A large truck was parked outside the neighbor’s home, a two-story white building with columns. The back of the truck was open, revealing some fancy wooden furniture. The man with the lightbulb-shaped head was now shouting instructions to some deliverymen who were raising a load ramp from the back of the truck.
When the neighbor spied Lloyd and Mari, he switched his focus to them. “I can’t have all these cars here,” he told them. “Miss Waxley’s Cadillac was parked outside my place again.”
“Dammit, Howard,” Lloyd said. “Kazzy’s dead.”
The neighbor didn’t register any emotion. “I know, I know. I’ve already spoken to the police. I’m the one who called them when I heard a gun go off at nine last night. They couldn’t find a thing wrong; they didn’t take my call seriously, I guess. But all this ruckus proves what I’ve been saying: that garden and museum thing has no place in this neighborhood. Take it over to downtown Brooklyn, or Manhattan. But not here.”
Mari looked like she was going to verbally slash the neighbor, but Lloyd pushed her forward. “C’mon, Mari. We’ve had enough excitement over the past twenty-four hours. Just let it go.”
They made it a few doors down until Mari apparently couldn’t hold it in any longer. “He’s a damn racist,” she muttered, tightening her grip around the stroller’s handlebar.
“He’s not against other races; he’s just against everyone. A nondiscriminatory hater.” Lloyd was trying to tell a joke, Mas figured, but it wasn’t registering with either Mas or Mari.
They turned the corner and walked down Flatbush Avenue, past coffee shops smelling of bacon grease and syrup, laundries with stacks of thin brown-paper packages in the window, and bakeries offering pastry cones filled with light-pink cream. Mas could feel Mari’s anger now redirecting from the neighbor to her father, and could almost hear his daughter’s thoughts. Why did I ask him to come? I didn’t want him over here in the first place, and now see what has happened.
Once they were back in the underground apartment, Mari and Lloyd took Takeo into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Mas, meanwhile, folded up the futon and blanket and placed them in a wicker chair by the fireplace in the living room. As he fumbled to take his cigarettes out of his pocket, Mas noticed that his hands were shaking. Even though Kazzy had been a stranger, it had been a shock to see the dead man’s face. That was the strange thing: both Mari and Lloyd had known the man well, and they didn’t seem that sad at all.
Mari was hard to predict when it came to emotions. During Chizuko’s funeral at a mortuary in Little Tokyo, Mari wore sunglasses that would occasionally slip down her small nose. At first Mas thought that her pride was taking hold, her reluctance to let people see her weak and vulnerable. But as mourners passed by Chizuko’s casket, Mas got a good sideways glance at his daughter’s profile. Her eyes were clear and dry, not a speck of any kind of weepiness. Mas realized then that the dark glasses were to hide her lack of emotion, not her excess of it.
Mas had wanted the funeral banquet to be at Far East Café, only about six blocks away from the mortuary, but Mari opted for the chop suey house in Monterey Park, a suburb east of downtown Los Angeles. “More people live out there,” she announced. “And there’s plenty of parking.” End of discussion.
Mas and his daughter had been seated at one of the round tables next to each other, but most of the time Mari was out of her chair. During one particularly long absence, Mas got up to look for her and thought he saw her by the cash register, arguing with one of the waiters. He was then waylaid by some family friends who spent a full useless fifteen minutes telling him what a saint Chizuko had been, how strong she was during her radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
Mas finally found Mari outside in the parking lot, where she was leaning against the yellow brick wall, an unfiltered cigarette in her hands. Her dark glasses were off her face, and tears watered down her cheeks.
“What happen?”
“They ran out of the damn pakkai.”
“Itsu orai.” Who cared about missing out on a serving of sweet and sour pork after seven other courses?
“It was Mom’s favorite,” she said.
But Mom not here, Mas was about to say, then stopped himself.
“It was mine, too.” Mari pushed up her dark glasses and went back into the restaurant.
Mas hadn’t seen Mari many times since then. He had given her all of Chizuko’s jewelry-the wedding ring, the string of pearls from Hiroshima, and even the cheap stuff she had received from customers when she began cleaning houses after Mari started school. Mari had taken all of that, as well as some old black-and-white photographs and Chizuko’s Japanese hymnal from her days as a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Mas didn’t understand why she wanted the black hymnal, since Mari couldn’t really read Japanese well and, as far as he knew, had quit going to church. But that was all part of the mystery called Mari Arai. Now Mari Jensen.
Lloyd came out of the bedroom first. “I’m going to get some Thai food,” he announced, grabbing his keys from the kitchen table. His voice sounded funny, and Mas knew that both he and Mari had been talking about him.
“I go wiz you.”
“No, it’s okay, Mr. Arai. Really. I think Mari wants to talk to you.” The son-in-law looked dog-tired. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, and both the sides of his face and chin showed a healthy crop of golden beard stubble.
“I pay, at least.” Mas reached down for his wallet. Again, Lloyd shook his head.
“No, Mr. Arai, it’s fine.” He went to the door and stopped as if he wanted to say something more. But he pushed forward, locking the gate behind him. Through the small barred window, Mas watched Lloyd’s work boots reach ground level and then disappear toward the street.
The living room became progressively darker, but instead of turning on the lamps, Mas folded his hands together and sat back on the couch. He left the cigarettes on the coffee table. No sense smoking in a sick baby’s house.
After some time, fluorescent light washed over the room. Mari had opened the bedroom door. “He’s finally asleep,” she said. Mas was surprised that Takeo could rest with so much light. She closed the door softly and turned on the kitchen light. She brought down an old aluminum cookie tin from one of the shelves, and after she pried it open with her fingernails, Mas realized that it was an okome canister, which held their daily supply of rice. As Mari began measuring cupfuls of rice into a rice cooker, Mas finally said, “I dunno your baby’s sick.”
“Yeah, I should have told you. But it was too hard to explain over the phone.” Mari closed the tin and returned it to a shelf.
Mas wondered where his daughter had wandered to last night. He knew that she had inherited his personality: flashes of explosive anger and fear, a need to escape for miles and miles. In Mas’s case, he would drive away in his Ford pickup. Mari, on the other hand, had to rely on her legs and public transportation.
She took a deep breath, as if she were getting ready to go underwater. “I thought about all the things I would tell you when you got here. What’s been going on with me over the past few years. How I’ve been working on myself. Trying to be happier, becoming less angry. But on the day you arrived, I realized that this whole thing was a mistake. Seeing you was too soon. I shouldn’t have called you, asked you to come all the way over here from L.A. ”
There was a hush over the apartment. There would be no turning back from whatever would come next.