Banana Split (17 page)

A buzzer went off from somewhere behind them, and CeeCee stepped forward to wave Sadie inside. “Oh, those are my rolls. I’ve got a big order due for a wedding in the morning, and I’m in a rush to get them baked up. Wait here for a minute, will you?”

That explained the heavenly aroma from the street; Sadie realized it was even stronger now that she was inside. CeeCee reached around Sadie, ushering her in as she did so, and shut the door before heading toward the back of the house. Sadie could see an outdoor kitchen through the screen door at the back—common in Hawai’i to keep from overheating the house. There was a pile of shoes and rubber slippahs by the door, and Sadie slipped off her own.

“Have a seat,” CeeCee called over her shoulder. “Charlie, will you get her a drink, dear?”

Charlie, however, had backed up as though intent on disappearing. Sadie honed in on him as soon as they were alone, and at her look, he slipped down the hallway. She automatically headed in his direction. He entered a room, and she didn’t hesitate to follow him. Her building anxiety about this meeting, culminating with the shock of seeing Charlie, had her reeling and unsure of what to do, which meant she couldn’t control her feelings as well as she liked. She was suddenly mad and didn’t fully understand why. She’d come here in hopes of helping him, yet right now she just wanted to put him in time out.

Charlie stood in the middle of a bedroom, looking terrified of her as she put her hands on her hips and stared him down from the doorway.

“I think you have something to say to me, young man,” she said sharply, trying to control the feelings churning inside of her, but finding it difficult to sort through them all. Was she more upset about the money than she realized? Or was this some new coping mechanism that masked her anxiety with anger?

He stood there, looking scared, and then his eyes darted to the right at the same time someone on far side of the room cleared his throat.

Sweet Hawaiian Dinner Rolls

4 to 5 cups of all-purpose flour, divided

1/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoons dry milk

1 tablespoon instant yeast (To use regular yeast, reduce pineapple juice to 1 cup and add yeast to 1/2 cup warm water. Add proofed yeast with other liquids.)

1 teaspoon salt

11/2 cups pineapple juice, heated

3 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons honey

1 egg

11/2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 150 degrees (or as low as it will go). Mix one-half of the flour and the rest of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. In a saucepan, heat pineapple juice until warm, but not hot. Add butter and honey to warmed pineapple juice. Stir until butter is melted and honey is incorporated. Add to dry ingredients. Add egg and vanilla. Mix everything until smooth.

Add remaining flour a little at a time until dough is tacky but does not stick to fingers when touched. Knead 5 minutes. Form dough into balls (a little larger than a golf ball) and place 1-inch apart on greased jelly roll pan. Turn off oven. Cover rolls with a dish towel and put pan of rolls into still-warm oven. Allow rolls to rise 40 minutes or until just doubled. Leave rolls in the oven, but remove towel and turn heat to 350 degrees. Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until rolls are a golden brown. Immediately brush tops with butter.

Note: For a lighter roll, allow to rise the first time right after kneading, still in mixing bowl. Follow the directions here for the second (shaped) rise.

Chapter 18

Sadie’s head turned toward the throat-clearer in slow motion, and her heart seemed to stop for at least two full seconds. The old Sadie might have a quick explanation for why she’d followed a boy down the hallway of his own house and confronted him in his bedroom but the new Sadie had nothing.

When her eyes met those of the other person in the room, she relaxed a little bit. Instead of an intimidating man with immense shoulders and glowering eyes—like Mr. Olie—she was face-to-face with a small, thin man, at least part Asian, she guessed, with a sparse mustache and closely cropped hair that spiked up into one of those short Mohawks that were all the rage. He wore board shorts and a gray surf shop T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.

“Um, hi,” the man said in a tone that bespoke of suspension of his judgment. At least for now. “Can I, um, help you?”

Sadie dropped her hands from her hips as the stance felt superfluous all of a sudden. She scrambled for an explanation but realized there was nothing to tell but the truth. “My name is Sadie Hoffmiller. Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?” he countered, crossing his arms over his chest with a lot more confidence than Sadie would have liked. Clearly, he wasn’t intimidated by her. This would be much easier if he was.

Seeing as how she was in someone else’s house and had just chased a little boy down the hallway, Sadie felt she had no choice but to cut to the chase in order to justify her actions. “Charlie robbed me.”

The man’s eyebrows went up, and his head snapped toward Charlie, who looked suddenly trapped. “What?”

His surprise gave Sadie the confidence she needed, and she decided to answer before Charlie could put any kind of spin on it. “I won’t give details until I know who you are. Otherwise, this is between Charlie and me.”

The man looked at her. “I’m Charlie’s brother, Nat.”

“Brother?” Sadie asked, looking between the two of them again. Nat’s features were sharp and dark, nothing like Charlie’s softer ones. Nat didn’t look anything like CeeCee either.

“Foster brother,” Nat clarified.

But that didn’t help. Nat had a small build, but he was most definitely in his twenties. “Aren’t you a little old to be in foster care?”

Nat’s jaw tensed, and she cringed. She hadn’t meant to insult him.

“I’m one of CeeCee’s adopted sons—there’s four of us. That makes me Charlie’s foster brother.”

Oh.
Sadie cleared her throat and remembered Mr. Olie giving her the status of CeeCee’s sons—all grown, two married with kids, one in the military, and . . . Nat, she supposed.

He raised his eyebrows at her, reminding her that it was her turn to explain her side of things.

“Charlie came to my house on Tuesday, looking for information about his mother. I told him I didn’t have what he was looking for, and . . . he stole almost a hundred dollars from my wallet.”

“Is that true?” Nat snapped at Charlie. “That’s where you went?”

Charlie looked between Sadie and Nat, and Sadie felt her protective instincts rising at the increased look of fear on the little boy’s face.

“I’m not here to get him in trouble,” she quickly amended, gratified to have an admission that Charlie
had
been gone. That was a step toward the information Mr. Olie needed her to get.

Nat looked back at her. “Why else would you be here? If he stole from you, he—”

Sadie turned to Charlie, not wanting the conversation to go this direction. “I came here because I was worried about you,” she said to him, though her tone still sounded angry. She was going to have to work on that. “And I didn’t want to get you in trouble by going to the police before I talked to your foster mother about what happened. When did you come back?”

“This morning,” he mumbled, looking at the ground.

“And your foster mother wasn’t angry?”

He shrugged and glanced at Nat. Sadie did too and saw a guilty expression in Nat’s eyes before he looked away. Sadie knew a shared secret when she saw one. “She doesn’t know, does she?” Yet CeeCee had still lied to Mr. Olie; Sadie wondered why.

“Where’s the money, Charlie?” Nat asked, looking at Charlie and answering her question without saying a word in direct response.

“Um, I, uh, don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Nat and Sadie said in unison. They shared a quick glance, and Sadie inclined her chin, indicating for Nat to continue . . . for now.

“I lost it,” Charlie said.

Nat cocked his head to the side, giving Charlie a look that said he wasn’t buying it. “You lost a hundred dollars.”

Charlie nodded, but Sadie had no doubt he was lying.

“We’ll talk about that later.” Nat moved toward a desk in the room that must be his—the room was too clean and too grown up to be Charlie’s. He fumbled in a drawer before pulling out a wallet. “I’ll make him pay me back.”

“I don’t care about the money,” Sadie said. She quickly heard her own words and looked hard at Charlie. “Although what you did was wrong.”

He looked at the floor again, and Sadie turned back to Nat. “But I want to know what’s going on. Why was Charlie alone?”

“It wasn’t Nat’s fault,” Charlie said. He shrugged and cast a nervous glance at Nat. “He just took me fishing.”

“You weren’t fishing from my avocado tree at three o’clock in the morning,” Sadie said, staring at both boys. The situation had reached the point where it was completely appropriate for her to put her hands back on her hips, but she didn’t. It felt a little too postured now.

Nat tried to look away, but Sadie had perfected her stare through two dozen second-grade classes and two children of her own. Finally, Nat crumpled and looked at Charlie. “Go see if
Makuahine
needs any help. I’ll be there in a minute.” Sadie had heard the word makuahine before and knew it meant mother.

Charlie didn’t jump to action, showing that he was more interested in what was happening here, but Nat gave Charlie a look that didn’t allow argument, and the boy slinked away. Nat waited a few seconds, then closed the door and faced Sadie. “It would be helpful if you wouldn’t pull CeeCee into this,” he said evenly. “It will not help things.”

“I’m not so sure,” Sadie said, making no promises. “An eleven-year-old boy has no right being left alone, especially at night.”

“He was in my care,” Nat said, then after considering his own words added. “Mostly.”

Sadie raised her eyebrows, and Nat sighed before glancing quickly at the door. Sadie didn’t want to be interrupted either but knew it was only a matter of time before CeeCee realized Sadie wasn’t waiting in the living room. This was an explanation she couldn’t step away from, however.

Nat started talking. “Charlie went to his mom’s memorial service Tuesday morning. He didn’t want to go to school afterward, but CeeCee had a catering job so I stayed with him. Within half an hour of coming home, I caught him trying to sneak out. I took him into town for a shave ice, and he told me he was planning to go look for his mom.”

“So he doesn’t think she’s dead,” Sadie said, feeling validated in her hypothesis.

Nat shook his head. “He’s used to her being gone—she’s been gone for a lot of his life—but he’d never considered that they wouldn’t be together again. Because of the condition of the . . . body, there was no way he could see her, and so he was left having to take the word of a whole bunch of people he doesn’t trust. After I talked to him, I called CeeCee and said we were going fishing, but I told him we were going to go to Anahola, where his mom was found, and have our own ceremony. I had hoped it would help him let go. Release his demons.”

Sadie thought it was a sweet gesture that had obviously gone awry. “How did he end up in Puhi?”

“We stopped there to buy a lei we could take out to where his mother had been found. There’s a flower stand off the highway.”

“I know it,” Sadie said. She used to walk the mile or so to the stand every few days and talk to the old man, Leloy, who ran the shop with his grandsons. They did the picking while he sold the flowers and the leis he made during the day. She hadn’t been there in more than six weeks.

“Did he talk to the old man?” She could imagine him confirming to Charlie where she lived if Charlie had had the gumption to ask for her by name. The towns on Kaua’i were all so small, a few thousand people in each village, if that. Leloy knew everyone in Puhi.