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“YOU ALL HAVE SOMEWHERE you can stay tonight?” Detective Medeiros asked.
We must have looked pathetic, Donnie, Davison, and me, standing out in the drizzle, staring at the smoking remains of Donnie’s house.
“I have my place in town,” I said. “It’s much too small for three people, but we could get Davison a hotel room. He’s traveling back to the East Coast in a couple of days so it would only be—”
“Molly.” Donnie looked aghast.
“What?”
Obviously, we needed to have a private discussion.
“Could you excuse us for a moment?” I said to Detective Medeiros. “Donnie, can you come help me check on my car?”
We gave the fire trucks and police cars a wide berth, walking in the middle of the road. Fortunately, Donnie’s street doesn’t get much traffic.
“Donnie, this is terrible. I’m so sorry for what happened. I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling right now. But please don’t take it out on me. What did I do?”
“Davison just saw his house burned to the ground,” Donnie said. “The house he grew up in. In a few days, he’s going back to the East Coast, as far away as he can be from his family without leaving the United States. And you want to kick him out and put him in a hotel room?”
Kick him out? Which meant, in his mind, Davison had a rightful place in my house to begin with. This was a great example of how people entered arguments with completely different assumptions.
“I suppose it is still your house, Molly. And I can’t tell you what to do.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, but...?”
We reached my car. It looked unharmed. The waxed turquoise and white paint gleamed dully in the sooty twilight. I pulled out my keys and unlocked the driver’s side door.
“Molly? What are you doing?”
“Sorry, I just want to see if the smoke smell got into my upholstery. Hmm. Maybe a little. Sorry, what were you saying?”
I closed the door and faced him. I expected him to look angry, but his face was expressionless.
“Now that you’ve made sure your car is okay, maybe we can talk about the fact that our son just lost his childhood home and has nowhere to stay tonight.”
“You’re being unnecessarily sarcastic. All I was thinking was my place is so small. You don’t even like to stay there.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, maybe I’m making the assumption because the last time you stayed over you said, quote, ‘Your place is too small.’ And it’s true. There’s only one bathroom. Of course I don’t want to be the wicked stepmother who throws poor little Davison out into the snow. But where’s he going to sleep? Tell me. Where?”
“In the guest room.”
“Guest room? I don’t have a...wait, are you talking about the storage room?”
The storage room contained all of the still-sealed boxes left over from my move from the mainland, along with what I called my “skinny” closet, filled with the clothes I would be able to fit into someday.
“There isn’t enough room in there for an entire person,” I said.
“Not the way it is now. We’ll have to move all those boxes. I think if we stack them along one wall, we’ll clear enough room for a cot.”
“I don’t have a cot.”
“We can pick one up on the way over. We’ll need to stop and buy some extra clothes for Davison and me too.”
“Great. All taken care of, then.”
Medeiros was still standing by the Lexus when Donnie and I returned. Davison was in animated conversation with one of the young firemen, who leaned against the truck, arms folded, smoking a cigarette.
“Are they allowed to smoke?” I asked no one in particular.
“You got a camera?” Medeiros asked. “Might want to take pictures of the damage for your insurance company.”
“I’ll use the tablet,” I volunteered. “It has a really good built-in camera.”
On the slim chance the fire had anything to do with our biotech research (although I sure hoped it didn’t), it would be good to have the photos in the same place as all of our other documents. I opened my bag and groped around.
“Stay back, though,” Medeiros cautioned.
“Definitely.” I already wasn’t comfortable breathing in the smoky air and wasn’t particularly inclined to get any closer to the source.
“Where’s the tablet?” I said. “It’s not here.”
“You got a cell phone?” Medeiros asked.
“Sure. Yes. But the tablet. I don’t remember leaving it at my office. I must have left it...”
Medeiros followed my gaze to the charred wreckage of the house.
“If you left it in the house, might as well add it to your insurance claim,” Medeiros said. “Gotta assume everything in there’s a loss. Anything that didn’t burn is gonna have smoke and water damage.”
My heart sank as I remembered slipping the heavy case into the drawer of the night table on my side of Donnie’s bed.
I was not looking forward to telling our grants administrator I’d let an expensive piece of university equipment get destroyed in a fire. Maybe there was some way I could put off reporting the loss until after my tenure decision was made, just to be on the safe side. I took out my cell phone and snapped a few photos of the gutted house, and then took pictures of the undamaged houses on either side and across the street. The neat gravel-and-greenery yards indicated an old Japanese neighborhood, established Mahina families whose ancestors had arrived three or four generations earlier from Hiroshima or Osaka. No rotting cars on gone-to-seed lawns here. No blue tarps thrown over rusted-out roofs. This was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one Donnie had grown up in.
“That should be enough pictures for your insurance,” Medeiros said. “Donnie, might as well take your wife an’ son home. Nothing more to do here.”
“So Donnie, you want to head up to the house with Davison? I can stop by the store and pick up a cot and some extra clothes for you.”
Donnie shook his head.
“Let me do it. I know our sizes.”
I reached out and squeezed his hand. It was trembling.
“Okay. In that case, I’ll take my car back and start getting the guest room ready for Davison. Take your time. I’ll see you two at home.”
I stood up on tiptoe, and gently pulled Donnie’s shoulder down so I could kiss him on the cheek. He pulled me into a hug, and then kept hugging me, and didn’t let go for a long time.
As I walked back to my car, I started to feel a little better. Letting Davison stay with us was a selfless good deed, a mitzvah, as Emma might say. It’s how you start storing up treasure in Heaven, right? And anyway, it was only for a couple of days.