The Invasive Species, page 6
part #4 of Professor Molly Mysteries Series
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 with 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.
Chapter Thirteen
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’d wet his hair down to smooth it, and 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.”
Chapter Fourteen
The parking lot of New Beginnings Chapel was crammed with supersized, lifted pickup trucks. New Beginnings, it seemed, did not draw an upmarket crowd. My initial impression was confirmed once we were inside. The pews were packed with neck and hand tattoos (the kind our university’s career services office calls the “unemployables”), exposed bra straps, and everywhere, that heartbreaking obstacle to career opportunity: poor dental care.
The interior of New Beginnings Chapel was vast, about four times the size of the largest theater in the Mahina Mall’s cinema multiplex. I estimated the ceiling to be three or four stories high. The seating was stadium-style, something I had never seen in a Catholic church. The expansive stage featured a podium in the center and potted palms on either side. Toward the rear, on the right, a band was setting up. High up on the wall behind the stage, where one might expect to see a crucifix (this being a church and all) was a gigantic television screen displaying a “New Beginnings Chapel” logo against a royal blue background.
New Beginnings Chapel should have a dental ministry, I thought. It sure looked like they had enough money to pull it off. As a child, I couldn’t understand why my parents thought my teeth were so important.
“You’re going to have your teeth for the rest of your life,” they’d say as they dragged me to the dentist or denied me a second helping of dessert. Worst of all were the braces, constantly poking the inside of my cheeks and wearing away little sore spots. I dreaded going in to have my braces tightened; my entire skull would pulsate with pain for days afterward.
Now I felt grateful and a little bit guilty about all of the resistance I’d put up at the time.
“You okay, Molly?” Donnie asked. The front rows were already filled, and we had to climb up the aisle toward the back.
“Of course I am.” I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth as if to reassure myself everything was still intact. I told myself to get a grip and imagine what Iker Legazpi, my gentle and saintly colleague in the accounting department, might say in this situation. Iker had once told me church should be thought of as a hospital, not a country club, its purpose to heal the broken rather than to comfort the fortunate. He had gone on to quote the Book of James and some things from the Old Testament. Iker was Catholic, like me, but for some reason, he seemed to know a lot of Bible verses.
