* * *
Another story about Mary and Harold: their daughter passed through town every now and again. Her name was Janet. Her folks were always telling stories about her, always showing me pictures from kindergarten, from high school, from dropping her off at College Station. She was getting her MBA at Bauer, and then she would move back home, and Mary and Harold had other children, and grandchildren, with baby photos on the mantle, but they never really talked about those, didn’t bring them up like they brought up Janet.
One day, they invited me over to meet her, and from the moment Janet walked through the door, it was clear that she’d thought it was a set-up. Some sort of surprise date. But when we actually sat down at the table, there was a shift in her body language. And her tone. At one point, she just totally fucking relaxed.
We ate some yams I’d baked, and this slow-roasted ham by Harold. When Mary brought a pie to the table—double-layered in caramel and pecans—she said her daughter and I should share it.
And that’s when Harold stood up to leave. He didn’t say shit about it. Then, Mary said she’d make the coffee, and she disappeared, too.
That left me and Janet in the parlor. With her parents gone, she sighed. She crossed her arms, and then her legs, setting her elbows on the table.
Do you do this often, she said.
What?
You heard me. Freeloading off the elderly.
You’ve got this whole thing screwed up, I said. I’m their neighbor.
So you’re just randomly over here, said Janet. Just because.
Just because, I said. Your parents are cool. We eat together. Sometimes we talk.
You’re joking.
We went walking the other day and Harold almost caught this toad.
Nobody does something like this for nothing.
Look, I said, do you want me to leave? Because it’s not that serious. And they’re your parents. If you want, I’ll go thank them and I won’t fucking come back.
You wouldn’t? Not ever?
Your call.
I don’t know if I expected Janet to flare up at that or what, but she didn’t. She actually laughed.
You’re a bullshitter, she said.
I talk a good game, I said.
No, you don’t. But it’s cute. Mom must not know you’re gay though.
Who said I was gay?
Please, said Janet.
I’ve got this sister, she said. As much as you talk to my parents, you’ll never hear about her.
Let me guess, I said. She’s the one on the mantel.
Yep. She’s got a wife and this kid and a house and everything. They’re cute together. But none of that matters.
Because she’s queer.
Because my parents are old, and change is hard.
That’s not an excuse, I said. It’s never an excuse.
But here you are, said Janet. So you’ll never come back again now that you know?
And I started to say something—although I still don’t know what it would’ve been—but that’s when Mary stepped back in the room. She asked if we wanted any coffee.
I looked at Janet. Her face wasn’t giving me anything.
I told Mary that’d be great.
That’s what I thought, she said, smiling.
* * *
One day, I told Ben all of that. We were at a bar in the Heights, out on the patio, and he’d been staring at the beers beside me. Once I’d finished my bottle, Ben folded his hands behind his head.
Of course that’s how she’s gonna react, he said. People don’t just do things like that. Eating other people’s food like it’s no big deal.
I did.
And you’re a weirdo. But they’re her parents. They’re old.
And, I said, waiting for the next thing.
And what? said Ben.
You know what. You almost said it.
Ben smirked at that, a rare sight from him.
That’s just not something we do, he said, laughing.
The skyline glowed under the patio’s lighting, an assembly of Christmas blinkers. A patch of traffic snaked around the cars parked bumper to bumper beside us, stacked like haphazard dominoes across one another’s backs. Some dog wandered between them with its tongue batting the concrete.
Then tell me, I said, what would you do?
I’d mind my fucking business, said Ben. But it’s not like anyone even lets us do that.
Us, I said.
Black people, said Ben.
All of a sudden, he was serious. He played with his fingers on the counter in front of us. So I grabbed one, making a ring around it, pulling it under the table, stretching it, and sliding my thumb across the whole of his hand. It was the most intimate thing we’d done in weeks. A blush rolled across his face. So I tightened my hold, running my finger across his wrist, which slackened, and then tightened, and then slackened again.
You’re annoying, said Ben.
You’re blushing, I said.
Shut up, said Ben, but he didn’t move his hand.
* * *
This is how our second year goes by:
I pull a new gig at this other restaurant.
Ben stays at his job with the kids.
We don’t buy a bedframe.
We fight.
We make up.
We fuck on the sofa, in the kitchen, on the floor.
I cook, and cook, and cook.
One neighbor has a baby.
Another has a stroke.
Whitekids invade the block, lining their porches with pumpkins on Halloween and Budweisers on the weekends.
Ma calls me from Tokyo, stalling on the line.
She asks how I’m doing.
I swear everything’s fine.
* * *
• • •
A brief list of Eiju’s favorite scents: steamed rice, crisp takoyaki, sesame oil. Laundered clothes. Grated ginger. My mother’s wet hair. My wet hair, as a boy, after he’d bathed me, lifting me from the tub.
* * *
One morning in the living room, Taro finished his checkup on Eiju, groping around his abdomen, and the motherfucker yelled out in pain.
I’d been taking a leak. When I ran out of the bathroom, Taro’d pursed his lips, and Eiju’d raised both of his arms.
No, he said, goddammit! No!
Taro stared at Eiju for a moment from the floor. Like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t know how the man would take it. He turned to me in the hallway, and then he turned toward Eiju again.
But Taro swallowed whatever he had to say. He rose to his knees, continuing with the exam. Neither man spoke, and Eiju lifted his arms when he was asked to, and he lowered them when Taro said so, and they went through the motions silently—poking and prodding and scooting around.
Once they’d finished, and Eiju slipped his shirt on, Taro packed up his shit wordlessly. He gave a slight bow to his patient, and his patient grunted him away.
But I cornered Taro outside. It’d become our thing. The block’s morning rituals had started up as he waited for me on the street, and I watched Taro wipe his brow with the back of his hand. When I offered him a cigarette, he smiled, waving me away.
I asked what went wrong, what the fuck I’d just witnessed, and Taro cracked the biggest grin.
Oh, he said, you know how men are.
* * *
Eiju never asked me what I talked about with Taro.
When I asked him why that was, he just shook his head.
What will it change, he said.
* * *
But I noticed that he’d started moving slower. Sometimes, Eiju dozed off in the middle of the day, grimacing himself awake. Whenever I asked what was wrong, he said it was none of my fucking business, although that didn’t chang
e the fact that it was happening.
* * *
So we slowly, wordlessly, adjusted course.
I took off from the apartment by myself.
Eiju came late, or he left early.
Or he didn’t make it to the bar at all.
Or, if he did, he’d pull up a chair in the back room, tugging a baseball cap over his eyes.
Our patrons noticed. They didn’t say shit about it.
When I told Eiju that, if nothing else, what he needed was sleep, he laughed right in my face. He said that we both knew he had a big one coming up.
Hey, I said.
But I didn’t have the rest of the words.
* * *
Here’s something that changed about Eiju as he got sicker and sicker: anger. Or the lack thereof.
He stopped knocking cups off of tables.
He stopped smashing doorknobs on his way out of the apartment.
He didn’t raise his hand at the first sign of a disagreement.
Now, what he did, mostly, was sigh.
He rolled his eyes.
He asked if you were done.
I guess it could’ve been his sickness. Or it could’ve just been his being an old fucking man.
Or, maybe, Eiju was just tired.
* * *
One night, Kunihiko flubbed an order for a group of American tourists. They were the first white people I’d seen in weeks. And they were fucking loud, asking for sake and sushi and karaage, which wasn’t on the fucking menu, and never had been, because there was no fucking menu. But Kunihiko still ran to the Lawson’s down the road.
Eiju was outside, smoking. Now he only stopped in the bar for a few hours at a time, mostly to get out of the house. For the most part, Kunihiko and I were in charge of nightly operations, although when Sana pointed that out, I told him to go fuck himself.
But it’s true, said Hiro.
Hardly, I said.
We’re not blind, said Sana. We see Eiju. We get it.
Nobody said that was a bad thing, said Hana, and I just fucking waved them off.
Now Kunihiko sprinted back up the stairs. Exploded through the bar with three sacks of convenience store chicken, cheesing from ear to ear.
And the white folks were too confused to say shit.
They eyed the karaage, greasy in their sacks.
Eiju stepped inside just as they fumbled with their napkins, dabbing at the wings. He looked at the white folks, and their food, and then, out of nowhere, Eiju froze, stiffening up.
But what happened next is not the thing that I expected to happen: Eiju began to laugh.
At Kunihiko, and then at me.
Then Kunihiko started to laugh.
And I started to laugh.
We were all laughing together. Eiju asked the tourists if they were enjoying their chicken. And this fat white dude told him, in the blockiest Japanese, that everything was wonderful, that they couldn’t have been having a better time if they’d tried.
* * *
• • •
When I was nineteen, before Ma left the States for Japan, she sat me down to talk about it.
By that point, we lived together most days of the week. I was out in the world for the rest of it. I fucked guys and I’d shack up with them, for a little while, whenever that worked out. When I finally got bored or they got bored or they dropped me for some skinny sparkling whiteboy, then I made my way back home. It was hardly ever complicated. I spent whatever cash I made, and I threw Ma a little bit for the apartment, but by then she didn’t need it. She’d moved up in the jewelry shop, working alongside the same manager who’d hired her. She brought home more money, most months, than she and Eiju raked in collectively when they were together.
And it showed: now Ma lived out by Greenway Plaza. She always looked way too comfortable. My mother only ever wore the nicest dresses, the nicest shoes, with jewelry on her neck, hanging across both wrists. An ankle. Every few months, I’d hear murmurs from her about some man, but I never actually saw them—if anything, by the time I heard about those fuckers, they were already gone.
* * *
Every few weeks, Ma still took me out. The restaurants were always entirely too nice. I was working at a gas station. Not fucking with college or anything like that. Our meals together cost more than I budgeted for food most months. But my mother didn’t spend money frivolously, and it was around this time that I noticed, whenever we sat down together, to eat or to drink or whatever, there was something entirely different about her. I couldn’t really place it. Until I finally did.
Ma had, literally, let her shoulders down.
That night, she told me she was going back home. Home home. Home to Japan. She’d lined up a few job interviews, and Ma would stay with her brother in Setagaya for the first few months—a guy I’d met only once when he visited Houston, short and thick like me. Afterward, she’d find a spot of her own a little closer to the city. And I could visit every now and again. And she’d be willing to front the ticket.
Or, said Ma, you could just come live with me.
In Tokyo?
Where else?
I don’t think that’s a great idea.
We both chewed at our salads. Our waiter, this older white guy, set some pasta across from my mother. I asked him for another beer, and he glanced at Ma, who nodded.
Well, said my mother.
Yeah.
Do you have anything keeping you in Houston?
Or anyone keeping you here? said Ma, and my skin froze for a moment.
It wasn’t like she didn’t know I was gay. She knew. But it wasn’t something we ever spoke about. Not with actual words that you could feel and see between us. It was just a feeling in the air, whenever we interacted, like a pothole in the road. Something we didn’t have to acknowledge every time, all the time. Because that shit was implicit.
Not really, I said.
Not really? said Ma. Or no?
No one worth mentioning.
Ma and I looked at each other for a moment. We weren’t smiling, but there wasn’t any malice either. The air was exactly empty, aside from the diners beside us, clinking their glasses and going on about whatever the fuck went on in their lives.
I have no reason to go back to Japan, I said.
Of course not, said Ma. You’re only Japanese.
Stop.
I’m just saying. What will you do with yourself here? And don’t say it’s whatever little job you’re working, Michael.
That’s pretty fucked up.
All I stated was a fact. That’s it.
Whatever, I said. I’m thinking of switching jobs anyway. I’ve got a friend at this shop.
A shop?
A deli. Sort of.
So you’d cook. Like your father.
What?
Eiju cooked. Cooks. And it sounds like you want to, too.
This has nothing to fucking do with him.
That’s not what it looks like.
Whatever. I probably won’t even do it.
Calm down, said Ma, playing with her napkin.
What if I said that I wanted you to come with me, said Ma. What if I wanted you to come home? Would that sway you at all?
If that were the biggest deal to you, I said, we would’ve gone back earlier.
And I suppose I’m not a big enough reason, said my mother, smiling.
And I’m not important enough for you to stay, I said.
We sat with that for a moment. Before I could open my mouth again, my mother signaled the waiter for our bill. He nodded, smiling even wider as he handed it over, and Ma slipped him her card. She didn’t even glance at the numbers.
Then there isn’t much else to talk about, she said, standing, reaching for her coat.
* * *
When Eiju left us for the final time, it was entirely unceremonious.
The sky didn’t fall.
The clouds stayed in place.
We’d grown used to him taking off for a day or two. He’d reappear a few nights later, in the same clothes, smelling like piss.
A few days passed without hearing from him. And then a week. And then the place where he tended bar called our apartment asking about him.
I don’t know how long Ma knew he’d gone back to Osaka or if she’d just needed to confirm or what, but the next thing she did was call my father’s sister.
I’d never met her. But I’d heard stories. And I knew about the history between their families, or the complete lack thereof.
Ma called her once in the morning, their time, and nobody answered.
Ma called her again in the evening, their time, and nobody answered.
Ma called her again the next morning, their time.
No one answered until the final ring.
Eiju’s sister told Ma that he’d been home for a few days. He was sleeping.
You didn’t know? asked my aunt.
I didn’t know, said my mother. But now I do.
And then Ma hung up.
* * *
• • •
I told Ben all of that one night in bed. This was the week after he’d put his hands on me. I’d shoved him back, not even thinking about it, and neither of us knew how it’d happened. But the only thing we could do afterward, to clear the air, was to fuck. That became our routine whenever we fought. Whenever things got bad. Like we were fucking away the thing that’d sat itself on our chests.
Afterward, Ben said, Shit.
Yeah, I said.
And you stayed.
I’m looking at you right now.
Well, said Ben.
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