“As long as you’re polite.” Elly covered the mouthpiece. “Mom wants to talk to you.”
During the conversation between Elly and her mother, Connor’s thoughts had shifted from concern to helpless confusion to relief. Now he stiffened noticeably. Be nice, his wife mouthed, handing him the phone.
“Hello, Connor.” Sayaka Oh Packard spoke English with a recognizable but not marked accent, and in a tone of voice Connor knew from Elly’s description belied her physical size.
“Ma’am,” he felt compelled to answer.
“My brother Nobuo has good things to say about you. I recall even Yuki broaching the subject with me on occasion.”
He stumbled over a reply. “Thanks—I mean—I’ve enjoyed working
with him—them.”
“Tell me, Connor,” she said, and her voice took on an unequivocal
firmness, yet was no less tender. “My daughter, do you love her?” “Very much so.”
“Good,” she said. “Now, what I’m going to tell you next, son-in-law,
you will not repeat to Elly, nor will you ask me what I mean by it. It is
simply this: Give her time. And don’t ever doubt the depth of her affection
for you.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
“And you coming to visit us over Christmas?”
“We’ll be coming over with June and Oh Sensei and Naomi.” “Welcome to the family, Connor.”
“I’m honored,” he replied. He handed the phone back to Elly. Well?
Elly’s expression asked.
“I think I’m hired.”
On the phone her mother said, “I gather June persuaded Naomi to accept Aunt and Uncle’s offer.”
“Well, persuaded by the Oh definition.”
“June will be bringing the uchikake, I hope.”
“Oh, yes. Mom, it is so gorgeous. We got the pictures back today. I’ll
get Connor to email you some of them.”
“I have seen you wearing it, Chieko, but only in dreams. And I doubt
dreams could begin to compare to one glimpse of you in the real world.”
Chapter 39
Breaking the Bed
T he phone rang again half an hour later, Elly’s father calling from the mission home. He clicked on the speaker phone. The window in his office must have been open. Elly could hear, from eight thousand miles away, the Tokaido local arriving at Rokkomichi station. A sound so distant and yet so familiar.
Her mother said, “As I was telling your father, Elly, your grandfather was as much a conspirator in this elopement as anyone on my side of the family.”
Elly guessed from the proximity of her mother’s and father’s voices that her mother was sitting in his lap. She smiled, recalling the Wednesday before she left for BYU. She’d gone to the mission home to meet her parents for a bon voyage lunch and found Brother Izumi waiting in the outer office.
“Hi, Izumi Sensei,” she said. He’d been one of her father’s graduate assistants at BYU. Accounting, she recalled.
Brother Izumi nodded. He was either extremely shy or extremely polite. Or both. It was the ratio between the two she wasn’t quite sure of. Sister Amiya saw her come in and called her over with a question about a translation. Elly asked, “How long has he been here?”
“About an hour. He’s getting a letter of recommendation for his doctorate program. He didn’t have an appointment, so he won’t let me interrupt the president. He insists he’ll wait.”
She silently fumed. Sister Amiya, Elly could tell, had graduated from her mother’s school of interpersonal relationship management.
“Good grief,” Elly said. She took Brother Izumi by the arm and barged into the office. “You’ve got to be more assertive than this if you want to succeed in American academia.”
And there was her father, and her mother in his lap. It was like catching the CEO playing footsie with one of the office ladies. Not that Elly hadn’t seen it before (not CEOs playing footsie with the OLs—her mother making out with her father). And it wasn’t like they were making out or anything. They were probably discussing what nice girl’s college in the northern wastelands of Hokkaido they could send Emily to. But Brother Izumi nearly died from embarrassment on the spot. Even her father reddened a bit.
Her mother was cross with her, if only to assuage Brother Izumi’s dignity (“Didn’t we teach you to knock first?”), though with a twinkle in her eyes. As her father presented Brother Izumi with the letter and imparted a few minutes worth of paternal wisdom, it was all Elly could do to keep from dissolving into laughter.
Remembering that moment, Elly had to smile again. Her mother was right—she was happy, a happiness that only grew as she shared the reasons with more and more people. And wasn’t happiness the same as love?
Friday morning Connor phoned home. His parents had known about the marriage for a week or more. Elly was amazed they’d been willing to wait until she and Connor got around to making it official. This was a family with the patience of the hills.
Connor spoke briefly with his father about how he and Elly had met, to whom Elly was related, about the wedding, which of the relatives had attended. The précis of the dissertation. Then he handed her the phone. His father had a pleasant voice, aged in the sense that she imagined wine ages, full of pride for his son and admiration for her. He didn’t have a lot to say, though. Elly imagined squeezing a sponge as they approached the end of the third full sentence of conversation.
She gave the phone to Connor, and the conversation diverted into a discussion about a security setting in the latest version of Microsoft Windows—almost as if that were the real reason for the call—until Connor’s mother took over and yanked things back on subject.
“Thank goodness for you, Elly!” she said when the phone was handed to her. “I was beginning to fear Connor would never get married.”
“Twenty-five isn’t that old,” Elly argued on her husband’s behalf.
“It wasn’t age, it was expectations. A McKenzie man has it in him to fall in love once, I think. It’s a matter of coming to the right precipice and getting pushed off it. You sound like you were just the girl to do the job. You have told your parents by now, I hope.”
“We spoke with them last night. They’re going to hold a reception for us in Kobe over Christmas.”
“That’s right, Wanda mentioned that your father’s a mission president. I’m afraid Japan is a little far for us. Maybe we’ll come out for Thanksgiving.”
“That’d be nice.”
“Lynne says you wore the most extraordinary kimono.”
“My Aunt June’s. We’ll send you all the pictures. Oh, and thanks for the mattress set. It really was a most—unusual—wedding present.”
“I’ve always believed that a decent bed makes a good foundation for a sound marriage. That old mattress always threw my back out.”
“And we’re putting together Wanda’s brass bed.”
“You talked Connor out of those cinderblock contraptions of his?”
“But aren’t they such clever contraptions?”
“A man ought to be handy, if nothing else.”
When Elly got home that afternoon, she found Connor sitting on the bedroom floor with a socket wrench. He’d detached the cinderblock posts and propped up the frame with a section of two-by-four. Then he raised the frame and placed it on the bracket. He glanced over his shoulder. “How was lab?”
“Not bad. A lot like Eikaiwa. You wouldn’t think so many returned missionaries were signed up for 201. Even Susan showed up. “
“RMs start with 221. They’re not bugging you, are they?”
“Not really. RMs have decent comprehension but pretty bad grammar, and don’t know it. They’re my lab rats. It’s fun to experiment on them.” She tipped back the footboard. “Are you ready to attach this yet?”
“See how the frame fits on top of this lip on the post?” He stood and with a bit of jiggling slipped the fastening plates
onto the joists. “Just put a little weight against the post so the plate doesn’t fall off the joists.” He leaned over and quickly tightened the bolts on each end. “There,” he said. “Looks pretty square.”
Elly agreed, and he attached the remaining four bolts. Then he held up the frame while she shoved the back two cinderblocks out of the way.
Attaching the headboard proved a bit trickier. They had to lift up the headboard and slide it down between the frame and the wall. Elly climbed up on the bed and held the top rail of the headboard while Connor lay beneath the frame like a mechanic working on the undercarriage of a car.
She knelt in the center of the bed and looked to her right and left at the headboard and footboard. “This is nice. Don’t you think?”
He flopped down on the comforter next to her. “I think it was doing it by myself the last time that left me ill-disposed. Things like this are a lot easier with two people.”
“Then I think I’ll leave you better disposed this time around,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him.
Getting into bed that night, she dispensed with subtlety and pulled off her top. Connor quickly lost interest in his Language Acquisition outline. A week and counting and she remained more than a little pleased at the effect her body had on him. He caressed her neck and throat with warm kisses until she cooed.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and wrestled him to the bed. “You’re stronger than that, even for a humanities major,” she kidded him. So he rolled her over and pinned her gently.
Something groaned. It wasn’t her. Gracious, she made more pleasant sounds than that in the throes of passion. The groan became a creak, and then a metallic grating. Followed by a sharp crack. The bed swayed like a raft riding in the wake of a powerboat.
It was like getting jolted out of bed by an earthquake tremor. Their lovemaking came to a screeching halt. Realization dawned on Connor’s face. He started to laugh.
“What?” Elly asked, a bit too frantically. She didn’t see the joke.
“I just remembered why I took the bed apart.” He assured her, “Don’t worry. It’s not going to fall apart. I mean, the bolts aren’t all going to pop out at once. Pretend you’re sleeping on a boat or an airplane.”
“The only boat I’ve been in was a canoe at girl’s camp and going waterskiing once or twice.”
“You’ll get to ride the ferry when we go to Maine. That’s the biggest boat I’ve been on.” He said, “I could get the cinderblocks.”
“No, that’s okay.”
Which wasn’t true. Every time she rolled over, the whole bed swayed. But she wasn’t about to make him get out of bed at this hour and start hauling blocks of concrete around.
She didn’t sleep well on airplanes either.
Chapter 40
Home Improvement
T he next morning Elly helped Connor take apart everything they’d put together the night before. It was like leaving on a trip and an hour later realizing she’d forgotten the traveler’s checks, and having to turn around and go back.
Connor carried on perversely unperturbed. He detached the bedposts and carried them up to the garage on his shoulders with a hi-ho, hi-ho, off-to-work-we-go kind of attitude. Elly sat at the kitchen table, as put out about the stupid bed as Connor had no doubt been when Wanda brought up the subject. Elly had enthusiastically gone along with it, even though he’d said several times that something was wrong with the bed. Their rudely interrupted lovemaking the night before had certainly proved that point. She felt frustrated beyond belief.
“What’s Connor doing with the bed?” Wanda asked.
“It wobbles,” Elly said.
“Now that you mention it, that’s why he took it apart the last time.” “I guess.”
Wanda cast a wary glance at her. “I imagine you’re not too happy with
me at the moment.” Elly shrugged, an expression that really said, Darn tootin’. Thinking back to the previous Saturday, Connor’s change of heart must have been prompted by other than a sudden aesthetic awakening. She felt like an idiot for not realizing it at the time.
One thing she was very certain of: she didn’t like people messing with her husband, relative or no. If she really wanted Connor to do something, she was perfectly capable of getting him to do it by her own devices, as crude as that sounded.
Wanda pulled out a chair and sat down. “Yes,” she said, “I confess to sticking my oar in. But if you’ll allow me to make the same mistake twice, I believe I have something useful to say on the subject this time.”
Elly shrugged again but managed to stop glowering.
Wanda said, “I was seven, almost eight, when we moved into the house on Fifth North. That Sunday, Bishop Barngrover came to see us about my baptism. He was a big, jovial man, the opposite of my dad in every way. Dad was out on the porch fitting a new screen for the front door. The bishop was no doubt expecting some contrariness from him, knowing him only by reputation. But Dad didn’t object to my getting baptized, which took most of the wind out of his sails. Still, the bishop was one of those well-meaning men who believed that no social visit could be concluded without a certain quotient of conversation. He looked at what my father was doing and said, ‘Brother McKenzie, I think you’re a little out of square.’
“It was said with every intent of making friendly banter, but Dad took a step back, and, blast it all, the man was right. Hardly enough to notice, but it was. Well, he bade the bishop a curt goodbye and spent the next week working on that door. He rejigged the frame, reset the hinges, tore the jamb down to the two-by-fours.
“Now, the casual observer might think something the bishop said had set him off, that Dad had something to prove and this was his way of showing the man up. People tend to read determined silence that way. Fact was, I doubt my dad even remembered what Bishop Barngrover had said. All he knew was that some thing wasn’t the way it ought to be, and he couldn’t let it be until he’d put it right.
“As you must know by now, McKenzie men are a laconic lot. Don’t let Connor’s verbosity give you the wrong impression.”
Elly had to grin at that gentle dig.
“It’s easy to take what they don’t say personally, and this is the important point—because they won’t tell you—but it’s things that wear their patience thin, not people. The exception being people who won’t leave them alone when they want to be left alone. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a person in my family a man ever stayed mad at past the moment. Things, yes. But people, no. I can tell you, fair or not, Connor will cheerfully consider that bed his mistake and his responsibility until it is fixed.”
“But it wasn’t—”
Wanda smiled and shrugged.
Elly went to the garage. Connor had set the bedposts on a plywoodand-sawhorse table and was examining them. He put down the flashlight and picked up a pair of needlenose pliers. “Look at this.”
“What?” Elly walked over next to him.
He held up the pliers. In its pincers glinted a small scythe of metal. “What’s left of the threads.” He shook his head. “I should have remembered this, made a note to myself.”
“I was kind of insistent. It wasn’t your idea, remember? It’s not that important. Come to breakfast.”
“In a minute.”
Wanda was waiting in the kitchen. Elly said, “I don’t believe this.”
Connor came in five minutes later with an optimistic expression on his face. “Did you figure it out?” Wanda asked.
“What I should have done in the first place.” He grabbed the phone and the phone book and flipped to “M” in the yellow pages. He ran his finger down the page to the Provo/Orem listings for Machine Shops. “Might as well start with the A’s. Let’s see, that’s American Tool & Die.” He dialed the number. “Yes,” he said, “I need to get some brackets on a bedpost retapped. That’s right, a bed. The threads got stripped. Oh, well, do you know a shop? Knudson Custom Machining—”
He looked around for som
ething to write with. Elly found the listing and pointed to it.
“Yeah, I got it. Thanks.” He hung up. “The smallest jobs they do are engine blocks.” He looked at where Elly was pointing and dialed the number. “Hi, I need to get some machining done on a bed. A bed frame. Oh, okay. You close at three on Saturdays. Right. No, we’ll stop by in an hour or so.” He hung up and said, “They’ll take a look at it.”
“So,” she asked, “what is this great idea of yours?”
“Drill out the old threads and tap new ones. Make it good as new.”
“So why didn’t you think of this before?” Elly teased.
“Probably because I didn’t have the tools. Then I got the idea about the cinderblocks, and that I had the tools for. At any rate, you’re right. I should have fixed it at the time.”
“I wasn’t right,” Elly insisted. “You were right, okay?” She kissed him on the cheek and said, “And we broke the bed, after all.”
Aunt Wanda was the one who laughed.
The Provo industrial park was located at the south end of University Avenue, between the golf course, I-15, and the Union Pacific tracks. Knudson Custom Machining was a hanger-like structure identified only by a sign over the open bay:
Welding and Fabrication Lathe and Drill Work Free Estimates
Connor got one of the bedposts out of the back seat. Looking in from the bright sunlight, the shop floor was too dimly lit to make out any details at all, except when the blue-white light from an arc welder reflected off the corrugated walls like small flashes of lightning. Inside the bay doors, a short corridor led them to a musty office. A middle-aged woman was working at a computer behind a gray metal desk.
“Hi,” Connor said. “We called an hour ago about a bed—?” “Oh, yes. Not many calls about beds. Best you talk to Nathan.” She came around the desk and led them onto the shop floor. A yellow and black stripe on the concrete marked some sort of OSHA borderline. “Why don’t you wait here?” She disappeared into the maze of machines.
Elly cast a sly glance at her husband. “You really like this, don’t you?”
The Path Of Dreams Page 22