Memorial(23)

25.



A few years after the divorce, my mother drove me to her new home. Everyone else was out that morning. She’d offered to show me the place. I’d said that was fine, but we’d made it to the driveway before I told her I couldn’t go inside. She looked at me for a long time, and then she opened the car door and sat on the hood. I watched her pull one cigarette after another from her purse, smoking them down. Eventually, I joined her. She offered me one, and I took it.

We smoked through an entire pack before she stepped back inside the car. I followed her, and we drove back to my neighborhood. She dropped me off. I never went back to her new place, and we never brought it up again.





26.



Nearly three weeks in, it’s almost astounding how little Mitsuko and I have talked about her son. When I tell her this, she shakes her head.

What is there to discuss? she says. What could you possibly tell me? I asked you once already and you gave me nothing.

He came out of my body, says Mitsuko. He’s a homosexual. He left his mother with a stranger. I’ve already got everything I need to know.

She’s sitting at the table, scrolling through her tablet. I’m in the kitchen, leaning over the stove.

I don’t know, I say.

Exactly, says Mitsuko. You don’t. So don’t worry about it.

Maybe you could tell me a story, I say, and Mitsuko actually laughs.

A story is an heirloom, she says. It’s a personal thing.

Okay, I say.

You don’t ask for heirlooms. They’re just given to you.

Okay, okay.

Check the rice, says Mitsuko.

I figure she’s just cutting me off, but then I look at the stove and it’s bubbling.



* * *




? ? ?

But here’s a story: Once, my father drove the entire family to Dallas. There was some sort of work convention. He figured we ought to come along. Our mother fought it—she was already on her way out by that point—but our father won her over, or he won the rest of us over, and then we bugged her incessantly.

Even if this was only a last-minute thing, we never actually went anywhere, and of course our mother didn’t trust my father to drive us kids on his own. So the four of us ended up in his Corolla, driving hours on the 10, out of the city, in the middle of the week.

I spent most of that week by the hotel pool. I made eyes with one whiteboy swimming laps in the mornings—some college kid, a few years older than me—and another one manning the lobby, and a third in the café, but by the time I’d decided they were feeling me, too, it was already time to go.

Things hadn’t gone well for my father at the conference. He’d missed out on some accolade or another. And we were halfway back home, driving five over the limit, which was twenty less than the line cruising in the lane beside us, when a cop pulled us over by a gas station in Huntsville.

The cop was young and blond. He explained to my father about speeding. He said he hadn’t wanted to stop us, but that was his job, and the law was the law—but my father was irate.

He slapped the window. He yelled. It was the most upset I’d ever seen him, shaking like he had something to prove. My father called the cop a motherfucker and a narc and a pig, and before I could even think about it, the whiteboy put him in handcuffs.

My father told the cop he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d sue him. His family. The whole fucking department. And this whiteboy held my father loose by the wrists, looking at the rest of us like why didn’t we jump out and help him.

So it was my mother who opened her mouth.

She told the cop our father didn’t mean it.

He was just scared, she said, for his family. His insurance. You know how it is.

The cop looked at her like she’d given him permission to let things go.

He smiled. She smiled back.

He let us off with a warning.



* * *





When my father got back in the car, he didn’t say a word. And we were already a few miles down the road before I realized I’d squeezed Lydia’s hand the entire time.

But he didn’t speak to my mother for the rest of that ride, or the rest of that week, or the rest of that month.



* * *




? ? ?

Mike is the only person I’ve ever passed that story off to. It took me two years.

We were at an arcade bar on Lester. He was hunched over Tekken, tapping the same two buttons.

He didn’t say anything when I finished. He just kept tapping.

Then Mike said, I get it.

You get what, I said.

I just get it, said Mike, and he fed the machine another coin.





27.



Now, sitting on the sofa with my father, we’re watching one of the Fast and the Furious movies. I made him a bowl of instant noodles, blanketed by some sliced cheese. He’s picking at them with a spoon. I spent ten minutes looking for chopsticks in the kitchen, nearly calling it quits before I found some shitty takeout disposables.

During a monologue from the Rock about defying gravity, my father says, He teach you that?

I ask him what he means. My father pantomimes with the chopsticks.

You never ate like that in my house, he says.