Like Sweet Potato Pie (16 page)

“It better not be about Adam.” I bristled. “Or I’ll—”

“Huh? No. Not this time.” She grinned. “But coming to see you is what reminded me how ready I am to go home.”

“Coming here? Why?”

A funny look passed across Kyoko’s face. “Let me back up. I don’t know exactly how to say this, but I came thinking maybe you needed help. That you’re maybe … overstressed or something.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. You sort of hinted at it over the phone. I’m not a dummy, Kyoko.”

She looked away. “Oh. Well. Sorry, but I was worried about you. All you’ve been through could wear anybody down. But I have to tell you that your life isn’t quite like I expected.”

“What do you mean?”

“They love you, Ro,” she said bluntly, looking up at me. Her piercing glinted in the overhead light. “I don’t know where you met that bunch of friends, and they’re weird all right—especially that Tim guy. But he’s really nice. Becky, too.”

“What did you say?” I did a double take. “You
liked
them?” Kyoko the stoic hadn’t uttered one word after our Sunday lunch at The Green Tree. “But I thought …”

“I never said I
liked
them. Let’s not get carried away.” She coolly stuck her ticket in a leather travel wallet-thing, hiding a smile. “But … They’re okay, I guess. If you must associate with people from Staunton.”

“You gave them those looks! And when Tim said that about catfish, you …” I crossed my arms stiffly. “I don’t believe you. You’re just making fun of me.”

“I’m not!” Kyoko shoved my shoulder. “Don’t make me say this twice because I swear when I get back to Tokyo I’ll go back to giving you grief. Hear me?” She shook a stray sock at me for emphasis. “I liked them, okay? I admit it. And I don’t like people very often. You should know that by now.”

“You can say that again.”

“Yeah, well, I had a million reasons not to. But when I saw how they treated you. The way they …” She threw the sock in the suitcase, and for a split second her eyes looked watery.

“Are you crying?” I recoiled in surprise.

“No! My contact’s bugging me.” Kyoko rubbed her eye harshly, smearing her glittery green eyeliner. “Anyway, those friends of yours talk to you like you really
matter.
They hear you. They protect you, in a weird way. Even your redneck boss man, hovering around our table and making sure we got the best service and bragging about what a good job you do.”

I smiled faintly. “Jerry does that to everybody.”

“And that Todd kid? What a cutie.”

Kyoko Morikoshi calling someone a cutie? Impossible. “I can’t believe this! I thought Todd got on your last nerve.”

“What? No way!” Kyoko ran a hand over his army-tank drawing. “He’s gonna be an artist. Did you see the detail on that fender? Man! I’m going to show this to my friend Makoto who draws anime comics. It’ll blow his ponytail off!”

My friends had outdone me. Just like Jamie said, they showed her our life to enjoy if she wanted to. Rolled out their red carpet, tattered as it might be. And striped with stars and bars.

I heard the tick of the clock on Mom’s bedside table and wished I could somehow stop time. That Kyoko could stay forever, and at the same time she’d change her mind and forget Europe. Tell Dave she made a mistake. That she’d misjudged Japan the way she’d misjudged Virginia—and wanted to give it another try.

“I’ve missed this, Ro. I miss having friends who care for me. Japanese people can be wonderfully polite, but a foreigner is almost always outside looking in. And I’m ready to be on the inside again.”

“You’re always on the inside here.” I wanted to say more, but my lip quivered, and I felt my throat choke up.

“Ah.” She patted my shoulder, smooshing my hair. “You’re all right, Ro. I’m glad I came. After all, who else can I pick on back at the office? They’re all a bunch of dorks.”

I reached up and squeezed her hand as she pulled it away. “Thanks.”

“For what? You’re a dork, too. But with a more intimate knowledge of fried chicken and biscuits.”

“I meant thank you for coming here and caring,” I said, ignoring her attempt at humor/affection. “I mean it.”

She yawned, leaning back on her elbows in an
I-don’t-care
position. “Yeah. Well. I do what I can. Just try not to get attacked at any more battlefields because I can’t exactly send you ninja throwing stars through the mail. Well, actually I
can
, but I’d have to … never mind. I’d better just do it because then you can claim you didn’t know if you get caught.”

Kyoko’s skills, legal and otherwise, never failed to impress.

“Just one thing.”

I looked up. “What?”

“That Stella woman is one weirdo with a capital w.”

My blood ran cold. I hadn’t seen Stella in a few days. “Why? You didn’t say anything rude to her, did you?”

“No. But I sure made up some good stories about your neighbors.” She snickered. “I bet she’s off investigating them now.”

“Kyoko! You didn’t!” My eyes popped out.

“Kept her busy, didn’t it?”

“That’s evil!”

“I know.” She beamed. “You should hear the stuff I said about you!”

The following morning frost painted the grass velvet-white. Kyoko took the remaining vestiges of summer with her, leaving me standing on the front porch in a cold, dazzly, hazy-breathed dawn. I’d hoped to drive her to Richmond, but she refused on the spot. Probably the emotion thing.

“I’ll do anything for you, Ro,” she said in an uncharacteristic spout of tenderness, patting my head with more force than necessary. “Just let me know.”

It stung. I rubbed the spot and fixed my hair. “Want to buy a house in western Virginia?”

“Ha! Don’t kid yourself. I’d go insane.” She flicked my shoulder. “Like you.”

I hugged her as long as she’d let me (about one-and-a-half seconds), and then she jumped in the car and left. Honked at the end of the driveway and pulled away.

I thought I saw her wipe her face with her free hand. And then never look back.

Leaving me with a mouthful of unsaid good-byes.

I walked Christie then put on my well-used running shoes and ran a loop through a couple of neighborhood streets to clear my lungs and the lump in my throat. Watched the sky brighten, chilly with fall gold, then sat on the deck steps in my sweatshirt, sticky and breathless. Heart beating gloriously in my ears as the sun turned Stella’s sugar maples to flame and rust.

And when I stood to open the screen door, they caught my eye: Mom’s last white Kobe roses of the season frozen in a shock of fine, diamond-like frost, as if sprayed with glitter starch. Breathtakingly beautiful for their last moment.

Just like Mom. Taken in an unexpected instant, the bloom still in their cheeks. Fearless. Bold. Standing strong in the face of death.

“Come, fall! Come, winter!”
Mom had written in her journal. “I
am not afraid! I will keep on singing until my last petal falls.”

My breath misted as I touched the papery petals, frozen in time. Their last bloom before winter. I knelt on the cold mulch, sun sparkling on the tiny ice crystals that formed on each delicate white petal like shards of spun glass.

I raced inside and grabbed my camera.

Squatting next to her roses, I snap-snapped away, trying to keep my cloudy breath out of the frame.

I could still see Mom’s words, written in her distinctive loopy script, so different from the angry words I remembered from my childhood:

My camera groaned, sluggish with cold, and my fingers turned red. I rubbed them together and took a few more shots. Then I gently touched one of the chilly canes, which had burst forth in glorious bloom in the late summer sun.

“I’ll miss you,” I whispered, thinking of Mom’s smiles from her photos. Of Japan, slipping steadily from my grasp. Of Kyoko’s retreating car, when I’d finally lost it from view behind a neighbor’s white siding.

Good-byes were becoming part of me. A little ache just below the surface, always holding back a tear.

But spring would come.

I believed it now.

“I’ll see you when winter’s over,” I said, touching a cold leaf in the morning glow. “I can’t wait to be together again. To say hello instead of good-bye.”

To you, roses. And to you, Mom.

I can’t wait for our reunion.

S
omebody should have warned me about fall in Virginia.

Whole mountainsides roared with red and orange flame. Gypsy Hill Park turned to gold, leaves sifting down to brilliant carpets where I used to see grass. The air crackled, crisp as the endless apples people gave away in bulging bags to ease the weight on their groaning trees. Our clear blue mountain ridges turned a distinctive smoky purple. My marigolds glowed.

Even the sun shone differently—muted apricot, a little bit sad and a little bit joyful, slanting across railroad tracks and evergreens with cool blue shadows.

Another color sprouted across the hillsides: blaze orange. Tim informed me “huntin’ season” was about to open and it was almost “deer time.” His gun rack bloomed with actual rifles, while he dressed in an odd combination of neon and camouflage. Eye-smarting, synthetic orange popped up everywhere—on caps, on vests, and gleaming from endless trucks and cars that winked in the receding fall sun.

While the local guys huddled at the gun range in plaid-wearing clumps to sight in their rifles, Wal-Mart set out a huge hunting display—complete with taxidermied deer and mannequins clad in shaggy, leaf-covered coats. Rows of camouflage caps, hand warmers, bows and arrows, rifle scopes, and shotgun shells stacked all the way to the counter, which bristled with rifles. They issued hunting licenses for the opening of deer season by the hundred—first for bows, then for muzzleloaders, and in November, the long-awaited rifle season. The waiting line snaked around the corner and into the photo area. I listened to them chat about “twelve pointers” and “three-fi’ty-sevens” and “black powder” as they inched forward in their blaze orange and camo, cleaning their nails with pocket knives or fingering boxes of shiny gold ammo cartridges.

The most astonishing fact of all: Becky told me that local schools gave excused absences for hunting!

Tim mysteriously disappeared three different weekends, and Adam and Todd, one. Staunton’s general male population shrank. Everybody—including the membership of my “new believers” Sunday school class—jawed about buckshot and synthetic pheromones, and my Sunday school teacher even drew deer-stand diagrams on the white board.

And then I started seeing dead deer strapped to tops of cars and in beds of trucks.

It horrified me to stomp on my brakes at a red light and find myself staring into the cold eyes of a buck just a few feet ahead. And I told Tim so the night they invited me over for rice and venison.

“It’s barbaric! How can you kill a deer? They don’t even have any natural defenses!”

He looked up from packing another Ziploc full of red stuff, fresh from his meat grinder. “Well cows don’t neither, and ya eat them up mighty quick.”

“Well, that’s different. They’re raised for food.”

“Ain’t no differ’nt. Fact is, deer got the better end of the stick. They live their lives free an’ wild, an’ then I take ‘em out before they know what hit ‘em. One clean shot. Ya ever been in a slaughterhouse?”

I hadn’t. And I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Maybe I should become a vegetarian.”

“Try it.” Becky slid a plate of tender venison and gravy in front of me as Tim slammed the freezer door shut. I tried not to notice the scarlet-stained rinse water as he washed his hands in the sink. Gordon, the hound, obviously undisturbed by such moral dilemmas, whapped his tail and stared at me in expectation of a handout.