by Frankie Bow
“So is that how it ended? You and me?” he asked.
“Stephen, you never even knew why we broke up? So you just, what, said oh well, and went on with your life?”
“I . . . I guess I knew something had gone wrong, and I was afraid to ask. I didn’t want to stir things up.”
“You didn’t want to stir me up, you mean.”
We sat silently side by side, Stephen glum, me freshly indignant over the birthday incident.
“Molly, what if I did it? Killed Jimmy Tanaka? I mean, if I was, you know, impaired, would I still be legally accountable for what I did? What about extenuating circumstances?”
I stared at him. Those cheekbones, the ones I had admired and envied, looked like they were about to cut through his waxy skin.
“Look, Stephen, I’m not a lawyer. But I suspect ‘sorry I committed a murder, but it’s okay, ’cause I was totally tweaking’ wouldn’t be a very compelling defense. Anyway, I don’t believe you did it.”
“Oh.” He took a sip of wine, made a face, and set the glass back down.
“Yes, it’s that fruity red blend I like. The one that you say is half a step above pink Jacuzzi wine. You don’t have to drink it. Look. You need an actual lawyer. And you know what else? You need to get into rehab. Stay right there. I’m going to call your parents.”
I stood up and went to the phone.
“No, Molly, I can’t go now! It’s the beginning of the school year!”
“You’re not indispensable,” I said. “You can get someone else to take over as chair and—”
“No! If I leave, I might come back and find my department gone.”
I came back out of my little office nook.
“They’re not going to get rid of the whole theater department,” I said.
“You have no idea how bad it is, Molly. Everything is ‘on the table.’ Everything except for the Student Retention Office, of course.”
“Yeah, the SRO seems pretty bulletproof,” I said.
“Not just bulletproof, Molly. It’s metastasizing.”
I walked back over to the couch and sat down.
“I thought you liked the SRO, all student-centered and everything.”
“Have you really taken a look at them, Molly?” Stephen had a wild glint in his eyes. “Their ever-expanding offices and lounges, their catered workshops and custom websites and award ceremonies and four-color glossy booklets designed to spend down their lavish budget to precisely zero dollars and zero cents by the last day of the fiscal year? Have you seen it? Have you really looked? It’s a monster. We’re feeding a monster.”
“They do have some nice furniture up there,” I mused.
“Meanwhile, we have to beg for the things we need. Beg! You, a professor, you don’t even have a proper office chair. You sacrifice your dignity every day by sitting on a yoga ball.”
“My dignity is very well toned from sitting on that ball, I’ll have you know.”
“Do you know that the cost for just one print run of Learning Styles in the Classroom would have covered Janey’s salary for a year?” Stephen said.
“Ouch. Really? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s bad enough for me, losing my department secretary. But it’s worse for her. Her husband is disabled. He can’t work. They were both depending on her health insurance.”
I watched him for a few moments. Then I got up to call his parents while he sobbed quietly on my leather couch. I still knew their phone number by heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Despite the name, there is (officially) no gambling at the Pair-O-Dice Bar and Grill. Trivia games, on the other hand, are perfectly legal. I don’t like to brag, but I’m rather good at trivia, and I was looking forward to tonight’s tournament. The Pair-O-Dice is generally pretty empty and therefore ideal for quiet conversation, but trivia night is the exception. Pat, Emma and I had secured the last free table.
“What?” I asked as I surfaced to rejoin the conversation. I had just finished stuffing a folded paper napkin under one leg of the wooden table to stop it from wobbling.
“Pat was wondering if Donnie had any friends of his own,” Emma said.
“I think he might be a psychopath,” Pat said. “Psychopaths can’t form close friendships.”
“Who cares? Molly and me can be his fake friends. Hey, did you guys hear about Stephen? I heard he disappeared.”
“Stephen?” I repeated, trying to sound nonchalant. I hadn’t told them that Stephen had come to my house, or that I’d driven him out to the airport and put him on the redeye direct to Los Angeles with no baggage except for the boarding pass from my home printer. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about getting shipped off-island, but I explained to him that if he were really a murderer, then getting him into some kind of lockdown rehab would make everyone safer. If he were innocent, then at least he’d be getting the help he needed. He couldn’t really argue with that logic. His sister was going to meet him at LAX, and his family would take care of him from there.
“I heard he just went out on sick leave,” Pat said.
“That’s kinda suspicious either way,” Emma said. “Maybe he really is guilty. Molly, did you hear anything about it?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. I wasn’t eager to have everyone know what happened. Stephen certainly needed help, and his mother had seemed appreciative on the phone, but in retrospect I could see how people in law enforcement might start throwing around ugly words like “aiding” and “abetting” and “fugitive.”
Donnie stood in the doorway of the Pair-O-Dice. I waved and he nodded and made his way toward us. He made slow progress through the noisy crowd, turning sideways to edge between the closely packed tables. When he finally reached our table he embraced me, kissed me on the cheek, and then turned to Pat and Emma.
Pat was barely polite. Emma was more than friendly enough to make up for Pat.
“Hey, Donnie,” Emma shouted over the din as he sat down. “When someone is murdered, you want to know who would benefit from their death, right?”
Donnie leaned in to hear her. “I suppose so,” he shouted back. “Why?”
I tried to shoot Emma a disapproving look, but she wouldn’t return my eye contact. What was she up to? She leaned closer to talk directly into his ear. I leaned in too, to hear what she was saying.
“I bet you know a lot of people in the business community,” she said. “Could you find out if Jimmy Tanaka had a will? Or if he was about to make one?”
“Jimmy Tanaka?” Donnie said.
“Molly wants to know,” Emma said.
“I do?”
Pat put his phone away and joined our conversation.
“Donnie,” Pat said, “you heard about Jimmy Tanaka’s murder?”
“Pat!” I exclaimed.
“I’m on the College of Commerce Community Council,” Donnie said. “They had an emergency briefing for us. They asked us to keep it confidential. But it sounds like all of you already know about it.”
“Good,” Emma interrupted. “We’reall caught up. What about the will?”
“I believe wills are public record,” Donnie said.
“Molly thinks her dean did it,” Emma said.
“What? I never said that.”
“You told us you saw the police coming out of his office after hours,” Emma said. “You did, right? You weren’t making that up?”
“I’m sure Donnie doesn’t want to talk about this,” I said.
“And you said that Dan told you that Vogel might be leaving, so you’d have to step up and become department chair. Eh, I can put two and two together.”
“What do you think the trivia topics are tonight?” I said.
“You might become department chair?” Donnie asked me, in a tone implying that would be a good thing. Clearly, he knew nothing about my workplace.
“Well, that’s what I was told,” I said. “If Bill Vogel leaves for any reason, my department chair, Dan Watanabe, is going to become the new dean.
And if that happens, he says I have to step up and serve as chair of my department.”
“So it would be to your benefit if Bill Vogel were guilty?” Donnie asked.
“What? No! Not at all.”
“But it would mean a promotion,” he persisted.
“I don’t want a promotion.”
Emma nodded agreement. Both she and I knew that being “promoted” to department chair meant that for an insultingly small bump in pay, I’d double my workload. There were all of the grievances that needed to be processed, and then there was having to answer to the Student Retention Office with all of their Student Satisfaction Reports and Disruptive Innovation Reports and Classroom Engagement Reports that I’d be responsible for filling out. I’d have no real authority, but if anything went wrong, I’d get all the blame. On top of all of that, I’d still have to teach, and I’d still be responsible for publishing enough research to get tenure.
But for Donnie’s benefit, I said: “It’s ghoulish to worry about my own career at a time like this.”
Donnie nodded sympathetically. Emma rolled her eyes.
“That was beautiful,” Pat said. “Very convincing.”
Donnie glanced over at Pat, and back at me.
“How did the three of you meet?” he asked.
“It was that committee,” I said. “I forget the name.”
“Oh, yeah!” Emma said. “The Assessment of Faculty Development Committee. I remember.”
“No,” Pat said, “I wasn’t on AFDC. I don’t remember which one it was.”
“Anyway,” Emma said, “we all thought Pat was taking notes on his laptop, but it turned out he was updating his newsblog, and in between he was writing fake reviews for all of us online.”
“On that professor rating site that shall not be named,” I added.
“Those are fake?” Donnie looked genuinely surprised, which surprised me.
“Most of them,” I said. “The well-written ones, anyway. I thought everyone knew that.”
“That explains quite a bit,” Donnie said.
“Donnie,” Emma giggled, “did you search for Molly online?”
“Of course. I had to do my due diligence.”
“I’m very easy to find, unfortunately. Not a lot of Molly Bardas out there.”
“You could get yourself a more common last name,” Pat said. “Like Gonsal—ow!”
Emma pushed back her chair and stood up. “Come help me order drinks,” she said. She grasped Pat’s elbow and dragged him away from the table.
“So I suppose you really don’t know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried,” Donnie said, leaning close to be heard above the clamor of the increasingly boisterous crowd.
“No. And I don’t have X-ray vision, I am one hundred percent human, and I never shot a man in Reno.”
Emma and Pat returned with their hands full of food and drink. “Fried mozzarella,” Emma announced as she set down a red plastic basket lined with grease-stained paper. “Fried calamari. And for the health conscious, fried zucchini. And, a pitcher of Mehana Volcano Red Ale.”
“Watch out, Donnie,” Pat said, as they sat down. “Last time we were here, it was a bloodbath.”
“Oh, yah! Molly knows every useless fact you can think of! She’s gonna wipe the floor with us.”
“Watch this,” Pat said. “Molly, the band New Or—”
“Joy Division,” I said.
“Okay, but—”
“After Ian Curtis committed suicide in nineteen eighty.”
Pat turned to Donnie and raised his hands in a “see, I told you” gesture.
“Ask me something about Steve Soto!” I said.
“We’re doomed,” Emma announced cheerfully.
Unfortunately, Emma turned out to be wrong. The first topic was Hawaiian royalty. Donnie was apparently on a first-name basis with every last one of King Kamehameha’s wives, and his exhaustive knowledge of the details of King David Kalakaua’s life and death seemed to me to border on the obsessive. I could practically hear my mother’s voice: “Men have fragile egos, Molly. You have to let them win once in a while.” Well, Donnie was winning. I hoped he was enjoying it. For some reason the game didn’t seem very interesting tonight.
Donnie won the category, to no one’s surprise. Emma highfived him.
“Emma,” I asked, “where’s Yoshi?”
She gave me a blank look.
“Your husband?” I prompted her. “I thought you were going to invite him along tonight.”
She shrugged.
The next topic, “Science,” was even worse. One obscure, irrelevant question followed another. Somehow Emma was guessing all the right answers now. I watched the local news flickering silently on the overhead television.
“I had absolutely no idea what that question was about,” I heard Pat say. “I thought a radius was the distance from the center of a circle to the edge.”
This gave Emma a perfect opening to flaunt her arcane knowledge: “The radius and the ulna are two bones in the forearm. Humans don’t have to walk on our arms, so those bones don’t bear weight. They’re slender, like two sticks. In quadrupeds those bones are thicker, and fused to bear the weight of the animal’s body.”
I stopped listening and read the captions on the television. I learned that I could make cash money selling my gold jewelry, remodel my kitchen with an E-Z loan, and start my future tomorrow at an online college. So many possibilities, all of which sounded much more appealing than sitting through this boring trivia game.
Pat nudged me and shouted into my ear. “Sorry they don’t have any questions about Rodney Bingenheimer this time.”
I shrugged and shouted back. “It’s okay. I don’t really care about winning or losing. I’m just here to have fun.”
“Obviously. Anyone can tell you’re having a blast.”
Pat went back to the trivia game, and I went back to reading the captions for the evening news. A honeymooning couple from Oregon had been enjoying a long hike miles from the nearest road. They’d spied a gap in the forest floor and shone a flashlight down into what turned out to be a system of lava tubes. About twenty feet below them the beam of the flashlight caught something that looked at first like a heap of dirty clothes. They were able to read their GPS coordinates to the nine-one-one dispatcher. The clothes turned out to contain a body. The remains were still unidentified.
I was so engrossed in the story that I barely noticed when the trivia master announced the top scorer for the evening: Emma Nakamura. Her grand prize: a gift certificate for fifty percent off a weekend for two at the Hanohano Hotel.
It was a pleasure to offer her my sincere congratulations.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was finally Friday. I was happy to be on my way to the Maritime Club and done with the workweek. Well, maybe not done, exactly. I had a stack of papers in my bag that I planned to grade over the weekend. And I still hadn’t completed my weekly reports for the Student Retention Office. But I had a juicy tidbit of outrage to share, and I was looking forward to commiserating with Pat and Emma.
They were already seated at a small table out on the lanai when I arrived. The morning’s rain clouds had dispersed, and the ocean glittered behind them in the afternoon sun.
“You won’t believe what I just heard about Rodge Cowper,” I announced as I sat down with them. I still couldn’t believe it myself.
“Oh, no,” Emma said. “What’d he do now?”
I paused for effect.
“He’s been nominated for the all-campus teaching award.”
Pat laughed and shook his head. “That must be a joke,” he said.
“No joke. I ran into Larry Schneider today when I was walking out to the parking lot. He knows people on the awards committee. Oh! He said I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. So don’t tell anyone.”
“Seriously? Rodge Cowper might actually get the teaching award? That’s like—” Emma looked from Pat to me and back again. “I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like s
omething bad!”
“Why do you two care?” Pat asked.
Emma and I looked at each other.
“I don’t care,” Emma said.
“Me neither.”
“If you really want to be popular,” Pat said, “you know what to do. Give everyone A’s, tell a lot of jokes, don’t assign too much homework, don’t question their worldview, tell them how smart and wonderful they are.”
“You don’t do any of those things,” Emma said.
“I know. That’s why I can sleep at night. You know, this is actually pretty nice.” Pat gestured toward the ocean. “Emma, your husband is missing out.”
Out on the shore, small children splashed in the shallows. A man balanced on a black lava rock outcropping, pulling up a fishing net.
Emma had joined the Maritime Club hoping thatYoshi would enjoy spending time here with her. Unfortunately, the weather-beaten little clubhouse with its archaic menu was not up to his standards. In fact, nothing on this island is up to Yoshi’s standards. Emma met Yoshi when she was finishing her doctoral work. When they married, they agreed that wherever she could find a job, he would follow. With his MBA, Yoshi had a lot more options than someone with a specialized PhD.
Now that Emma has a job here, just a few miles from the house where she grew up, Yoshi wants to back out of the deal. He simply can’t live in a town without VIP rooms, where no one can tell he’s wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit (nor would anyone care), where no one is impressed by his trendy brand of vodka. (Sure, he can order it from Hagiwara’s Specialty Liquors whenever he wants, but that’s not the point.)
Emma decided to keep the membership anyway. The Maritime Club has a nice oceanfront location and decent food, even if the menu hasn’t changed since the fifties.
“What does Rodge do in his classes, exactly, that’s so award-worthy?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard he shows funny videos and tells jokes.”
“I have a joke you could tell,” Pat said.
“Not the canoe joke,” I said. “I mean, it’s funny, but it’s totally inappropriate.”
“The canoe joke is not funny,” Emma said. “It’s gross.”