Now Hiroko sat across from them on the edge of a leather-covered easy chair, her posture impeccable. She’d had coffee ready when they arrived, and had gotten out a plate of cookies—store-bought and stale. She’d never been much of the grandmotherly type, even twenty years ago, and age had not mellowed her.
The art on her walls, however, was still brilliant—vibrant and chaotic. Pete recognized one piece that he’d seen, incomplete, in her studio—which was really the little cottage’s tiny second bedroom—back even before he’d met Lisa. The swirl of different shades and hues of blue and green somehow captured the very essence of life itself—but then again, he’d always preferred modern art, wild and unfettered, to the Norman Rockwell school of realism.
“She and the boy gave me some story about a school project and a road trip up to Manzanar,” Hiroko told them with the same matter-of-fact grimness that she’d had when he’d met her, years ago, “but it was clear they were lying. I gave her the check because I thought she needed it to break the cycle.”
Shayla nodded, but Pete was lost. “What cycle?” he asked.
Hiroko put it plainly. “Babies having babies.”
Babies having…oh, shit. Oh, Jesus. “You honestly think…?”
Hiroko shrugged.
“Did Maddie say anything, specifically,” Shayla asked, with another squeeze of his hand, “that made you believe…?”
“No, but while she was here, it didn’t take much to make her weepy. Hormones.”
“It hasn’t been that long since her mother passed,” Shay pointed out. “Plus she’s a teenager, and on top of that, she’s probably feeling uncertain about her decision to leave home. I certainly don’t think we should jump to conclusions based on her being a little weepy.” She leaned forward a bit. “Where’s this Manzanar?”
“Head toward Reno on 395, but then stop in the middle of nowhere,” Pete told her.
She was perplexed. “Is it…like Coachella? Is there some kind of music festival or—”
“Manzanar is one of the prison camps where they kept us—Americans of Japanese descent—during the Second World War,” Hiroko told her.
Shayla sat up straight. “Oh dear God,” she said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t know that. I mean, of course I know that it happened and it was awful. I mean, it must’ve been…I can’t imagine…” Now it was Pete’s turn to reach over and squeeze her hand as she turned to look at him with eyes that were enormous and filled with horror at her gaffe.
“It’s okay,” he murmured.
“Itwasawful at Manzanar,” Hiroko said. “And it’s not a big surprise that you didn’t know it by name—it was one of many. We don’t talk about it enough. We should. And of course, now the last of us are finally dying off.”
Shay pointed over her shoulder at the collection of black-and-white photos on the wall by the front door. “Is that what…? Are those pictures of…?”
“Yes, that’s the camp. I was ten years old when I arrived. We were there for three years. Until the war ended, in ’45.”
Shayla gracefully rose and went to look more closely at the photos that Pete had seen many times when he was a teenager. Rows of long, barracks-style cabins lined the flat valley surrounded by the snow-capped Sierra Nevada in the west and the Inyo Mountains in the east. Families had been in Manzanar long enough to plant gardens and flowers bloomed—and in the photos, Hiroko and her brothers got older. At one point, the U.S. Army even “allowed” the boys who were old enough to enlist, and many—including Hiroko’s brother Kaito, resolute and impossibly young in his uniform in a posed portrait—went off to fight and die for a country that considered their families a threat.
Meanwhile, Hiroko corrected herself. “Theprisonat Manzanar. If I call it a camp, it sounds fun. Festive. Macramé. S’mores. Sitting around a fire and singing ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ ” She shook her head. “It wasn’t fun. It was an ordeal with the dust and the dirt and the freezing winters and deadly hot summers. But all of that was secondary to the humiliation.”
“I’m so sorry,” Shayla said.
“Youhave nothing to apologize for,” Hiroko said. When Shayla turned and focused on the photos, the old woman silently mouthed to Pete,I like her.
Maybe shehadmellowed a bit with age and time. Back when he was in high school, she’d spoken openly about how miserable Lisa would make him—even as Pete had blushed and insisted that he and Lisa were just friends.
It was funny how people saw a boy hanging out with a girl—or a man with a woman—and assumed that romance and lust were involved.
Pete knew that like Hiroko, Izzy also thought there was something-something going on between him and Shayla. And Shay’s playinggood copback at the Grill had only added fuel to that imaginary fire.
She’d surprised Pete when she’d grabbed him like that—that full bear hug from behind—although in hindsight, he couldn’t come up with another way for her to have “stopped” him from pummeling Schlossman. At least not that would’ve looked believable.
And despite his anger at Schlossman and his focused need to get to the bottom of those damning photos, part of his brain had been acutely aware of a variety of things. First, that Shayla was stronger—sturdier—than he’d imagined. There was a solidness to her, and at the same time, a softness. It was a good combination, which made him aware of the second thing, which was that it had been too damn long since someone who cared about him—truly, honestly cared—had put their arms around him.
It had shocked him—just how much he’d missed something that he hadn’t even really known that he’d been denied.
It was different from sex. He was well aware of just how much he’d missedthat,but oddly, this hurt worse.
“Maddie told you that she and Dingo were going here—to Manzanar?” Shayla asked as she continued to study the photos.
