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THE SUN HIT ME SQUARE in the face from Donnie’s east-facing bedroom window. I’d invested in blackout shades for my own little house and had become accustomed to waking when my body told me to, rather than whenever the sun demanded. I’d have to remember to buy a sleep mask today. Donnie’s window treatments were cream-colored muslin: light, elegant, and utterly ineffectual.
I didn’t remember Donnie coming to bed. He was facing away from me now, his shoulder rising and falling in slow rhythm. I gave him a gentle kiss on the ear. He stirred and grunted.
“Want to go to St. Damien’s with me this morning?”
“Huh?”
“Davison can come, too. We can all go to church together, as a family.”
“I wanted to make us breakfast,” Donnie said. “Can’t you stay and eat with us?”
“Of course. Want to go to the nine o’clock Mass afterward?”
“I don’t think it’ll work.” Donnie sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled his hands through his unkempt hair. I lay there and stared at his beautifully formed back and shoulders. His white t-shirt glowed against his brown skin.
“Sunday’s a busy day at the Drive-Inn,” Donnie said.
“I know.”
“It’s already after seven. I’m going to get breakfast started. Come out whenever you’re ready.”
Donnie pushed himself into a standing position and stretched, which gave me the opportunity to admire him for a few moments longer. He went into the master bathroom and closed the door. I got up and rummaged in the closet until I found a bathrobe.
The heavy hem hit the tops of my feet, and the sleeves hung past my hands and had to be cuffed. I was uncomfortably warm. The bathrobe was my only option, though, other than getting completely dressed right away, or parading around in front of my stepson in sleep shorts and my laundered-to-translucence Alice Mongoose t-shirt.
I opened the bedroom door and peeked down the hallway. Davison’s door was closed. Good, he must still be asleep. I went out through the front door and tiptoed down the wet asphalt driveway to retrieve the Sunday paper, enjoying the evaporating cool of the morning.
Like most homeowners in Mahina, Donnie had a box for delivery of the County Courier installed just below his mailbox. The Sunday paper wasn’t in it. I checked the mailbox just in case, but it was empty, too. It wasn’t like Donnie to let his subscription run out. I’d have to ask him about it. I picked up the hem of the robe and darted back inside.
I found the Sunday paper in the kitchen, along with Davison, who was already awake. Of course he was. His internal clock was still on Eastern Standard Time. He was reading the sports section. The rest of the paper was in pieces, strewn across the table.
“Eh, Molly.” He didn’t look up. He was shirtless, which created the off-putting illusion that he was sitting at the kitchen table naked. He reached up and scratched the back of his neck, displaying a wiry black armpit bush. How unfair was this? Here I was, trailing around in a big heavy bathrobe (which now had a wet hem), to spare my stepson the sight of my partially clothed body. He might have returned the favor.
Of course, I couldn’t say anything to him. He’d make some inappropriate “joke” about it and then leer at me the way he did that time I accidentally walked into his hotel room, and I would immediately want to run out and put on five more bathrobes and a burqa.
“Good morning, Davison. I see you already got the paper.”
“You gonna make coffee?” His eyes were still pinned on the sports section.
“Am I going to make coffee? Davison, didn’t you grow up in this house?”
He set the paper down and looked at me with puppy dog eyes.
“The coffee machine’s new.” He tilted his bushy eyebrows into a sad a-frame. “Never used that kind before.”
“Clever. Nice use of strategic incompetence.”
“Huh?”
My students did it all the time. Professor, the LMS won’t let me upload my paper. Can I give it to you later? Professor, the syllabus is too long to read. Can’t you just tell me what’s on it? Professor, I can’t figure out how to log into the library database.
And students weren’t the only ones guilty of this. My colleagues could be even worse. Hanson Harrison, for example, loved to play the part of the doddering technophobe who couldn’t figure out how to submit his book orders online or upload his course grades. Serena, the dean’s secretary, invariably would get fed up and do it for him. She even printed out Hanson’s emails for him every day, as he insisted he was unable to read them on the computer.
“Making a cup of coffee is very simple. I’ll demonstrate.”
I took down a coffee mug from the cabinet, shaking my arm to let the bulky bathrobe sleeve fall out of the way. Then I retrieved a coffee pod from the drawer, inserted it into the coffeemaker, lowered the lid, and pressed a button. I watched the coffee stream into my cup, the flow slowing as the coffee maker gurgled its last.
“Just like that,” I said. “Easy. One cup at a time. Pods are in this drawer. When the water gets low, just pour some into the reservoir here.”
“It looks complicated.”
“It’s not complicated at all. It’s simple. Now you try it.”
I sat down at the kitchen table and rummaged through the mess of sections in search of the front page. I ignored Davison as he stood helplessly in front of the coffee machine. If anything, he should have made coffee for me. I was more of a guest in this house than he was.
The front section of the County Courier was filled with ads for the upcoming election. Please vote for my friend Winston Agbayani. Kendrick Yamanaka, working hard for District 2. My name is Mercedes Yamashiro and I humbly ask for your vote. I liked Mercedes Yamashiro. She was the owner of the Cloudforest Bed and Breakfast, and one of the first people I met when I moved to Hawaii. I wished I could vote for her, but unfortunately, I wasn’t registered in her district. My choice was between the unprepossessing Winston Agbayani and the unremarkable Kendrick Yamanaka.
“Political campaigning is so polite here,” I said. “On the mainland, it’s all negative. No one humbly asks for anything. It’s more like Frank Smith eats live puppies and will raise your taxes. Frank Smith: Can you trust an alien shapeshifter who wears a suit of human skin?”
Davison remained in front of the coffee machine, inert.
“Get the pod from the drawer,” I said, finally.
“What drawer?”
“The one right under the coffee machine.”
He stood there for a while longer. When enough time had passed to convince him I really wasn’t going to make his coffee for him, he managed to retrieve a coffee pod from the drawer and fit it into the holder.
“What I do now?”
“Press the brew button.”
“There’s three brew buttons,” he countered.
“That’s for six, eight, and ten-ounce cups. I usually choose the smallest cup, the six-ounce. Then I dilute it with water.”
“That doesn’t make sense. How come you don’t just make a bigger cup?”
“When you run too much water over the coffee, you start to extract the bitter stuff at the end. When you select the small cup, you only get the best part of the brew, the nice aromatic extract.”
“Too humbug. I’m gonna just make the big one. I like one big cup of coffee.”
“Suit yourself.”
He brewed his cup, sat back down, and drank. The only sounds were newspaper rustling and coffee slurping. I was reading the top story on the front page, about some ominous underground rumblings, which might presage a new lava flow, although it was uncertain where it was going to come out. According to the map that accompanied the story, my little house downtown was well out of danger. The lava would most likely miss Donnie’s place as well, although it wasn’t so certain.
“Eh Molly,” Davison said.
“Yes?”
“Dad told me you wen’ found one dead body.”
“That’s true.”
“Aw, you get some bad luck, ah?”
“At least one person was having a worse day than I was. What did Donnie, I mean your dad, tell you about it?”
“Nothing. Just on the way from the airport, I asked him what was going on when I was outta town, and he said the usual, Molly tripped over another dead body.”
“He said, ‘The usual, I tripped over another dead body?’”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know who it was. They haven’t announced the name. I think they’re waiting to notify next of kin.”
Donnie came into the kitchen, still wearing his T-shirt and pajama pants. He had wet his hair down to smooth it, so he looked less rumpled than he had earlier.
“Well, this is nice. The whole family’s up.” He grinned, came over and kissed me on the forehead, and then swung into action, producing bags of flour, cartons of eggs, and small jars of brown and white powders. From the aroma that wafted from the stainless-steel gas range, I inferred that he was conjuring pancakes.
“Donnie, this is so sweet of you to cook for us. Especially since you’ll be cooking for hundreds more people today at the Drive-Inn.”
“I don’t mind,” Donnie said. “It’s good to see people enjoying the food.”
“Well, the pancakes smell delicious.”
“Dad,” Davison complained, “Pancakes? Cannot. Get white flour, ah?”
“I forgot,” Donnie said. “I’ll cook up some of your special bacon.”
“You keep eating white flour an li’ dat, you gonna get the kine, middle age dad gut.”
“As long as my wife can put up with it.”
“No problem. I’ll eat your pancakes. There are worse things than being chubby and middle-aged.”
Like being a know-it-all food Nazi, for example.
“Oh, Dad,” Davison said. “You want to come to church with me today? You can come too, Molly.”
“You want to go to St. Damien’s?”
“Nah. We always go to St. Damien’s. I wanna try go New Beginnings Chapel.”
“The big box church?” I asked. “Why do you want to go there?”
“My strength and conditioning teacher said I should try it. When I told him I was gonna go visit back home, he looked it up online and told me try go New Beginnings Chapel when I’m here. When I get back, he’s gonna ask me how it was.”
“You have a faculty member telling students where they should go to church?”
“It’s not a state school, Molly,” Donnie said.
“Still. I can’t imagine butting into my students’ personal business.”
“Sure, Davison,” Donnie said. “We’ll go with you. Is that okay, Molly?”
“Donnie, didn’t you just tell me you couldn’t go to church because you had to get to work this morning?”
“I think I can take a little time to go to church with my family.”
I sighed. “Sure. Let’s go. Maybe we’ll hear the story of the Prodigal Son.”