Strawberry Yellow (18 page)

“Here, let me drive us home.” Minnie helped Mas out of the driver’s seat into the passenger side. She was going to leave her car in the parking lot and pick it up later.

She crinkled her nose. “You were drinking.”

“Dinner with Oily.”

“So you were definitely drinking. Drinking alcohol with a concussion. Not such a good idea.”

Mas rubbed the stubble over his lip and on his chin.
That’s what he’d told Oily. Too bad he didn’t listen to his own advice.

“You’ll see him again in a few hours,” Minnie said. “He and Evelyn are coming by to help Billy and me with the last of the thank-yous for the
koden
.”

Funeral work never seemed to be finished. Mas recalled his thank-you notes taking weeks upon weeks to get out. Actually, to be perfectly honest, he didn’t write one thank-you; it had all been his daughter Mari’s doing.

“I’ll let you rest for a while,” Minnie said as she parked Shug’s car in the garage. “Hope we don’t make too much noise.”

His head still banging, Mas pressed down on his temples.

As he pulled on the door handle, he saw something on the otherwise immaculate floor on the passenger side. Shug wasn’t the type to leave even a single dust speck on the interior of his car, so out of respect, Mas picked up the piece of paper, a receipt, and stuck it his sweatshirt pocket.

The calls from creditors were getting more frequent, frequent enough for Jimi to pull out the telephone cord from its wall outlet. He didn’t answer his cell phone anymore unless the calls came from his children, employees, or suppliers. He didn’t bother to listen to his voicemail messages; almost every single one of them seemed to be from collection agencies.

And then came the letter. The foreclosure notice from their bank informing Jimi that he needed to settle up the
delinquent mortgage payments within thirty days. Six months’ worth of principal, interest, and other additional costs. If he failed to this, not only the house but the farm would be subject to foreclosure.

The letter was a sign, and its timing was also a sign. Ats’s caretaker would be off for the weekend. She’d packed her overnight bag, apparently a free duffel from a casino in Laughlin, and told Jimi that she was excited to see her sister, who was visiting from the Philippines. Jimi told her to enjoy herself and take an extra day if she needed to.

Watching the caretaker leave in a relative’s car, Jimi didn’t waste any time. He retrieved the package from their extra refrigerator in the packing shed. The pills inside looked innocuous, like aspirin. He ground the extra-strong morphine in a mortar until it was a fine white dust. Then mixed it with apple juice. It was only a matter of Ats drinking it. But she wasn’t having one drop.

“Ats,” he said, hoping that evoking her name would elicit a better response. She continued to stare at him plaintively with her large eyes, her eyelashes now few and far between, like a flower losing its petals. She knew. But how?

Her lips were tight against her closed teeth.

We are going to lose the farm,
Jimi thought.
We are going to lose my parents’ legacy
. He felt defeated. This was all for the next generation. Their children and grandchildren. What did his and Ats’s lives mean anyway? It had to mean more than providing strawberries on top of someone’s shortcake or pie. It needed to have more substance. Something tangible. Dirt and ground. Something that could be fertilized and irrigated. A variety named Taro would have been special. Even if
nobody else knew, the Jabamis would know that strawberry was theirs. Well, perhaps the Arais have won, Jimi thought. He wiped away tears from the corners of his eyes.

Abandoning the fatal morphine and apple juice concoction on the kitchen table, he went outside. He sat underneath the lemon trees and spoke to his sisters.
At least I tried
.

“Mas, it’s for you. A woman named Genessee.”

Minnie had opened the guest bedroom door, and Mas blinked his eyes awake. What time was it? He took the cordless phone from Minnie, who took her time leaving the room.

Mas sat up on the bed. “Hallo.”

“I’m so sorry to call you at your cousin’s house. I hadn’t heard from you and I was worried.”

“I’zu
orai
. Comin’ along good.”

“I’m so relieved. Mari said you told them not to come. Just making sure that you weren’t being Japanese.”

Mas was confused. Well, he was Japanese, in a manner of speaking. Although he was officially American, it was hard to erase his cultural DNA.

He talked to Genessee a little more, although he didn’t go into the details of the whole mess swirling around the Arai household. It was too hard to make out anything definitive; every time he tried to grasp hold of something, it moved, only to be replaced with something else in flight. As always, though, it grounded Mas to talk to Genessee. The rest of them in the house must have noticed, because when he went out to the living room to replace the phone in its cradle,
everyone was giving him a funny look.

“So, was that your giiiirlfriend, Mas?” Evelyn’s voice took on a terrible sing-song tone that made Mas cringe.

“Just like you to keep someone under wraps. So who is she?” Mas couldn’t believe that Oily could bounce back so strong after a hard night of drinking. Oily lifted a glass filled with liquid. He couldn’t be starting again so early in the day, could he?

“Well, her first name is Genessee. Unusual. Related to anyone we would know?” Minnie asked.

Mas feared it was a losing battle. “No, no.”

“Is she a
hakujin
woman?” Minnie wasn’t going to let up.

“Uhnnn,” Mas said, hedging again. “
Hapa
. Part Okinawan.”

“
Hapa
makes her half-white.”

“Uhnnn,” Mas repeated.
Oh, what the hell, need to come clean
. “Sheezu
kokujin
.”

“Wow, that’s very Los Angeles of you.” Mas didn’t know if Oily was paying him a compliment or insulting him. When it came to Oily, there was always a sarcastic twist, so Mas assumed he meant a little of both.

“A
kurochan
,” Evelyn murmured, without thinking.

Mas blanched. He himself had used that slur in the past, but he didn’t approve of it now, especially to describe his lady friend.

“I don’t know much Japanese, but isn’t that derogatory?” Billy, who must have been lying on the couch this whole time, got up.

“Billy, there’s no one here to hear it,” Minnie said.

“You mean it would be all right for a bunch of black
people to call us Japs behind our backs?”

“It’s not the same,” Minnie said.

“It sounds pretty much the same to me.”

“Billy, stop it.”

Billy shook his head. “I have to go. I have to take care of some things for Laila.” He put on his tennis shoes and left out the front door.

Minnie addressed the people in her living room as if she were issuing a public apology. “I’m sorry, everyone. It’s that Laila. It’s almost like he misses her more than his own father.” She tightened her fists and pressed them into her eyes. More waterworks.

Evelyn immediately went to her friend’s side, while Oily continued to sip his “juice.”

Mas chose to go outside to follow Shug’s son, who hadn’t quite made it back into his truck.

“I just get tired of it sometimes, you know,” he said to Mas in the driveway.

Mas, surprisingly, did know. Two large boxes sat in the bed of Billy’s truck. “Where’su you goin’?”

“Laila’s parents’ house. I have to go over there now. Drop off some of Laila’s things. Some old photos that she brought to the apartment. Some clothing. I was going to just mail them over, but I figure that would be a chickenshit thing to do. I need to see them face to face.”

It was a no-brainer for Mas, who didn’t relish dealing with all the nosy ones back in the house. “I’zu goin’ wiz you.”

At first, the ride was dead quiet, but as they got on the highway and the scenery got more uncontrolled and even wild—the wind-swept cypress frozen in a dervish dance—Billy’s lips got looser. It was as if getting away from Watsonville, even only a few miles, made him more relaxed and reflective. “My whole life, I’ve tried to follow the rules,” he said, sunglasses shading his eyes. “Do what my parents want me to do. Get married, have kids. Get involved in the business of making strawberries. Then I took a good long look at what I had. What? Colleen and I met in college. I didn’t know who I was and neither did she. We got together because everyone expected us to.”

Another cypress, this one shaped like a man running in place.

“You know, Everbears wanted to send me to Mexico. This was after something had happened here. Something real bad. I needed to get away. They wanted me to try breeding some plants down there. New climate, new soil. A new start. But Colleen said absolutely not. She said she was afraid of being shot, killed. That’s just TV shows, I told her. Sensational news programs.”

Billy sipped something from a metal thermos in the cup holder in between the seats. “And then I met Laila at a pool party thrown by Clay. They went to high school together. We fought like cats and dogs from the get-go. Later we were both manning booths at the local farmers’ market—I was supposed to teach people about breeding strawberries, and she was there to tell us how laboratories had no place in creating organic fruit. We went out for drinks to continue to debate; one thing led to another, and we were in love.”

Mas had to stop himself from snorting. Love. Young people always were concerned with love. Why didn’t they have the good sense that he and Genessee seemed to have? Restraint.

“I didn’t hide anything from Colleen,” Billy explained. “That wouldn’t be right to her and it wouldn’t be right to Laila. I told Colleen that she could keep the house. I’d pay for college for the kids. I’d give her alimony, too. I wouldn’t fight her for anything.” Billy readjusted his sunglasses. “I didn’t expect her to shut down. I guess she had dreams, too. That we would get old together, play with our grandchildren. That was her dream, my nightmare. There was no compromise.”

He turned after getting off the highway. The skies were gray, but Mas lowered the passenger-side window and let the cool air bathe his face. He always felt transformed in Monterey. He didn’t feel like he was in California or even in the United States. It was like he’d been transported to a magical world where there was no poverty, no crime. For a moment, he felt happy. Then he was brought back to reality by Billy’s continuing talk.