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I HAD A REVISE-AND-resubmit due Monday, so after Natural High, I dropped Donnie off at his car, loaded the cockroach costume into my trunk, and drove up to campus. If Donnie wanted to chase around every grocery store in Mahina looking for all the things on Davison’s magic list, he was welcome to it. I had to get my revision done and uploaded before the weekend was over. I’d learned the hard way a deadline of noon, East Coast time meant the crack of dawn in Hawaii.
Unfortunately, the air conditioning on campus was turned off on weekends, so I sweltered through my revisions, even with my desk fan rattling away on the highest setting. I had no one to blame but myself. I got the revise-and-resubmit back from the journal a month ago, and I’d kept putting it off. A major part of the revision (besides “add more tables” and “make it shorter”) was the recommendation by one reviewer that I cite the relevant and outstanding work of a certain scholar. I was having a little trouble squeezing that work into my paper, as I didn’t think it really pertained to the topic, but if it was important to someone who was going to decide whether my paper got published, it was important to me. (I also now had a pretty good idea who that anonymous reviewer was.)
I managed to finish, check my paper over, and get it uploaded while it was still light outside. One more errand, and then it was off to Donnie’s for a joyous reunion with my stepson. Hooray.
Stephen looked up from his desk when I knocked on the open door of his office. Stephen had never been a terribly neat person, but his office was even messier than I remembered. Colorful gowns, headdresses, swords, and plastic firearms hung from the coat rack. Costumes were heaped over the backs of his visitor chairs. Boots, curly-toed elf shoes, and stiletto heels were piled along the wall. A painted plywood palm tree, taller than the height of Stephen’s office, was wedged against the wall.
Stephen himself looked gaunt and sickly under the fluorescent lights. His uniformly black hair (dyed, I’d bet money on it) was scraped back from his pale, angular face.
Stephen had spent some time in rehab a while back, and when he got out, he had started eating compulsively, substituting one addiction for another. After gaining seventy pounds or so, he had become an exercise fanatic, going up to the campus gym first thing in the morning and running on the treadmill for hours. He’d lost all the added weight (and then some), and now had the stringy, hollow-eyed look of a marathon runner.
“I just wanted to return this.” I held up the bagged cockroach costume. “Thanks for letting me use it. I didn’t see you at the Chancellor’s Welcome and Halloween party.”
“I had a lot to do.”
Stephen didn’t get up. He may not have been feeling well. Or perhaps he was just being rude.
“Well, it’s too bad you missed the festivities, Stephen. You could’ve taken credit for my remarkable ensemble. By the way, I met Miss Dorothy Pfaff. Marshall Dixon has her on the hook for some major bucks.”
“Ah. Did she sign your Alice Mongoose t-shirt?”
“No, but Emma told her all about it, much to my mortification.”
Stephen had an issue of Variety spread out on his desk. He turned a page, and then another one, looking at nothing in particular.
“I’m sure you made a great impression on our benefactress, Molly. That’s the most important thing.”
Stephen was doing the thing he knew enraged me, positioning himself as the Morally Pure Artist, counterpoint to me, the Business School Sellout.
“Well, our funding from the state’s been cut by forty percent. It’s almost impossible to get grants with our crumbling infrastructure, and we’re not allowed to raise tuition. So unless we all want to end up working for free, we’d better make nice with the local philanthropists. You know all this, Stephen. You go to the same budget meetings I do.”
“Indeed, I do. Did your Friend from the Business Community accompany you?”
“Yes, Donnie came with me. He didn’t have anyone thoughtful enough to provide him with a spectacular costume like this one, though, so he just wore his regular business clothes.”
Stephen flipped open the carved wooden case on his desk, drew out a cigarette, clamped it into a wire cigarette holder and lit it. He closed his eyes and sucked in the smoke so hard his cheeks hollowed. One habit he’d never managed to kick was smoking his Indonesian clove cigarettes. Despite the campus-wide tobacco ban, Stephen’s office still reeked of Gudang Garam smoke.
Stephen blew out a spicy cloud of exhaust.
“Of course he went with you. Can’t let the little woman wander off by herself.”
“Is there anything you need to talk about, Stephen?”
“How was the costume? Did it fit?”
“It was perfect,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to miss the extra pair of limbs. They were quite useful. Should I just hang it over here?”
“Keep it.”
“What?”
“Keep the costume. I don’t have any place to store it. I don’t have a prop room anymore.”
“What do you mean you don’t have a prop room? Isn’t it just over—”
“That space houses the Office of Student Engagement now.”
“Your prop room? They took it away?”
“The Student Retention Office concocted this space reallocation plan over the summer when most of the faculty were off campus. They didn’t notify the theater department, of course.”
Stephen rested the cigarette holder on the edge of his ashtray—a heavy vintage number from the sixties, molded out of golden glass—and looked directly at me for the first time.
“They piled all of my props and costumes in the hallway and moved in some new deanlet with his clutch of minions. So, keep the costume. Have fun. Re-enact The Metamorphosis for your accounting majors. I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.”
“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll find some use for this. Thanks, Stephen.”
I left Stephen in his dark office, sitting in a pool of sallow light from his desk lamp.
Donnie’s house was still empty when I got back. The stew Donnie had started earlier was starting to smell delicious, although the savory meat aroma was mingled with a smell like suntan lotion. Maybe Donnie was trying out some new coconut-scented air freshener in anticipation of Davison’s arrival.
I hung up the cockroach costume in the coat closet and found some simple white dishes in one of Donnie’s cupboards. I put out three place settings on the dining room table, poured myself a glass of wine, and was just sitting down at the kitchen counter to read the day’s paper when I heard the front door open.
“Guess who’s here?” I heard Donnie sing out. “Molly? Are you home?”
After the draining experience of dealing with Stephen Park, I really didn’t feel up to facing Davison. But I couldn’t exactly hide and pretend not to be home. One, Donnie would be disappointed if I didn’t show, and two, my distinctive Thunderbird was parked right in front of the house. I got up as Donnie came in through the living room, with Davison behind him. Donnie took Davison’s duffel bag and gave him a little push to propel him toward me. I put down my wine and allowed Davison to squeeze me in a tight hug, enveloping me in the sour body odor that inevitably develops over twenty hours of uninterrupted travel.
“Long time, Molly.” Davison pressed a stubbly kiss into my cheek. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that my new stepson (and former student) was calling me by my first name. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to come up with anything better. I certainly wasn’t going to let him call me “Mommy.”
“Go to your room and change.” Donnie handed back Davison’s bag. “Then we can have dinner.”
Davison had his own room in Donnie’s house, which was one reason I couldn’t feel entirely at home there. A couple of years ago, Donnie had given him a furniture catalog and a blank check and told him he could pick out his own décor. The result was like The Masque of the Red Death as reimagined by a mob decorator, all red plush carpet, black and silver rococo furniture, and electric chandeliers with black leather candles. If the door happened to be ajar when I passed, I’d pull it shut.
“Oh, Molly, thanks for setting the table.” Donnie went over to examine my work. He quietly gathered up the silverware, put it away, and brought out different flatware from another drawer. Then he rearranged everything on the table. When he was finished, he brought over a wine glass and sat next to me at the kitchen counter. I picked up the bottle of wine and poured for him.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Traffic wasn’t too bad. I didn’t recognize Davison right away. He was standing in front of me, and it still took me a second. Has he been gone that long?”
“It hasn’t been that long. I think you didn’t recognize him because you made him get all his tattoos lasered off before he left. What was wrong with the place settings?”
“Nothing,” Donnie said. “I just like to do it a certain way.”
“Could you explain your system to me? Maybe next time I can replicate it and save you the trouble of redoing it.”
In fact, he could explain it, and he did. It had to do with which things could go in the dishwasher with which other things, and how many of each kind of place setting was on hand, and which pattern was still being manufactured, and which would be hard to replace, and some other parameters I didn’t quite commit to memory. By the time he wrapped it up, it was nearly eight o’clock. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and my stomach was starting to make noises like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal.
We heard Davison’s bedroom door open. Finally. A moist cloud of sweet shower gel fragrance wafted into the dining room ahead of him. He wore basketball shorts and a gray muscle shirt emblazoned with the name of his school in stencil font.
“Looking good,” Donnie said. “Let’s eat.”
Davison looked more like Donnie than ever. He had his adoptive father’s strong features and thick black hair. (Davison was Donnie’s sister’s baby, and for reasons still unclear to me, Donnie had taken him in and raised him. Donnie was always vague when I asked him about it, and as there was no reversing the decision at this point, I didn’t feel I needed to know the details.)
Davison seemed to have lost some weight since I’d seen him last. His muscles looked functional, like Donnie’s, rather than puffed-up and decorative. I’d always suspected Davison had been taking steroids to enhance his workouts. Maybe he’d given them up, or he didn’t have the right connections at his new school.
“Wine?” Donnie asked Davison as we sat down.
“Nah. Dad, how many glasses you had today? You gotta practice moderation. Couple glasses a week, maybe, if you’re highly active. But more than that, no can.”
“I’ll have some wine,” I said.
“You gotta be careful too, Molly. Alcohol no good for wahine.”
“English, Davison.” Donnie ladled stew from the slow cooker into my bowl.
“Donnie, this looks great. I’m so hungry.”
“Dad, when you get ethanol in your system?” Davison persisted. “That’s what the alcohol in drinks is called, ethanol. Your body burns ethanol first, so you don’t burn fat. Lotta times when girls stop drinking, they lose weight, ah? That’s how come. Eh, Molly, you quit drinking, you drop ten pounds right away I bet.”
“You certainly are a font of advice today.” I took the wine bottle and filled my own glass.
“I been learning a lot about nutrition. I been eating healthy, no alcohol, no trans fats, no rice or bread or nothing like that.”
“Well. I did notice your acne’s cleared up a little.” I dug my spoon into the stew and stirred the chunks around.
“Davison, this is made entirely from ingredients on the list you sent me.” Donnie ladled out Davison’s portion. “I had to go to a few different places to find everything.”
“Aw, thanks, ah?” Davison said. “Looks great.”
“They didn’t have everything at Natural High?” I asked. I brought the spoon halfway to my mouth. The suntan lotion smell intensified.
“They were out of coconut oil,” Donnie said. “I had to buy that at Mizuno Mart.”
I slowly lowered the spoon back into my bowl.
“The coconut oil was for us to eat? How interesting. What else is in here?”
“Grass fed beef,” Donnie said, “and a few different kinds of greens. Onions and garlic. A little bit of fresh grated ginger.”
“Well, that sounds nice.”
“And some bone marrow and liver,” Donnie added. “I’ve never cooked with this combination of ingredients before. I hope everyone likes it.”
“Me too.” I downed a fortifying gulp of wine. “Davison, you eat like this all the time?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna try eat clean the whole time I’m here.”
“Terrific. Donnie, did I ever say thank you for calling Konishi Construction for me? It was so thoughtful of you. You think they’ll finish the repairs on my house pretty soon?”
“Dad, you remember the fluoride-free toothpaste?”
“It’s in your bathroom. Oh, Molly, I got the special shampoo and conditioner you like, the one for curly hair. It’s already put away in the shower.”
“Thanks.”
“You staying here now, Molly?” Davison asked.
“I am. An Albizia tree fell onto my house and crushed it.”
“Good thing. Wife shouldn’t be apart from her husband. You know what I’m saying? You two are man and wife now. You should act like it.”
“Not really any of your business, buddy,” Donnie said.
“Gosh, I’m so sleepy,” I said. “I think I’ll turn in.”
“You’ve hardly eaten anything. Aren’t you hungry?” Donnie reached over and squeezed my hand.
“Oh, I’ve had plenty. Really. I’ll put the rest in the fridge and heat it up for lunch or something.” I shuddered at the thought of warmed-over coconut-flavored liver. “You two probably want to catch up.” I stood up, draped my arm around Donnie’s shoulders, and got a peck on the cheek.
“We’ll have a family breakfast tomorrow,” Donnie said.
“Sounds great.” I wrapped up my bowl and stuck it in the refrigerator, then quietly lifted a jar of peanuts out of the pantry and darted down the hallway to the master bedroom.