Memorial(29)

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So every glare and shove and yell between my parents felt irreparable. Intolerable. Like the craziest shit that’d ever occurred. And one night, after an argument that sent Eiju flying right out of the house, I asked Ma why we didn’t just move back to Setagaya, as if everything would’ve been better if we simply went back home.

She looked at me for a long time. Her makeup was smeared. Her cheeks were patchy.

Then she said, That isn’t your home.

Ma said, We’re here now. This is your home.

She didn’t sound too sure about it, even then. Maybe she hadn’t quite convinced herself. And, of course, about a decade later, a while after Eiju split for good, she’d pack all her shit and fly to Tokyo and my mother would not come back.



* * *





But before that—our apartment with the gates.

Roaches on the carpet.

Our feet under the table, grazing in the heat.

Ma would set her lips on my earlobe, whispering all sorts of shit in Japanese, enunciating in the most ridiculous tones, until I fell out of the chair from laughter, only having picked up like half of it, and it was only later on that I’d think about what she was actually saying, that it was all just the same thing, frantic and unending: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!



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? ? ?

After a week in Osaka, I came up with something like a routine: I’d make it out of the apartment around eight in the evening, to prep Eiju’s bar. It sat a few minutes from his busted walk-up in Tennoji, beside a bakery and a tattered bookstore and another walk-up and two parking lots and like sixteen love hotels. The streets were always quiet except for the other third-shift folks running last-minute errands before work. You didn’t have to walk too far from the nearest station to reach us, but it wasn’t like we ever actually opened before ten and most guests stayed well past midnight either way.

I spent hours mopping and scrubbing and wiping. Or at least I’d start to, until Eiju popped in. He’d put me on the broom until it clicked in his head that I could actually help him, that this was my area of fucking expertise, and then he stopped showing up to the bar until he absolutely had to.

This was probably the only reason he didn’t send me back to fucking Houston.

Or at least before he finally got sicker.

But then the fucker didn’t have a choice.



* * *





When I first showed up in Osaka, Eiju asked how I planned to spend my time. I’d just dropped my shit on the wood floor of his apartment, this ugly one-bedroom thing. The luggage made this cracking sound. I asked him to repeat the question.

You heard me, he said, in English this time. Your ears aren’t broken yet.

You’re not making any fucking sense, I said.

Fucking, said Eiju. So you’re grown now.

I flew here for you. I came down here for you.

Which is fine. But you need a job. And I need extra hands.

You want me to work for you? I said.

I’m here to spend time with you, I said. Before you fucking die.

Sure, said Eiju, and we’ll spend more time together if you make yourself useful.

He told me about the bar. About the money he’d made off it and the blood he’d thrown into it. Eiju called it his baby, the one thing he had left—which, by itself, had me curling my fucking toes—and when I asked him for its name, my father said it, and I blinked.

No, I said. The bar’s name.

You heard me, said Eiju. Mitsuko.

I made a fist and then I unmade it and I watched Eiju watch me do that. I wiped my eye sockets with my palms.

But I also took stock of the liquor. I chopped the daikon and rinsed the rice. Eiju didn’t serve many meals—the main thing was booze—but his regulars made requests, and he was a big fucking baby about turning them down.



* * *





I didn’t ask Eiju what made him so amiable with his patrons or what those motherfuckers had that his family didn’t.

I didn’t put up a fight.

At the end of the day, he was terminal. Pancreatic cancer. That was his diagnosis. Playing along was the absolute fucking least I could do.



* * *





The bar’s stairs were busted as fuck. So I usually heard Eiju as he scaled his way up the railing. Whenever he opened the door, he wore this big-ass smile on his face. The sounds of Osaka seeped into the cracks, disappearing altogether when the lock clattered behind him.

Gonna be a good night, he said, tossing his jacket.

I’d catch a sleeve before it hit the ground and stash it under the counter. Eiju’d start rearranging bottles behind me.

The entire bar was about the size of my living room in Texas. We kept six stools across one counter and the place usually found itself fucking packed. Eiju’s clientele came from all over the neighborhood: businessmen on benders, and hostesses on their breaks, and college types, and taxi drivers, and singles wasting the witching hours.

They all knew Eiju and his bar.

But none of them knew he was dying.

I’d ask if he’d taken his meds in the morning, and Eiju would say, What meds, and I’d say, Fuck, and Eiju just waved that off.