired me to work full-time in their personnel department, first as an assistant, then as a benefits administrator. After a couple of years I outgrew that job and moved to my current employer, starting once again as an assistant in their human resources department (which sounds so much more interesting than “personnel”) and eventually working my way up to department head. Career opportunities abound for anyone skilled at living by a daily planner.

  I moved beyond that cramped rental in Hermosa Beach, too. After a year of parking tickets and an hour-long commute, I moved inland: first to Fountain Valley and then, later, to Brea, putting more and more distance between me and the Pacific. Now I live ten minutes from work, in a one-bedroom condo for which I secured a fifteen-year, fixed-rate mortgage. There’s a Wal-Mart nearby, a Linens ’n Things, a T.J.Maxx. I cannot smell the ocean; I’ve almost forgotten that it’s there. If not for the mild weather, I could be anywhere.

  “When we get to the airport, if we have time, we can go over the week’s itinerary,” I said, giving my kitchen a quick wipe with the counter sponge (I use a different one for the dishes).

  “What itinerary?”

  “I’ve written up a tentative schedule of day-by-day activities. So we don’t get to the end of the week and get really bummed because we forgot to go, say, parasailing.” I rinsed the sponge and put it back in its stainless-steel holder.

  Jimmy grinned. “That would totally ruin the vacation.” He cut himself another hunk of bread and took it into the living room. I tried not to notice the crumbs tumbling onto my freshly vacuumed carpet. He clicked on the television and settled onto my couch. To encourage him to spend more time at my condo, I’d TiVoed all of Jimmy’s favorite shows: the CSI’s, the Law & Orders, Without a Trace.

  My condo is the first home I’ve ever bought. The day I closed on it (two years earlier, a month before my thirtieth birthday), I hauled in a sleeping bag to spend the night, too excited to wait for the movers. I’ve always disliked clutter, so I furnished it simply but warmly: beige carpet, toasty walls, sage furniture, and cranberry accents. At first, I accessorized with large bowls of fresh fruit and vases stuffed with fresh-cut flowers. I can only eat so much fruit on my own, though, so the oranges on the
bottom of the bowls were always molding, emitting a biting, sour smell, while the apples turned mealy and brown, and the pears rotted and ran. As for the flowers, buying armfuls of tulips seemed homey at first, like giving myself a nice little treat. But after a while, the effort began to feel sad.

  By the time Jimmy entered my life, the fruit bowls had been stacked in cabinets, the vases shoved far back on the upper shelves. But still. I was proud of my little condo, with its granite-tile countertops, its double sink in the bathroom. I liked my gleaming cherry bed, my tidy kitchen table.

  “Nice place,” Jimmy said, the first time he saw my condo, a couple of nights after we met. “You know what it reminds me of?”

  “What?” I said, thinking: Decorating magazine?

  “A hotel room.”

  I’d added some more throw pillows since then, a few more prints on the wall. But Jimmy was right: my condo looked like a place where no one lived. Perhaps a few crumbs on the floor weren’t so terrible.

  “I think I’m ready,” I said, consulting a list. “I’ve emptied the dishwasher, left a light on, locked my windows. I put vacation holds on my mail and the newspaper.”

  The list seemed too short. How could a life be so easy to leave, if only for a week? I didn’t even have any pets to feed or plants to water.

  “You shouldn’t have put the hold on your newspaper,” Jimmy said, flicking through the stations as if he were playing a video game.

  “Why?” I pulled my black suitcase across the room to the door. I’d tied a yellow ribbon on the handle to make it easy to spot on the baggage carousel.