Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

“That will take some time to photocopy,” said Becca.

“Well, then let’s start off with the past quarter.”

Becca glanced at the attorney, and he nodded his head. She disappeared, and Mas could hear her shoes clomp up the wooden staircase. The phone rang, and then, a few moments later, Becca came down. “It’s Mari,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s an emergency.”

Lloyd left the room, and Mas felt desperately uncomfortable. Becca, Phillip, Miss Waxley, and Penn had all positioned themselves in different corners, like the same poles of magnets repelling each other. Larry, on the other hand, planted himself right in front of Mas. “You two aren’t going to get away with this,” he said. Larry’s breath was warm and kusai, like Mari’s old dog Brownie when he was sick with distemper.

It was just business records; why was Larry so concerned? Mas didn’t back down, and stared back at Larry’s face. The vein underneath the scar on his forehead pulsed, making his flesh look like a crawling spider.

Lloyd reappeared and asked Mas to meet him outside. His eyes were moist, and in the hazy sun, his pupils resembled the broken patterns within a kaleidoscope. “Takeo needs a blood transfusion. I need to go to the hospital now. Can you wait to get the financial statements? We’ll call you at the apartment and tell you what’s happening.”

Mas nodded.

“And put this”-Lloyd slipped something heavy into Mas’s coat pocket-“in a safe place. But no target practice, okay?”

“ Orai. ”

“I’ll tell them what’s going on.”

“I wait here,” Mas said. Lloyd went back into the house and then reemerged, gripping Mas’s shoulder briefly before he headed for the sidewalk.

A few minutes later, Larry stormed out, almost knocking Mas down from the porch-a giant bowling ball crashing into a lone pin. He uttered no threats or apologies. He moved quickly and forcefully down the walkway and up the sidewalk. If Larry was indeed a gambling man, he would seek relief at the tables or racetrack, Mas figured. The problem was that Larry was already acting like a gambler on the losing end of a bet. That kind of transparency would lead to further losses.

Becca came out with a stack of papers in a manila file. Mas took them without saying thank you or good-bye. He wanted to get away from the Waxley House as soon as he could.

Back at the underground apartment, Mas had to find a hiding place for the gun. It was so beautiful, Mas wanted to keep stroking it, but he didn’t have time to be an aho. He first put it in the bottom desk drawer. But wasn’t that obvious? Next was a drawer in the bedroom underneath Lloyd’s boxers. Another stupid idea. Finally, Mas decided on the okome canister on a shelf in the kitchen. There wasn’t that much rice left, but enough to cover the gun. Mas pushed down on the tin cover, hoping that out of sight meant out of mind.

Next Mas had to contend with the papers, an inch thick. He arranged the financials in piles. This was a familiar task, as he met with his tax man, a former gardener, once a year before April fifteenth. Before their meeting, Mas would sort out receipts, check stubs, and invoices, attach related pages with paper clips, and calculate the totals with an adding machine Chizuko had bought from a now defunct discount chain called Fedco.

Mas chewed on some peanuts left over from his plane ride and surveyed his work. He had placed income all together in one pile; he wasn’t concerned about incoming funds. But expenditures, that was another story. Becca, whether intentionally or not, had gone beyond just providing financial summaries. Instead, Mas had copies of receipts and checks, all signed by Larry Pauley and Penn Anderson.

Sitting at Lloyd’s desk, Mas paid special attention to the bills for gardening supplies and services. He used to help his ex-friend, Wishbone Tanaka, with his lawn mower shop on rainy days in Los Angeles. He was familiar with various gardening and pesticide companies, their prices and policies. Adjusting his reading glasses, Mas blinked hard and tried to focus. The rows of numbers seemed to merge into one another. Mas felt his eyelids drooping. He rested his head on the stack of papers. Just for a minute, he told himself.

The phone rang, jerking Mas awake. He was still at Lloyd’s desk, and he could tell it was morning, because light was coming through the edges of the curtains. He must have slept a good six hours. The financials that had served as his pillow were wet with Mas’s drool. His reading glasses had dug into his face and left impressions on his cheeks. Wiping the drool off the side of his face, he answered the phone on the fifth ring.

“Dad,” said Mari, “we need you now.”

Mas sipped some orange juice through a straw and bit into a cookie, one of those Danish ones that came stacked in white cupcake holders and arranged in a round aluminum tin. Actually he didn’t care much for these cookies, as he usually regularly received at least three tins from various customers each Christmas. He preferred those pastel pink, yellow, and green swirls that he bought from a Dutch bakery in Bishop on his way home from fishing in Mammoth Lakes. That was everyone’s take-home gift, omiyage, to the ones who had to stay behind in Los Angeles.

But the nurse had told him to make sure to eat and drink before he left the blood donation room. “Need to maintain your blood sugar level,” she said. So Mas dutifully poured himself a drink and forced himself to finish a flattened-pretzel-shaped cookie topped with large sugar crystals.

The nurse was pretty good with a needle. A rubber tie at his elbow, one slap on his forearm, and Mas was filling a bag full of blood. He had done this at least one time earlier, and hated the fact that his blood would be churning in someone else’s body. But this time it would be his grandson’s. Both of them had type AB; AB people could receive from anybody, but could only give to other AB types. He did feel some apprehension. “Don’t wanna hurt Takeo more,” he said to Mari. “Who knowsu with the pikadon.”

“Dad, the Bomb happened over fifty years ago. Anything you may have, you gave to me, and I’ve already given it to Takeo. Aside from Lloyd, we’re all radioactive. Haven’t you noticed that we glow in the dark?” Mari grinned. Her humor was biting, but today it made the news that Takeo needed a blood transfusion go down a little easier.

Both Mari and Lloyd didn’t trust the general blood supply and had called everyone they knew to donate. Apparently Takeo didn’t need much, but they wanted to stockpile, just in case. Mas didn’t realize how many friends they had in New York. Most of them were hakujin, with unkempt frizzy hair (gardeners or filmmakers? Mas wondered), but some were black, Chinese, Sansei, and Puerto Rican. They all bent down to hug Mari and kept an arm around her shoulder. Mas could almost see all the kimochi that was being woven around his daughter and son-in-law like bolts of fabric, cocooning them from harm. But Mas knew those cocoons, no matter how saturated with love, were still fragile and vulnerable; anyone could still tear through and reach the soft parts.

He wished that he could join in. Add to the layers of support. But it would be like ballroom dancing, or kissing. No self-respecting Kibei would partake of such practices in public. If he did, wouldn’t he just dissolve, lose control and a sense of himself? If he opened that floodgate, there was no telling how much of him would bleed out. Instead, he could help his family in practical matters. Make sure that there was food on the table, ample life insurance in case he dropped dead too early, and a house, bought and paid for. That was Lloyd’s job now, but Mas wasn’t in New York City for no reason. While Lloyd and Mari needed to keep a watchful eye over Takeo, Mas had to tend to the other matters that would keep them together.