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FRIDAY NIGHT PROVED THE posters they’d hung all over the neighborhood worked. The Sue Ikeda Memorial Photo Show, less oppressive and miserable than the funeral, offered a lightness to everyone’s memories and conversation. The banquet hall doors were open from noon to nine p.m., with never less than twenty people in the room.
Scattered and detached, Ryan watched the reactions of each person to every photo, to see what they got out of it. The painting of Gramma as young woman in a faux-Victorian sitting room stood on an easel near the entrance. Everyone exclaimed over how it captured her smile, complimented Ryan on his skill.
Veronica and Ryan endlessly refilled tables with food and drinks. At five p.m. when Ryan wasn’t sure how he’d survive, they opened the wine. Finally overwhelmed, he gave up and joined Steven and Ben at corner table, nervously sipping cheap wine and trying to keep an eye on the entire room. His reprieve didn’t last long.
“There you are!”
Mrs. Hino came toward them, her hand on Garrett’s elbow, the only indication she was probably never going to be one hundred percent again after the heart attack. Still, she was such a force of nature that it took a second for Ryan to register Terrence Chao behind her with a very old man.
Introductions were time-consuming. Mrs. Hino grilled Ben about his job and his prospects and whether he’d been properly looking after Ryan in recent weeks.
“Nice to finally meet you.” Terrence Chao shook Ben’s hand with the enthusiasm of a long-time fan. Every time they met, Ryan liked the man more.
“You, too, Terrence.”
“Please, call me Terry. The only people who call me Terrence are doing interviews for magazines.”
“So, you guys are moving here soon?” Ben glanced between Terry and Garrett.
“They put an offer on a house today!” Mrs. Hino’s smile lit up her face.
Her smile brought out Ben’s. “Is it near you, Mrs. Hino?”
“Not so lucky,” she said. “I’m taking up too much of your time, Ryan. I know you have so many people to talk to tonight. But we have something important for you.”
Garrett and Terry politely excused themselves to see the photos. The old man, Mr. Nakamoto, had stood so quietly next to Terry since the introductions that Ryan forgot he was there. Ryan realized the man was quite hard of hearing and regretted not speaking more clearly during introductions. Mrs. Hino filled the space emptied by her departing nephew.
“Mr. Nakamoto and I got to talking after church last week about what you’re doing here, and I discovered he has something he wants to give you.”
She nodded at Mr. Nakamoto, who silently pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. He held it out to Ryan, his hand shaking.
“Thank you. What is it?”
Mr. Nakamoto bowed slightly. “It was my sister’s.” His voice was both scratchy and frail. Ryan leaned closer to hear. “Sue was in my class at Nikkei Gakko, but my older sister was your grandmother’s special friend when they were growing up. Your grandmother sent that to her. My sister, she died about ten years ago. Now, I think you should have this.”
Ryan took the letter, his throat closing around a thank you so it came out garbled. He cleared and tried again. “Thank you, Mr. Nakamoto. This was in your family. Are you sure you want to give it to me?”
Taking Ryan’s free hand in both of his, Mr. Nakamoto said, “This is for you. Thank you for bringing all these pictures back and for all the memories with them.”
Tears pooled in Ryan’s eyes, one spilling over. “You’re welcome.” He wished he had a way to give everybody a piece of their own memory. But this show was all he had to give back.
On the envelope, his grandmother’s tidy Palmer script had faded to a medium brown. Written with an old hand-cut quill or some unusual pen, it was addressed to MK Nakamoto at an address near where Japantown was before the war.
“Open it.” Mrs. Hino hovered with the anticipatory glee of someone who knows they have the perfect gift.
Ryan unfolded the letter. The envelope was a piece of rice paper that formed an envelope as it wrapped around another sheet. The inside sheet was dated March 12, 1928.
The script was tiny but legible, except for a few words either too faded or written in a cramped hand, plus a line in the middle written in kanji.
“Go on. Read it out loud,” Mrs. Hino said.
Ryan read the first couple of paragraphs, which responded to Gramma’s friend’s last letter, thanking her for news of their friends’ marriages and children. Then Gramma got down to business.
Don’t think I’m a bluenose, but if Peter Kawaguchi hasn’t proposed to you by the time you get this letter, you need to tell him the bank’s closed. Wait around any longer and you will run out of other options. I like Peter, but he needs to do right by you, especially after you necked with him.
Even reading it for the second time, Ryan laughed out loud. At fifteen or sixteen, his grandmother’s voice was no different from the elderly woman he’d known growing up. Insisting people get their act together and do the right thing. Ryan glanced at Mr. Nakamoto and touched his ring finger. Mr. Nakamoto nodded and smiled. Peter had come through.
I know you are eager to hear more about Japan. Springtime here is more beautiful than anything I have ever seen. At Osaka Castle, they have a festival for the cherry blossoms. We all go out dressed up in constricting, uncomfortable kimonos and walk through the park or float on a boat down a little stream with blossoms falling everywhere like snow. I know I told you last that I did not like it here. My cousins here think I am too brash and too loud. Not a proper Japanese girl. If only they could see us in America!
It is so beautiful here that I must be a better person for having seen it. I hope you get to come someday and see it for yourself. Maybe when we are both old married ladies, we will travel here together. Bring our husbands and our children. But perhaps if I’d never come, I could not understand what that meant and I would long for something else, for the old country like so many Issei seem to.
“What does this part say?” Ryan held the letter out to Mrs. Hino, his finger on the line of kanji.
She took the letter from him and showed it to Mr. Nakamoto. They spoke to each other in mixed Japanese and English before handing the letter back to him.
“It says ku areba raku ari, which is like an old saying.”
Mr. Nakamoto nodded. “Old proverb, like my mother would say. It means there are good things and troubles in the world.”
Mrs. Hino said, “I read it as ‘there are hardships and there are delights.’ I’m not sure why she put it there. What does the next part say?”
Ryan was certain Mrs. Hino had already read the letter herself, but he read on.
There is a man from Seattle in the neighborhood. He came only to visit his grandfather who is dying, though my cousin tells me his grandfather has been dying for twenty years, using it to get everybody to do what he wants. This man’s family is friends with my family, but I haven’t seen him since I met him at the festival. I wonder if they think I am too wild and won’t behave myself with an American boy. He leaves next week, and I might not see him again, but he gave me his address so I could write him a letter. He lives right up the street from you! Can you believe that? Maybe you know his family already? His name is Toshirō Ikeda. This letter may go on the boat that brings him back to Seattle. So you’ll have to write me and tell me everything. And maybe I’ll have a better story to tell you by then.
Ryan finished the letter, the last paragraph only greetings sent to other friends back in Seattle. He folded it gently back into its makeshift envelope.
For the first time in weeks, the tears didn’t come. Ryan’s heart cleared. This man, who he felt sure he’d never met before, gave Ryan back a piece of his grandmother he believed lost forever. Only a few lines, but it told the beginning of the family Ryan knew, of how she met his grandfather. A letter like this was something Ryan never expected, but he was so humbled by the gift and grateful for it.
How ever time had altered his grandmother’s memory and what she told about her experience, the trip to Japan obviously meant something to her when she was young. It changed her, gave her knowledge about herself. Following her journey wouldn’t get Ryan closer to her, but it might get him closer to himself. In the days following Gramma’s death, Ryan hadn’t yet sent his refusal to the Yoshida Foundation. He hadn’t intended to keep the option open, but he saw now, a week before the deadline, that it must be his grandmother still looking out for him.
Ryan slipped the letter into his jacket pocket, then squeezed Ben’s hand. He had to get Ben alone. Surely after hearing the letter, Ben would understand why Ryan suddenly had to go to Japan after all. But no matter what, Ben would accept Ryan’s decision. Hopefully with grace.
“Thank you, Mr. Nakamoto. This means so much to me. Please, if there are any pictures of your sister you want, let me know. I will make sure you get them.”
Mr. Nakamoto took Ryan’s hand in both of his, patting the back of Ryan’s hand the way Ryan’s grandmother had. “Sue was so special to my sister. She would be glad you have this now. Thank you for sharing all of this with us.”
“We’re going to look at the rest of these pictures,” Mrs. Hino said. “I haven’t found myself in any of them yet, but we only made it halfway round the room.”
“I know you’re in a few,” Ben said. “Maybe you should make a game of it for Garrett and Terry. See if they can guess which ones are you.”
Mrs. Hino laughed. “Don’t let this one get away, Ryan. I like him.”
“Wait, Mrs. Hino. Can I speak with you for a moment? About a picture I found.”
Veronica came up. “We need more wine.”
“Okay, I’ll take care of it in a second.”
First, he needed Mrs. Hino to answer the mystery of the gravestone picture.
◊
Unable to find Ben after his talk with Mrs. Hino, Ryan made the wine run alone, glad for the space to breathe and consider his decision.
The fluorescent lights at QFC were otherworldly. After the dark parking lot, the grocery store interior felt like an aquarium. Shaking off the sense of being observed, Ryan headed straight for the wine aisle. In the decades he’d been coming to this store, nothing changed much, until it did. Instead of wine on aisle six, Ryan found dogfood. As if the employees got together in the middle of the night to rearrange the store to confuse all the locals. On aisle four, where canned vegetables and soup once lived, Ryan avoided his fellow shoppers searching toilet paper brands and hurried for the next possible place wine might be.
“Ryan, man, hey, you doing alright?”
In the middle of the paper aisle, destroying the peaceful solitude Ryan hoped for when he said he’d come to the store alone, stood Hector in his red baseball jacket, handsome in a way so intimately familiar it broke attraction down into wistful melancholy.
Hector was a pallbearer at the funeral. All the men in Gramma’s generation were too old to help carry, so the family picked young representatives from the church community to do the duty. Younger generations participating in literally carrying on the community sounded noble and wonderful, but it hadn’t dampened Ryan’s discomfort at Hector being tied so closely to his family on that day.
“Hey, Teto. Yeah, better.” Ryan wiggled the fingers of his left hand, then stuck it quickly back in his pocket, remembering Hector didn’t know about his broken hand. Didn’t exactly witness it, never saw Ryan in the interim until the funeral, when the cast was already off.
A microcosmic representation of their entire relationship, in which Ryan was hurt, struggled to get past it and moved on, while Hector moved blithely through life unaware of the destruction he left in his wake. Or at least unaware of the wreckage Ryan created in response to the emotions that Hector aroused in him.
“How are you? Just off work?”
Was polite conversation between them always this forced, or was finding Hector in an unexpected place throwing Ryan off his game? Though he’d grumbled to Ben about the pallbearer choice, Ryan had no idea if he spoke to Hector at the funeral. But here in the grocery store on an unassuming Friday night, suddenly he was right back at the funeral. Another line of hands to shake, condolences, conversations he didn’t want to have. All the things that weren’t present at Gramma Sue’s memorial photo show.
“Yep. Wife called to say we needed milk and diapers. You know how it is, that stuff never ends. Hey, isn’t your thing for your grandmother tonight? We were going to come, but the kids are sick.”
“Yeah, we ran out of wine.” Ryan glanced around, hoping Hector would notice he was in a hurry. “Sorry you couldn’t make it. There’s been a nice turn out.”
“The last time I saw your grandmother, she told me you were thinking about going to Japan. What’s up with that? Is it soon?”
Ryan wasn’t superstitious, but if anyone found a way to send him messages from beyond the grave, it was sure to be Gramma, who believed every decision was as simple as being smart enough to see what was right in front you.
“No, it’s not soon. Early spring.” Spine tensing, Ryan hated telling Hector before Ben, but he also never expected anything to turn out as he hoped.
“Cool, dude. She said you got like some kind of award? Man, that’s awesome for your art. People recognizing it. I always knew you were going someplace.”
“It’s a pretty big deal,” Ryan said slowly, waking up to how much everything was about to change.
“How you holding up?” Hector searched Ryan’s face as if his slow reply was indicative of a deeper problem.
“You know, trying to get through.” Was it better to be here in Seattle, where a grandmother-shaped hole existed everywhere he went? Or to be in Japan, missing Ben just enough to get through to Ben’s next visit?
“Brother, that’s all you can do.” Hector stepped forward, arms raised like he meant to hug Ryan. Ryan stepped backwards. Confusion flickered across Hector’s face for a second. He stepped back, nodding slightly, still studying Ryan’s face. Ryan stuck out his hand to cover the awkwardness.
“Hey, everyone’s waiting for me. I should get back.”
Hector grinned, all good-natured camaraderie. “Totally. My wife will kill me if I’m gone like a minute longer than I need to be. You know how it is when they’re pregnant. It’s crazy.”
Ryan didn’t know how it was. Strange how far his life and Hector’s separated from where they’d been fifteen years ago. Five and half years ago. Inseparable and ready to go into the future together.
“Say hi to her for me. Take care.”
“Yeah, you too. Be good.”
Be good echoed as Ryan paid the cashier and ran for the door. Hector said it at every parting, all the way back through high school. Meaningless words to Ryan—but did they have deeper meaning to Hector? Unanswerable now that Hector was only in Ryan’s rearview mirror.
Obviously, Hector would reopen their friendship if Ryan showed up for it. Hector, who remembered back to when Ryan was four. Hector, who knew so much about him. But had they ever viewed the world from the same direction? Had Ryan suffered from his own wishful thinking, that he’d been to Hector as Hector had been to him?
Driving back to the banquet hall, Ryan meditated on Marcus’s speech about grieving and moving forward. Things were going to keep changing; there was no stopping it. But steering it was possible. Even if unable to anticipate all the bumps in the road, Ryan decided what direction to travel.
Ben was watching the door from the little corner table and hopped up to help with the bag Ryan carried.
“I need to talk to you. Come in the back with me.”
Ben took the wine from Ryan, his brow creased with worry. “You okay? What happened?”
“Hector was at the grocery store.”
“Oh, shit.” A small smirk wiped away Ben’s stricken look. “How’s your hand?”
“Very funny, asshole.”
But when the door to the little prep room closed behind them, sealing out the memorial crowd, Ryan kissed Ben warmly, a real greeting. He wanted as much of Ben as possible while he was here with him.
“We need to talk.” Ryan leaned back against the counter. Even that small frown of concern was attractive on Ben. Everything looked good on him.
“About what?” Ben put the wine down and leaned on the counter across from Ryan.
“I’m going to Japan.”