by Paula Hiatt
With the residual panic of a man still too exhausted to be fully calm, he picked up his cell phone and scrolled for the office number. The chipper receptionist transferred him to Pink.
“I’ve been unavoidably delayed,” he said.
“I see that.” He could hear the teacher smile in her voice.
“I’ll be in shortly for my 11:00 a.m. with Melo executives and the audit committee. I haven’t finished reviewing the proposed adjustments or preliminary internal control findings. It’s going to be close. Could you lay out everything so I can get directly to work?”
“It’s already finished,” she said.
He paused, thinking she must mean “finished laying it out.” Surely she couldn’t be capable—
“You’re ready for your meeting,” she said. “I’ve summarized the findings and gotten the management responses from Melo’s accounting department already.”
An unidentifiable quality in her tone worried him unreasonably—smugness, perhaps, or some sort of secret knowledge, as though she could see him through the phone. Instinctively he pulled a pillow in front of himself.
“Thank you,” he said uncertainly. “I’ll be in as soon as I can.” He thumbed his phone to end the call, absolutely positive she’d never been caught in her underwear. Fifteen minutes later, showered and immaculate, he paused to fish the offending boxers out of the wastebasket and shoved them into his pocket. In the parking garage he furtively crammed them into the first public trash he saw. No point exposing the evidence.
Chapter Two
“Good morning, Pink.” He strode into the office smiling mechanically, oblivious to what he’d said or to the perplexed expression on her face. Already homing in on his computer, he dropped carelessly into the bizarre chair, his legs splitting east and west as he grabbed the desk to right himself.
“Chair,” he said with his best Tanaka stare, a legacy from his paternal grandfather, known to shatter the kneecaps of battle-hardened executives.
“I’ll switch it as soon as they send us a replacement, or would you rather I snatch one out from under someone else?” She smiled sweetly. Ryoki demurred, deciding to ask Brian about it later, though he would never remember to do it.
She showed him the completed documents, photocopied, collated, stapled and neatly stacked on his desk. “Brian went through this with me,” she said. Ryoki looked over everything, rapidly scanning the numbers and Melo’s take on them, appreciating her clear, meticulous summary. He had everything he needed, but he knew he wouldn’t have time to familiarize himself with the details. She seemed to read his mind.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“That will not be necessary,” he replied automatically, his nose in his papers.
She put a finger on the corner of his spreadsheet and he looked up, really seeing her for the first time that morning. Tan corduroy skirt, ivory cashmere sweater and a short strand of graduated pearls, like a professor with a little student thrown in. He still couldn’t figure out what position she held in the office. Judging by her work and overconfident manner, she must be a newly minted lawyer or fledgling MBA, or possibly a clever graduate student who did not yet own a dark suit. Pink looked at him, smoothly determined, momentarily exposing a wide vein of granite under all that cream. But an executive meeting required more than determination. He glanced back at the reports in his hand, then checked his watch. No way to absorb all this in time.
“Look, yesterday I saw the dark circles under your eyes,” she said, biting her lip. “And last night I got to thinking that I may have been a little abrupt, and this morning, well, I think maybe you might need me more than I’d anticipated.”
“I’ve had a good night’s sleep since then,” he said.
“We both have a vested interest in making sure there are no delays in this transaction. I need to be free as much as you do,” she said bluntly.
Her clothes looked so soft, so tactile, so at odds with her frank expression. Somehow her offer to help seemed more palatable yesterday when he didn’t have to parade her into meetings. He checked his watch again, dropping the reports onto his desk with a sigh. Truthfully he could see no alternative. He would have to take the risk.
At 11:00 a.m. she sat near his elbow, unobtrusively handing out materials and generally facilitating the meeting. She moved quietly, almost too quietly. Fourteen dark-suited, dour-looking men. What if she folded in on herself? What if she tried to disappear? What if—
But when Kate’s turn came, she stood, cracked a joke, made direct eye contact, and led the group through the last set of findings with a sweet smile and the clear, commanding confidence of a secretary of state. Ryoki studied expressions around the room as they subtly shifted from ogling the pretty girl, to actually listening to what she had to say. When she resumed her place, Ryoki stood to wrap up and noticed that fully half the eyes had followed her to her seat and rested there before reluctantly returning to him. Stern faces had softened, looking receptive, an unexpected advantage. Certainly she had done this before.
When the meeting broke at two o’clock, they all went to lunch at a nearby sports bar, but Kate begged off, claiming work. Ryoki had given her no assignment, but he said nothing. As she headed down the hall, Brian’s partner, Edward Randall, a white-haired, grandfatherly type, caught hold of her arm. “Now, Kate, don’t work too hard,” he said. “Remember, you’re on vacation.” He let loose with a big guffaw, as though he’d told some great joke. With her back to him, Ryoki could only see her right shoulder lift and fall in a delicate shrug as she hurried off down the hall.
Ryoki didn’t get the joke, and felt a nagging suspicion he should have. She was always pulling that disappearing act, and every time she left he sensed some undefined quality evaporated with her, though he would never have admitted it. He should have had a little introductory talk with her earlier, a private chat, not necessarily work-related, just to be polite, to break the ice. In his haste, he’d neglected to do so yesterday and hoped to remedy the oversight after lunch. Unfortunately he didn’t see her again until three-thirty that afternoon, and by then she seemed distracted, hugging a scuffed and stained leather binder to her chest, cloaking herself in mundane tasks like someone who wished to be alone. He held back on the small talk, figuring tomorrow would be better for them both.
However, the 11:00 a.m. meeting proved so successful that the following morning found them plunged neck-deep in draft EPS calculations and sticky licensing agreements. True to her word, Kate focused directly on her work, staying late, keeping close, but never taking time for idle chit chat—which is how Ryoki came to be surprised on his fourth evening in San Francisco when he went to Brian’s home to attend a Porter family dinner. He had already kissed the cheek of Brian’s wife, whom he’d never called anything but Aunt Grace, and had begun a round of jolly back-slapping talk with Tom, the oldest of their four sons, when Kate breezed in without knocking and said “Hey, Claire” to Tom’s wife, giving her a hug and asking when she and Tom had arrived.
“Kate, where have you been? You should have been back an hour ago,” Grace said.
“Bad traffic,” Kate said.
Ryoki looked at Kate’s soft pink dress, her hair loose and wavy around her shoulders. She seemed so different from the office, more relaxed around the mouth, an odd loopiness in her movements.
“Bad traffic, or a wrong turn?” Grace asked, cutting into his thoughts, her head coyly cocked and one eye narrowed to a slit—the same face she pulled the time he and Tom tried to convince her that their broken headlight was a hit-and-run, absolutely nothing to do with Tom’s bat-wielding ex-girlfriend. Ryoki knew that look well.
Kate looked at her toes, muttering something about the confusing number of exits between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, and visibly jumping when she turned around and noticed Ryoki.
“I believe you already know our Ryoki, isn’t that right?” Grace said.
“We’ve met,” she said simply, her elbows stiffening to her sides as t
hough someone had poured starch over her dress.
“Put down your things and freshen up. We’ll wait,” Grace said, her tone more mother than hostess.
Ryoki had stood staring for the whole exchange, his fingers absolutely still on the back of a chair. That was the dress she could wear on the cover of a romance novel. Not a bodice ripper, but something classic, an Austen romance. He blinked.
Austen novels popping into his head made him feel uncomfortably in touch with his feminine side, a feeling paradoxically at odds with the reason he stayed behind the chair, taking conscious regular breaths, and trying to think about baseball.
Kate returned a few minutes later with her hair brushed out and fresh lipstick. Ryoki allowed himself a brief, courteous glance before averting his eyes as Grace herded them all into the dining room, directing him to a seat on her right, opposite Kate. Tom took a seat next to Kate, opposite Claire, and Brian presided at the head of the table.
During the salad course, Tom elbowed Kate, causing her to smear dressing on her cheek. “So, Kate, how’s your vacation going?” he asked with a smirk. She feigned deafness as she wiped her face, her fingers inching toward the cruet as though she might pour the contents down his neck, but a look from Grace stayed her hand.
“Brian, we’ve raised a pack of savages,” Grace said, looking apologetically at Ryoki, but he was distracted. Why did Kate and vacation keep coming out in the same breath?
“What do you mean, Tom?” he asked.
“Oh, Mom called Kate a few weeks ago and talked her into coming to stay for a couple of months, to get out of the snow in Salt Lake. But the minute she got here, their bilingual paralegal quit without notice—”
“I was asked to assist Mr. Tanaka,” Kate chimed in, “only to discover I’d given up my vacation for this punk kid in a bespoke suit who speaks perfect English.” She looked slantways at Ryoki with a raised eyebrow and quirky smile that made his stomach flip. In that dress she could have called him a lap dog without offending him.
Tom sat back, snickering. “Classic bait and switch,” he said.
Ryoki looked at Kate sitting next to dark-haired, carelessly handsome Tom and suddenly the obvious clicked into place. This had to be the famous Kate Porter, Brian’s niece, whose visits to her uncle’s house had never happened to coincide with his own. He’d always known she existed in a blurred theoretical way, still retained scant memories of the Porter boys mentioning a cousin who appeared to hold the position of sister in the family lore. In fact, he vaguely remembered tuning out as his mother clattered on about the lovely Miss Porter, or was that her Pretty American Friend, some other anonymous girl she would have just loved for him to meet? But the memory was thin and smoky, a lifetime ago, another existence, before his marriage and the ensuing fiasco. Ryoki tried not to squirm in his chair. That little first day chat would have been exceedingly helpful right about now.
“Did your father get tangled up at work? I think I would’ve heard if he was sick,” Kate said.
Ryoki shook his head and opened his mouth to elaborate, but there was a burst of laughter from the other end of the table and Kate turned to hear the joke. Ryoki concentrated on his plate and unpacked the memory of their first meeting, when she had called him “Ryoki.” How had she addressed him since? He realized he had no idea; he had paid absolutely no attention to what impression he might have made.
“Ryoki.”
He looked up at Tom’s wife Claire, the least familiar voice at the table. Even after all the time he’d spent in America, it still jarred him when someone he hardly knew used his first name.
“Your English is so beautiful. How did you learn?” Claire asked.
“Except that he calls me ‘Pink’ half the time, not sure what that is,” Kate mumbled, almost to herself.
Ryoki busied himself with his napkin, trying to remember when he might have called her Pink out loud. He vowed to be more careful, though he would catch himself three more times before finally breaking the habit.
“Ryoki’s always had an amazing vocabulary, even when we were kids,” Tom said. “Hey, do you remember that time—”
“Tom!” Grace said, giving both Tom and Ryoki the mom’s glare of death. Clearly she hadn’t forgotten the day she’d caught him teaching her boys to curse in three languages. He could have pointed out that Tom had taught him a couple of interesting things, but now was not the time. He smiled at Grace, all innocence and saccharine before looking at Claire to explain his English, a question he had been asked a hundred times. Unfortunately, Kate cut across him.
“His English is actually much more sophisticated than my Japanese. He uses clichés like a native,” Kate said. Ryoki wasn’t sure if she meant that as a compliment or not. “He really doesn’t need me to translate,” she added.
“I don’t speak Portuguese,” Ryoki said seriously. “Some of the documents are in Portuguese.” She may not feel the same obligation to him as to his father, and he couldn’t afford to let her wiggle out.
“I remember when you were born. You know that?” Grace said. Ryoki cringed. “Your mother was here visiting us in her sixth month and there were complications, so she stayed. You spent your first month right here in this house. We all took turns walking the floor. I’d never seen a baby with so much bendy black hair.” Grace smiled at him fondly, closing her mouth, story finished. Ryoki let out a breath. That wasn’t too bad. Last time she’d regaled him with all sorts of delivery room drama, details of which he could have spent his entire life in gleeful ignorance.
“I speak English because my mother was a half, born and raised in the United States,” Ryoki said, looking at Claire. “I grew up speaking English and Japanese at home. She was very adamant about that.”
“What’s a ‘half’?” Claire asked, the question itself containing an innate sense of democratic superiority that Ryoki often encountered in the United States. He looked at Claire’s heavy gold necklace and soft manicured hands and wondered if Americans recognize they participate in a fictitious egalitarianism.
“I mean my mother is only half Japanese. My grandmother eloped with an American Air Force pilot and they moved to the States.”
“That’s a relief,” Kate said. “You made it sound like she’d misplaced some crucial body parts.” Her joke did not reach her eyes, making Ryoki wonder if she understood what it meant to be “half” in Japan. His mother flaunted her half status, always pronouncing Ryoki with her hard American “R,” a tease that stuck, continually goading his grandmother into correcting her with a tightlipped smile, “Lyoki, his name is Lyoki.” His father took the middle ground, generally calling him Son. Early on Ryoki learned to answer to anything.
“I understand your grandfather was a tall man,” Brian said. “Gave your mother her blue eyes and I’m guessin’ your height too.”
“He was six-foot four. I’m only six-two, same as Tom.” Ryoki had never met either of his maternal grandparents. For him they existed merely as figures in a black and white wedding photo, dead before his birth. In the picture his American grandfather towered over his tiny Japanese grandmother, almost floating in her pouffy Western-style wedding dress. Because of that picture he’d always envisioned his grandfather as a gentle, slow-witted giant, protecting his miniature princess.
“When you were four, I remember you throwing all your weight against the doors at the mall, to hold them open for your mother and me.” Grace said. “Your mother said she was raising you to be a gentleman just like her father. I thought it was darling, but she said a few Japanese mothers had told her off for making a little boy work so hard.”
“How did your parents meet?” Claire asked, her eyes shining, perhaps anticipating a grocery store romance, soulmates defying distance and culture.
“An arranged marriage,” Ryoki said simply.
Claire’s head snapped back an inch. “Oh.” She cleared her throat, clearly aware she’d been rude, but not sure how to proceed. “I didn’t realize—advanced nation—I imagine parents know th
eir children best,” she said, her cheeks pinking.
“It still goes on,” Kate said. “We hadn’t been roommates a week before I knew you were perfect for Tom, so the first chance I got I dragged you on a road trip to Stanford. Before we got there, I called to make him get a haircut and told him exactly what to wear, practically gift-wrapped him,” Kate laughed smugly. “If it weren’t for me, Tom would still be spending Friday nights chugging beer with a bunch of smelly guys.”
“Sounds good to me,” Tom grinned wickedly at his wife, but Ryoki caught a certain softness in his eyes and quickly looked away, embarrassed to have seen such naked affection in the face of his old friend.
“Well, Ryoki, I don’t believe you’ve ever been up through Wine Country,” Brian said.
Ryoki had never been to Wine Country because he didn’t care about it.
“Unfortunately not,” he said.
“Well, you need to do that while you’re here. Kate, why don’t you take him tomorrow?”
Kate dropped her fork, flinching when it clattered onto the china plate. For a rare instant her face was wide open and Ryoki could almost see her reaching for a dentist appointment or a major surgery before her expression closed up. “Tomorrow would be good, if you’re free,” she said, looking hard at Ryoki, giving him an out.
He could have easily worked through Saturday and Sunday too, had actually intended to, but he was acutely aware that he hadn’t shown Brian’s niece proper respect and he seriously needed to make it up. Besides, that morning he’d awakened for the third time with his keyboard waffled across his cheek. Eventually the drool was going to make the keys stick. Suddenly spending a few hours with a pretty girl, even an off-limits one, felt like too great a temptation. “That works,” he said. “Ten, maybe?”
“I’ll pick you up,” she said. Ryoki pursed his lips, tried to form a tactful response. He preferred to drive, loved it when he had the time. On the off-chance he could squeeze in the opportunity, he’d rented a sporty little BMW coupe just for the sheer pleasure of speeding through the Northern California hills. That coupe would be reason enough. But there was also that other element, the one you weren’t supposed to mention in the U.S.