Memorial(50)

* * *





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.