Pentimento (with apologies to Lily Hellman)

Is dinner ready yet?

This past Sunday, the brother of Mark’s daughter Kyla’s ex-husband Steve came to dinner.   He was in Hawai`i on a Navy boat from Canada (a Carrier or Destroyer) and had “pulled alongside” in Pearl Harbor at the end of the RimPac exercises.  David brought a friend named Bill.  Mark met them mid-Kailua at our store Lanikai Bath and Body.  When they arrived in our driveway, Ian and his tools were spread everywhere, trying to reengineer a new air conditioner that was built only for windows, while he had a box in the wall of his room.

Ian asked Mark for help, and Bill and David offered to chip in.  An hour and a half later, Ian’s airconditioner was installed and they had “sung for their supper.”

Our house has been run amok with mini-construction and electronic projects, piles of stuff relating to a specific thing in one or another corner of the house.  The aquaponics garden outback (erected in a miraculous three weekends) is now empty of plants, but golden talapia are growing apace and fertilizing a non-existent bunch of vegetables.  In this, Ian reminds me of this father.

When I lived with Scott, there was always a project going on.  I gather his wife Beverly has suffered the same fate, both in Newport and in Maui.  Similarities were cemented again when Bill and David (who we had never met) were wearing rubber gloves and working on an airconditioner in the garage.  Could it have been a fictitious invite for dinner, they wondered.

About 40 years ago, in another place and time, I had invited an old boyfriend to stay with us when he was in Hawai`i.  When he asked what he could do to help, Scott handed him a shovel and showed him a hedge which needed digging out.  I am sure my friend could have said no, and Scott would have employed the “well, I tried…” theory of modern slavery.  But Nick Hayes must have been stupified at the request and so he did it.

In watching David and Bill toil with Ian, I recalled the hedge digging event and understood for the first time that Scott picked the worst job he could think of because he was pissed off that I invited an old boy friend to stay with us.  I never did get his messages when I was supposed to.