Joy reached over to the passenger seat and extracted her cigarettes from a large pile of fast-food wrappers, potato chip bags, and empty cans of Red Bull. Her eyes were closing, millimeter by millimeter, but they were the least of her worries; her mind was as enervated as her body. Thirty hours is too damn many to stay awake for anything.
She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and searched, one-handed, for a lighter in the mess. She finally found it, cursing all the way, and lit the cigarette. She took a long puff and blew the smoke out. The rush of nicotine set her teeth on edge. She picked up the Styrofoam coffee cup from the cup holder, and her hands left the wheel briefly to flip back the top of the plastic lid. She drove and smoked with one hand; with the other, she drained the remainder of the coffee.
She sighed and threw the cup on the floor, then started looking at road signs for a motel. Not that I'll be able to sleep anyway. A few miles later, a square green sign showed the pictograms for food, lodging, and gas. A few feet later, a billboard confirmed: "America's Best Value Inn: Right at Exit 221." She flipped the right-hand turn signal, and slowed down to exit just as the rain started up again.
The wipers added a whole new dimension to the asphalt reverie. She pulled into the parking lot of the motel and it really started coming down. She turned off the engine, put out the cigarette and leaned back in the seat. The pounding of the rain on the roof was loud, but the quiet of the engine was louder. There's coffee in there, and a bed.
She jumped in her seat when the cell phone rang. She pulled the phone out of the second cup holder and looked at the number. Damn it! It's not like it's a decent hour. She pressed the Send button. "Hello, Mrs. Marshall, what can I do for you?"
She rolled her eyes. "No, even my mother would think that releasing doves is a little too much. Just hold off on the major decisions, okay? I'll be there in..." She looked at the clock in the dash, "...nine hours, give or take. I'm in Kansas now. I'll be there for breakfast. Yes, you have a lovely night, too."
She sighed again and abandoned the idea of stopping. Dropping the phone back into the cup holder, she started the car up again, driving out of the motel lot and into the 24-hour gas station off the frontage road. She picked up a large cup of coffee with cream and extra sugar, and another four-pack of Red Bull. She surveyed the food available-nachos and hot dogs, microwave hamburgers, French bread pizza. The hell with it. I'll stop somewhere with a waitress.
Back in the car, her hands were shaking and she felt slightly nauseous. She set the coffee down, and rested her head on the steering wheel. The tears were coming, she knew, so she banged her head against the plastic to distract herself. It was no use. It's too much. I can't take it all. She took a ragged breath and sobbed for long moments, then sat back and banged her hands against the steering wheel as hard as she could. A primal growl stopped the crying in its tracks, but now it was just her and God, mano-a-mano. "When do I get my life back, you son-of-a-bitch? What's next, huh? Setting my fucking house on fire?"
It was just a month since her boyfriend of five years packed up and left for a teaching job in Japan. "It's no one's fault," he said. "I just need a new adventure." Adventure, my ass. Men and their goddamn adventures. Then, while she was still sitting in the dark in their apartment, wrapped up in Ben and Jerry's, old Journey albums, and Lifetime movies, and the sad realization that she her life had devolved into a cliché, the phone call came. Her mother was dead. She'd collapsed at the acupuncturist. They don't have needles for a heart attack? She threw everything that would fit into the back of her car, left a key and a note in her next-door neighbor's mailbox, and drove into the soft darkness of the South Carolina night.
There was only enough fight left in her for a short argument with the Divine. She spent another few minutes crying in the side parking lot of the brightly lit Circle-K. She scrubbed the tears away with a red-and-white gas station napkin, took a deep breath, and burned her lip on the hot coffee. She lit a cigarette, turned on a classic rock station, and started the car. How the hell can You Oughta Know be a classic rock hit? Am I really that old?
At 9:24 am-by the clock in the dash-she pulled into her mother's driveway for the first time in almost ten years. I can't believe I'm actually back here. She got out of the car, taking a minute to adjust her sea legs and spinning head. She rang the doorbell, waiting for Mrs. Marshall or one of her mother's other friends to let her in. That's crazy. It's my house now. She took out the key that had been on her key ring since she was 10, and let herself in the door.
It was silent. No one was waiting. Sunflower Meadow McLaughlin wasn't jumping up to take her coat and explain how the wool industry was taking advantage of the poor sheep. No one was bustling over to tell her that she should drink more green tea or stop eating red meat or try the new soy something or other. Not even one eyebrow was raised when she pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. The final arguments had been laid to rest over the relative merits of this psychic over that spirit channeler; Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus were no longer up for debate in the now-quiet rooms. Cherubs and butterflies still dominated the tchockes that covered all the flat surfaces, but no one was regaling her with the miracles wrought by her own personal guardian angel. For the first time since she could remember, the house didn't smell like incense or dope or both.
She walked through the house to the dining room, obviously the base of operations for the death rites. She shuffled through the papers on the table, then took off her coat and sat down in one of the straight-backed dining room chairs. She could almost hear her mother's voice. "Don't hunch over like that, Joy. Your chakras will get all out of alignment." She lit a cigarette and scanned the obituary that someone was obviously writing. She found her mother's personal phone book, with Aztec gods on the front, and flipped through it aimlessly, wondering who was already on the way. A Post-it note from Mrs. Marshall was on the table right next to it. "Joy, call me as soon as you get in. I'll bring breakfast." Not before I get a nap.
She crushed the note into a ball on her way to her old bedroom, now a twin bed in the back corner of a room crowded with boxes and bags. Great, I'm living in a storage locker. She stepped into the bathroom down the hall, used the toilet, then threw the butt of the cigarette in and flushed. She went down the hall to the bedroom and kicked and threw things until there was a narrow pathway to the bed. She dropped her clothes on the floor and fell onto the bedspread.
She met her mother, who was a stranger, in a gas station off the freeway. Sunflower was pumping gas into a red Ferrari. She walked up to Joy and asked if she had a dollar for a cup of coffee. Joy pulled a crumpled dollar bill out of the pocket of her jeans, and handed it to her. Sunflower laughed. "I can turn this into anything I want. You see?" She was holding a crystal ball in the palm of her hand, where the dollar bill had been. Joy held her hand out and Sunflower passed it to her, and the ball turned into the blue china dolphin that Tim had given her for her last birthday. Then the gas station and the car and the dolphin and her mother disappeared, and Joy was left with her empty hand held out, standing by the side of the road.
***
Tim stopped at the door of the very small room he was meant to call his own. "This is it?" he asked. "Really?" The woman stared at him, obviously not understanding.
"Your... room," she repeated in broken English.
Tim sighed and remembered the huge, sunny two-bedroom apartment he'd left in South Carolina. The veranda was bigger than this. Then he remembered his manners. "Dōmo arigatō."
"Dō itashi mashite. You... food?"
"No. No, thank you. I'd like to sleep now." He spoke slowly, hoping he wouldn't have to try again to explain himself in the strange combination of Japanese and body language. The phrase book was still in his luggage, and the orientation classes were highly intensive, but not so instructive.
She nodded with limited comprehension. But it was enough. "Sleep. You sleep. Food... later?" He didn't know if she was asking him if he wanted to eat eventually or if she just wasn't sure of the words.
"Yes, later." He repeated his thanks in Japanese, and hoped she would take the hint and go away. Thankfully, she did.
He closed the door behind her and sat down on the low futon mattress that took up fully half of the space. I better find that phrase book before she comes back. He opened the suitcase and started digging through the limited belongings he'd been allowed to bring. I guess I know why they limit you to two bags now, he thought, looking around the tiny room.
He came across a framed photo in his suitcase, set it upright on the bedside table. He stared at it sadly. It was a picture of him with a girl on his cousin's shrimp boat. What a day. There had been a lot of beer and at least one shrimp gut fight. That was one thing he just adored about Joy. She never shied away from shrimp guts. Or a fight for that matter. He had rethought his decision to leave what felt like hundreds of times. He knew he had to leave; he couldn't just become another Citizen of The South who never saw anything in the world but Spanish moss and swampland.
But Joy.
He thought of her crying at the airport, how his mother was such a bitch that day. He could just see her sitting in the airport parking lot, cussing and crying, after politely walking his mother to her rental car. He saw her trying to pull herself together enough to drive home, and then he saw every turn she would take from the airport home.
She'd insisted on driving when they drove up to Michigan, too, when her father's third wife had called to say he'd died in a car crash. When they'd stopped at gas stations along the way, he could see her through the store windows and the windshield, her head on the steering wheel, shoulders shuddering. But every time, without fail, by the time he opened the car door, balancing the coffee and cigarettes and potato chips, she was fully in control. She blamed her red-rimmed eyes on staring at the highway for so long. "I'm fine," she must have said a thousand times. "It's not like I really knew him anymore."
Tim hoped he hadn't kept herself in control for the past few weeks by saying the same thing about him, but he suspected she probably had.
He imagined that when she walked back into the empty house, it probably felt a lot like he was feeling in this little, tiny room. It was quiet; the feel of another person breathing in the other room was missing. She would lock the deadbolt and the door handle and the chain lock, because she hated being alone in the house. She'd throw something frozen into the microwave for dinner because cooking for one was ridiculous, she always said. She had a completely unexplainable delight in Salisbury steak that reached back into her childhood.
She would probably take her TV dinner out onto the veranda, then sit out there from dusk into the dark of night, rocking back and forth in her grandmother's old rocking chair. He loved to watch her out there when she didn't know he was looking. She looked so pretty among the flowers. She's never going to keep all my plants alive. The girl could kill kudzu.
It was disconcerting to be this far away from her.
He shook his head to get rid of the wool-gathering. Only way to move on is to move on. He looked around his new home. There was a miniscule desk in the corner, about big enough for his laptop, and a folding chair against the wall. Above the desk there was an empty cork board. A door opened into a narrow closet. He stowed his father's army-issue duffle bag in the closet and pulled the laptop out of his carry-on bag. The voltage convertor fit perfectly in the electrical outlet on the other side of the room. He just slid the computer onto the desk and figured he would rearrange later.
He looked at the picture again. He took a deep breath and opened the back of the frame. He took out the photograph and tacked it to the bulletin board above his new desk.
***
The funeral had gone off without a hitch-the stoned-looking Unitarian minister had talked endlessly about good karma this and miracles that, the cycle of life and the souls of the reincarnated undead. He went on and on about how Joy's mother was with her, until she felt like he was waiting for $40 to communicate with the dead right then and there. Yeah, that's likely. Joy vetoed the idea of burying her mother in tie dye and sandals, so she was tastefully dressed in one of the Ann Taylor dresses Joy sent for Christmas each year. It still had the tags on it, so Joy left them. Her mother looked small in the casket, insignificant-like she was just a sweet, little old lady, not a weird, batty, hippie freak at all.
Her mother's well-meaning friends filled the house with tofu and bean sprouts and pomegranate juice; Joy retaliated by chain-smoking and ordering steak dinners delivered. In the days that followed, while these people she didn't know still felt the need to take care of her, she made regular trips to KFC and Burger King. Nothing better than a Whopper with cheese for breakfast, unless it's watching a health nut watch you eat it. She made sure there was plenty of alcohol and refined sugar available after the service, but she was the only one who took advantage. Her mother's friends left early, and she got pleasantly drunk trying each of the flavored vodkas that she'd bought. None of the seals had even been cracked. Two martinis along, she went into the pantry to find the chips that one of those goddamn health freaks must have hidden away, and she stumbled across her mother's stash of pot behind the rice cakes. For the first time in years, she rolled a joint, like she'd learned from her dad's best friend when she was 15, and lit up.
Just like every other time she'd been high, she fell asleep. She laid down on the patchwork couch to stop the spinning, then pulled the crocheted afghan from the back of the couch to avoid having to turn up the heat.
Sunflower was dancing with Tim; he was teaching her how to waltz and they were both laughing. Then, as the music ended and they separated, Sunflower turned into Joy's father. As he turned to Joy and asked if she knew how to jitterbug, Tim disappeared. Joy looked for him everywhere in the dream-under the chairs, around all the corners-but he was gone. She turned to ask her father where Tim had gone and he wasn't there either. Joy sat down on the floor and found herself playing the dulcimer that Sunflower bought for her when she was six or so. The quiet sound of the plucked strings was soothing, but as she remembered all of the lessons that she'd had while other kids were learning piano or flute, Sunflower reappeared playing the banjo. Then Tim appeared in her grandmother's rocking chair, playing the washboard, and her father reappeared humming across a cigarette pack cellophane and a back-pocket comb. The dulcimer disappeared. Then Joy did. The music kept playing.
Joy opened her eyes, yarn in her mouth and her head drooping off the couch. She had the vague feeling that she was missing something, that there was some important message that wasn't getting through. Fabulous. Now I'm communicating with the dead. She massaged the crick out of her neck and balled up the empty bag of chips. She threw it in the trash as she wandered into the kitchen for something else to eat. She took a box of Wheat Thins and a block of cheese up the steps to the second floor and her childhood room.
***
Japan was still unfamiliar. He was irrelevant in the chugakko, teaching English and "American culture" under the thumb of a passive-aggressive, middle-aged, Japanese middle school teacher. The kids were curious about him, sure, but who wouldn't be curious about someone sitting in the corner who couldn't speak the language? The first day had been a wash. He ended up using the universal language of pantomime to make himself understood in front of every class. The teacher had looked at him, disdainful, before she sent him back to his corner and took control of the class. He knew she said something nasty about him then, because the kids had all laughed, but he had no idea what it was. When she asked him later, she just told him that it was just a joke, and wouldn't explain further. He spent a lot of time supervising the kids cleaning the halls and courtyard, but he had no way to tell them if they missed a spot, and he wasn't courageous enough to try. The kids knew what to do and how to do it. Otherwise, they'd have been supervised by a real teacher.
At home, he wasn't becoming part of the family, as was advertised. He was staying in his boss's mother's house, and the kocho-sensei got regular reports on his behavior, his habits, and his reactions to Japanese culture. He wouldn't have even known, but one day, the boss came up and put his arm around Tim. "Hard to leave pretty girl at home, huh?" Tim wanted more than anything to get a lock for his bedroom door, but that would just get reported, too.
Even with language lessons, he was baffled by how to get what he needed. He couldn't tell which road signs applied to his bicycle... finding a doctor when he came down with the flu... how to find his own place to live and go through the leasing process. He had acres of paper to sort through to maintain his teaching position, and luckily, most of it was translated into very bad English: "Hours of study Japanese," "Culture of American teached grades," "Overseer teacher commenting." This wouldn't have been so bad, really; it was among the only bilingual paperwork. But he was pretty sure that whatever he wrote was going to be translated back into very bad Japanese: "Overseer teacher beat with strap." Even the English version of the "Course of Study for Lower-Secondary Schools" was all Greek to him. He was used to being good at languages-he already knew Spanish and Russian-but the CLAIR correspondence course in Japanese wasn't working. He felt like the entirety of Japan was just one big wall to bang his head against.
He was vaguely interested in the usual route that JET teachers took-finding a Japanese girlfriend and learning the language in bed-but it still seemed somehow unfair to Joy, and he didn't know enough Japanese to hit on girls yet anyway. He was tired of eating weird food that his landlady cooked. He was tired of eating lunch with a group of teachers he couldn't understand, just so someone would order him something besides sushi. He wanted a burger and fries and a strawberry milkshake, but he couldn't ask for directions to the nearest McDonalds, and he had a sneaking suspicion that they would just serve fast-food fish-burgers anyway. He missed Joy's cooking. He missed Joy. He imagined that she'd probably found another guy and replaced him right away. He really wanted to punch the faceless guy in the face.
***
She went outside to get the mail. I can't believe I finally remembered the address change. Cable bill. Gas bill. Sympathy card from someone I don't know. As she flipped the card to the back of the pile in her hand, she stopped and stared. The unrefined paper envelope lay in her hand, shimmering like raw taffeta, burning holes in her eyes. The original address-in his handwriting-was obscured by the lemon-yellow change-of-address stickers and unfamiliar block letters: "PLEASE FORWARD."
It was the right size for a greeting card. He was raised right, so it could be anything from a genteel thank-you note for not causing a scene at the airport with his mother to another rendition of "It's not you; it's me. No, really, it's me." Part of her hoped that the card was just a friendly note, but she knew that "all his best" might kill her. She felt the tears coming, so she cleared her throat hard and blinked them away.
She took a deep breath, sat down on her grandmother's old, oak rocking chair, worn smooth by ages of children, anxious mothers, old people having grown to death do they part. The envelope was a little heavier than a typical Hallmark card, but you'd only notice if you were weighing intentions. It was pink. It would be pink. Joy hated pink, had never had a girly a day in her life; she wasn't a Tri-Delt pledge with a born-again virgin pin, not a shallow, silly, husband-hunter. Those girls just couldn't see what a boy like him saw in a girl like her. She wasn't the kind his mother would love. Or even like.
The stamps were unfamiliar, the postmark Hiroshima, December 23. His new address blazed in the upper left-hand corner. Now she knew where he'd been assigned, could even write. She sniffed the letter, as if he'd scented it with the cologne she hated, or secretly kept a dried flower from their last picnic on the beach. She searched it for the same ocean salt fragrance of the sweater she'd brought on her cross-country trip. No such luck. It smelled remarkably like an envelope.
Her mother used to rig each greeting card to drop half an ounce of confetti on the floor (made from recycled paper, of course), her way of metaphorically insinuating herself into every corner of Joy's life. But everything her mother ever sent her was nothing compared to this one card. If it were signed, "Love," it would be all the confetti she'd ever need.
She liked to think of herself as courageous, bold, take-the-bullshit-by-the-horns kind of girl, but she found herself reaching for her cigarettes. How can I possibly be so nervous that I can't open an envelope? She studied it for the seven or eight minutes it took to finish the smoke. Then she took the carved African letter opener from the pencil cup on the desk, and in one quick, can't-stop-it-now gesture, slit the top of the envelope open and slid out the card.
It was nondescript. He probably sent this everyone. Two pink and red origami swans on a light green background, slight glitter shining in the half-light of dusk. She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and opened it. The note was longer than a postcard, but not long enough to be a letter. Glued to the right-hand side was a brassy Japanese coin with a hole in the center and unfamiliar symbols around the edge. Underneath, his familiar handwriting: "Buddhist best offering. Take it to mean that we will see each other again. Love, Tim" Goddamn, I'm sick of crying. Joy took the coin off its paper backing, lowered the card into her lap without reading the rest, and held the talisman tight in her hand while she rocked in the chair and tried to keep herself under control.
***
Things were getting better by degrees. Life as a gaijin wasn't easy-Japan has always been hard on foreigners-but he was finally in his own 20-tatami apartment, basically one 300-square-foot room with half a stove, a built-in rice cooker, and a bathroom with a separate toilet. It was great to spread out, to make a mess without it being reported to someone. He found a corkboard at a local 100-yen store, and it was quickly filling up. Joy's picture was still front-and-center, but the edges of the photograph were being slowly covered with reminders of appointments, phone numbers, and digital photos that he had taken of the sights in Hiroshima.
After just a few months, he was tutoring one of his young neighbors after school in exchange for language lessons from the boy's mother. Naoki really wanted to hear about American culture, instead of just staring at him blankly like most of his students. He loved The Simpsons and going to American movies with Japanese subtitles, and he bugged his mother endlessly for a pair of Nikes like Tim's. The kids at school were warming up to him, no doubt, but their loyalties were still 100 percent with his supervising teacher, who just wouldn't lay off the jokes. He'd also made a few tentative friendships with some of the younger teachers, since they usually ordered his lunch for him, but they still loved watching him spit out things that they, themselves, would never eat. Naoki was a balm to his pride.
Best of all, he discovered the American-food Mecca, a store run by two expats that was a mere 30-minute bike ride from his house. He'd looked up instructions online and made bacon cheeseburgers; pot roast with carrots, potatoes, and pearl onions; and smoked barbeque ribs. I knew that wok was good for something. In a moment of weakness, he'd even bought half a dozen frozen pizzas he had to carry home in his backpack while he balanced Spaghetti-o's and Kraft American cheese with two loaves of Wonder Bread in the basket of the bike. Normally, he wouldn't eat half this stuff, but there is really nothing like Miracle Whip to make you love being American.
He was even thinking about dating. He missed Joy every day. But the application had taken months. It wasn't like he'd been keeping some big secret. She knew he was going to go. It was just bad luck that the program didn't pay for spouses, and especially discouraged unmarried couples. Can you just see us both in that tiny room? We'd have killed each other. Tim now knew how to say, "You're really pretty," "I don't want to get serious," and "Let's do it now." All memories and moonlight aside, he had to get on with his life.
***
Dear Tim,
I sat down to write this as soon as I received your card. It was good to hear from you. It sounds like Japan is great, and I'm sure you are talking like a native already. I moved back to Denver right after you left SC, so it took a while to get to me. My mother died and I am here in her house managing everything. It is weird being back here. It's like being ten again, but I know all the things I never knew then. I'm sorry now that I never brought you here. I miss you. My offer still stands.
Love, Joy
***
Joy,
I'm so sorry to hear of your loss. I never met your
mother, but I'm sure she loved you very much.
School is okay; the kids are great. I know
just enough Japanese to get me into
trouble.
You wouldn't believe how many
vacation days I get. I am going to do
some traveling outside Japan,too, but
not sure where yet. Any ideas?
I have my own place now, so no more
old-lady rules. (I'm sure you'll think
it's funny that she didn't want me
dating Japanese girls.)Anyway, I'm
off to go meditate under a rock in this famous garden.
Will write soon.
***
She picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned on the TV. She watched the news for a few minutes, but decided she didn't want to hear what was wrong with the world today. She took a bite of the pork chop, speared on her fork with some applesauce. She changed channels repeatedly, not finding anything good to watch, but avoiding the quiet that would mean she had to think about Tim and South Carolina and all she lost when her shithead boyfriend left and her goddamned mother died. What a fucker he is. ‘I'm sure she loved you.' Asshole.
The moving company was due on Tuesday with her things from Charleston; it only took her six weeks to pull herself together and hire the company. After dinner and a quick smoke, she decided to start boxing up some of her mother's things to make room for her own. She wasn't quite ready to deal with all the angels, so she turned up her R.E.M. CD and made her way to the basement.
She sorted through each box quickly and carried them up the stairs to stack by the door for Goodwill. An hour into the project, she found a big box with a mothball smell and her name written across the top in black Magic Marker. The first thing she found when she opened the box was the letter she'd written to her mother the night before she'd left for college, telling Sunflower that she wasn't coming back. "I love you, but we just see things too differently, and since Daddy left, it's too hard to stay here. I'm not saying I won't be in touch, but don't expect me to came home for holidays-or anything, really." Wow, that was just mean, wasn't it?
As she went further down in the box, it turned out to be just about every crayon picture, cut-out collage, and rhyming poem she'd ever produced. Her report card, every year, and terrifyingly bad school photos all the way through high school. My god, my hair!
The Denver Broncos jersey that she won for a third-grade, city-wide recipe contest was in the box. She couldn't remember the recipe, but the huge ceremony was downtown, with all the winners announced, and news cameras, and the Mayor, and everyone buying the book. The book wasn't in the box, but she would check the kitchen later. Her baby teeth, that she had assumed gone with the tooth fairy years ago, were kind of creepy in a drawstring bag. She found her favorite stuffed animal from childhood, her "teddy-monkey," and set it aside in the Keep pile.
Her Girl Scout sash, with its sewing and housekeeping and cooking badges, brought back more memories of Sunflower. Her mother had been unconvinced when she wanted to join with her friends. "Are you really sure you want to do this?" She had been sure to the depths of her toes. Then three badges, and a few dozen boxes of cookies later, she had returned to her mother. "They're trying to turn me into a housewife, mom. Do I really have to do this?" Sunflower had smiled and called to pull her out of the Scouts. There was nothing she wanted less for her daughter than housewifery.
She found the patchwork dress and matching hat that Sunflower had made her to wear at the Renaissance Faire, the tap shoes that led to her first time ditching class, her bible from the Wednesday night kids' program she attended with the girls across the street. I had to practically beg them to let me go to church. She found her Prom dress wrapped in paper, her yearbooks, the letters that told her she was skipping sixth grade, welcoming her to AP History, thanking her for the bake sale donation to Mondale/Ferraro, accepting her at Duke on scholarship.
Her baby book was at the bottom of the box, with her birth announcement, the telegrams from family, the list of gifts and their givers, and a lock of her then-blond hair saved in a little paper pocket. Her height and weight were recorded faithfully each week until she turned two. She discovered that she took her first step at 9 months and 8 days, and her first word was "duck."
The rest of the basement wasn't so interesting: holiday paraphernalia for every conceivable celebration, broken furniture she was sure Sunflower meant to have fixed, iris and lily bulbs that hadn't been planted, the old rug that her mother had hooked when she and Daddy were living in the commune before Joy was born.
But when she found the boxes in the furthest corner, still filled with the things her father had left when he took the old Volkswagen camper van and set off to find himself, she completely lost control. She sat down on the floor, put her head down into the dusty smell of her Daddy's old Grateful Dead t-shirts, and cried until her head was aching and her stomach was in knots.
***
He was amazed at how much free time he had. He wasn't really in charge of anything, so he just had to prepare a regular lesson and learn Japanese. And really, there was only so much time he could spend on kanji before his head hurt. Besides, he got a month of vacation while school was in session, and then a month or two more in between each term. He was just a train ride away from anywhere in Japan, so he bought a train pass and started spending his weekends and holidays on the rails.
Tokyo was the busiest city he'd ever seen, including New York. He hadn't noticed how stressful it was during the orientation, because he spent most of his time in the hotel conference room. He was turned off by all the people and the noise, so he spent most his holiday weekend in the same hotel. He knew he was acting like an idiot American, but room service was soothing.
He climbed some of the way up Mount Fuji, but gave it up after half a day, because none of the services were open in the off-season. He met a group of Japanese hikers there, and they spent a wild couple of night bar-hopping and teaching each other Japanese and English dirty words. The girls giggled at him, which kind of pissed him off, until one of them quietly took his hand and led him back to her hotel room to demonstrate some of his new vocabulary.
He took the trolley car in Osaka to the Sumiyoshi-Taisha shrine, and spent a whole afternoon in the gardens. He met a monk there who told him, in fairly good English, folktales about Shinto and his life taking care of the shrine. Next time, a tape recorder. He made a lunch of the free samples in the basement of the Kintetsu department store, then returned to the shrine to walk in the flowering trails of the gardens, thinking about the life he wanted to build in Japan. Once he had seen all the flowers he could take in one day, he had dinner at a food stall in the shopping district nearby.
He loved Kyoto; if he stayed in Japan, it would be there. He saw Edo Palace and compared it to the palaces he saw everywhere else he went. He went to see the geisha at Miyako Odori, and didn't quite know what to say about his experience. I guess I can see the attraction, but I think I preferred it when Joy picked fights with me. He spent three days in the Kyoto National Museum, comparing the art he saw there to the art he had seen during his two college weeks in Europe and back in the States. He bought postcards of ancient Japanese artifacts, sat down in the museum café to write them, and mailed them to his family and friends on his way out the door.
Wherever he went, he saw temple after temple after temple. He kept a pocketful of coins for the offering boxes, and he always tried to find an English-speaking monk to tell him stories. While they told him folktales, they also talked about their own lives: why they had chosen the religious path, why Shinto or Buddhism or Confucianism was important to them, what the spiritual road had made of their lives. When he got back to Hiroshima, he went to the American Buddhist Center and signed up for a meditation class, because closing his eyes and counting to ten wasn't really working.
And Japan was the least of his travel. He was just a quick flight away from the rest of the Far East. He was in Bangkok for a week, where he spent a day on a tour of the major sights, then spent the rest of the week learning how to scuba-dive and avoid hookers. The prostitutes and bar girls seemed somehow drawn to him, probably because he couldn't help blushing whenever he saw them. He spent a good 5,000 baht buying drinks and dinner at a very nice restaurant for one pretty girl he met at a club, until he finally figured out that she'd have gone back to his hotel immediately if he'd just handed the money to her. He declined as politely as he knew how, in Japanese and English, but she still screamed at him as he walked away as quickly as he could.
He bought a spot on a five-day bus tour of China, but they spent most of the time in Beijing. He thought he'd been gypped, because all he saw in depth was the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. Then he met an also-shy girl from New Zealand on the bus, and saw enough of her hotel room that he stopped feeling quite so ripped off.
He was contemplating the political ramifications of a trip to Tibet-the influx of American dollars into the impoverished local economy versus visible support for the Chinese regime that kept the country under its thumb-but he really hadn't made up his mind. He had bought a ticket to Guam already, though. The diving was supposed to be spectacular and he was only a few dives away from certification.
***
She had taken to wearing the Japanese coin around her neck on a leather cord-as though it implied a not-empty promise. Time moved forward, no matter how hard she looked back. She had to stay present, make arrangements, take care of things. She felt like she had stepped into her mother's incredibly uncomfortable Birkenstocks. Every so often, someone would call that didn't know Sunflower had died, or she'd find something from her childhood that made her heart lurch. And if the emotional parts weren't bad enough, the lawyers must have had her on speed dial. Who knew her Communist mother made big money in the stock market? Doing this without any real help was the hardest thing she'd ever done.
The moving van came and went. While she was unpacking her own things, she came across the photo album that she and Tim had made, with pictures from their vacations, their friends, their life together. She thumbed through it, indecisive, then put it back in the box. He should have wanted to stay with me. She beat the dead horse for a minute or two. Then again, it's not like I didn't know. The movers had boxed up a bunch of things of Tim's, as well. She was sure that he'd moved everything to his mother's place, but somehow Joy ended up with three pairs of dying Nikes, a box of Phish paraphernalia, and the recipe book his mother had made him when he went away to college. Ha! I have her ‘famous' brownie recipe now! After a few weeks of sorting through boxes, making the house her own, she lost the vague embarrassed feeling that she'd grown up with.
Once she finally got used to being back in this house, and mercilessly trashed the ubiquitous cherubs and butterflies, she started to think about her mother, wandering around alone here. I really was a shitheel. One night, when she finally grew to enjoy the quiet, she lit a cone of incense on the shelf of stones and feathers and small crystal and silver things that Joy knew belonged to her grandmother. "Nag Champa really is the only kind of incense you should burn, honey. Bob Dylan uses it at his concerts, did you know that?" She remembered her mother trying to teach her to meditate when she was barely five; instead of lullabies as a child, she got "floating on a pink cloud," "first relax your toes," and "you're walking down a long staircase." Imagine, Tim meditating. I never would have pegged him as the type. Her mother followed with yoga as she got older, then Sufi dancing. While other girls were reading the new Judy Blume book, she had Khalil Gibran, Jack Kerouac, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
She sat down in her mother's living room chair, and decided to give this meditation thing a shot once more. No one would ever have to know; she had long since outgrown any pink clouds. Breathe deep. In through the nose; out through the mouth. In through the nose; out through the mouth. I never got the breathing right. In Mississippi; out Mississippi ... In Mississippi; out Mississippi ... Thoughts flow through... other thoughts. Where are all these thoughts coming from? Okay, quiet head. Shhh now... Ten-one-thousand, nine-one-thousand, eight-one-thousand, seven-one-thousand, six-one-thousand... I sound like I'm under anesthesia... Good in; bad out. Good in; bad out. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Experience Joy.
Once her head was doing the breathing on its own, her body loosened up from the permanently defensive posture she'd adopted when she was in elementary school. As her childhood conditioning had taught her, she promptly fell asleep.
It was the night after her daddy had gone. Sunflower had been crying all day, and 12-year-old Joy was making dinner: curried tempeh with brown rice and steamed cauliflower. She'd snuck out and bought Oreos with her allowance, because she figured Sunflower had enough to deal with without grounding her daughter for cookies again. Sunflower's sobbing was the soundtrack, overriding everything: the sound of the rice boiling over, the gasp when Joy nicked her thumb cutting cauliflower, the crinkle of the plastic around the cookies. Joy watched her mother throw herself onto the couch and cry into the pillows, saw her going into the bedroom time after time, like she was keeping it a secret how many bong hits she was taking. Joy saw Sunflower screaming out the window at the ghost of her now invisible father. "You goddamn, son-of-a-bitch, mother-fucker! Find yourself? There's nothing to find, asshole! You better never come back! I hope you rot in hell, you fucking rat bastard!"
When Joy woke up, she took the coin and its cord off her neck and shoved it into the junk drawer with the candles and the incense and the trinkets from her dead mother's altar.
***
Dear Joy,
I've never had a pen pal before. It's nice going to the mailbox and finding a letter instead of a load of bills. I am a bad correspondent, I know, but I will try to make up for too many postcards - from all my exotic locales - with this letter.
Yes, the apartment has been great! It's pretty much the size of a matchbox, not much space for more than a futon and a desk, but it's mine, and my boss can't get reports on me from his mother anymore. It all feels very transitory. I actually used an orange crate for a nightstand - very back-to-college.
Being in Hiroshima has been more difficult than I could fit on a postcard. I got here just in time for a front-row seat at the 50th Anniversary program - where I never felt more like an Ugly American in my life. I start any new relationship here under immediate suspicion. (I swear my supervisor told my students that I would drop an H-bomb on them if they talked to me.) I am finally learning enough Japanese to make some friends, so it isn't quite so lonely. But really, I had no idea there was a language it would be hard for me to learn.
I'm enclosing a newspaper article from the Japan Times (the best English-language paper here), about the cherry blossom (sakura) viewing in Peace Park a few weeks ago. The parents of the boy I'm tutoring asked me for a picnic (oishii) during the festival. Naoki wanted to know if they have oishii in America, so I told him about the time we took everyone down to Folly Beach for our birthdays. (I left out the stories about the red wine and skinny-dipping.) I told him about how many months it took you to stop bitching about getting your ass kicked at flag football. (Don't worry, I didn't tell anyone you throw like a girl.) Mostly we discovered that eating out in the open is the same on both sides of the world. My best lesson in "American culture" so far. I think I will do it in class soon.
Time for tutoring now. Naoki is learning English much more quickly than I am learning Japanese, but at least I give him something to laugh at. Write soon.
Best, Tim
***
Life was getting a little easier. Joy was in the grocery store one day, contemplating the possibilities of white fudge-covered Oreos, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She was startled and nearly dropped the cookies. When she turned, she was looking at her best friend from high school, Marisa. After the high-pitched screaming subsided, they both left their carts in the aisle and went to a nearby restaurant for lunch.
Over salads and a bottle of Chardonnay, they caught up on the last decade of their lives. Marisa, it turned out, had met a man in college, and married him right after she graduated with a degree in Marketing. They-and their two kids-only lived a couple of miles from Joy. Marisa had quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom. Oh, Lord. Once she gets started on the kids, it's all over. I better get the check. Joy was pleasantly surprised. Marisa was well-read, well-informed, and damned interesting. Her husband was a lawyer and her kids were happily ensconced in a great private school. "If I didn't stay informed, I wouldn't be able to keep up in my house!"
During that first lunch, they talked through politics, religion, and their sex lives since high school-including the gory, sexy details of both Tim and Marisa's husband, Bill. Just like in high school, they seemed to never run out of things to talk about. They debated the relative merits of husbands versus boyfriends, buying and renting, dead mothers or live. Marisa agreed that Joy had it made, and Joy agreed that Marisa had everything a woman could ever want. Joy didn't tell Marisa about the regular letters to Tim, because she thought it made her sound desperate, and Marisa didn't talk about her feelings of uselessness now that the kids were both in school.
In the weeks following, Marisa introduced her to a whole circle of new acquaintances, and they all made it their business to get Joy out of the house. She always had someone now to go shopping with-for furniture, for clothes, for completely useless but very pretty shoes. She'd never in her life enjoyed shopping before. Most of the women were married, of course, so the group social opportunities would be limited as long as she was single, and they were constantly wondering about her reproductive capabilities. But most were happy to go out during the day, and so she started to form friendships with people who weren't 6000 miles away. The underlying depression that she'd been in since Tim left began to lessen.
It went away completely when she went to a local shelter and adopted a kitten, Catfish. Two more cats to cat lady, I guess. He was such a little sweetheart. He wasn't threatened because she was single; he didn't care that he was the only baby in her immediate future. He slept on her pillow and licked her nose and eyelashes to wake her up in the morning. He curled up in her lap and purred while she watched TV and sat with his little pink nose and white paws sticking out over the edge of the monitor while she was at the computer. He was such a mama's boy that he came when he was called. He wanted nothing more than as much attention as she could give him, and, being a cat, he was independent enough to find something better to do when she was too busy. Perfect child, she thought.
One day, she realized that she hadn't thought of Tim in almost a week.
***
Japan was far better with a girlfriend. He really shouldn't have resisted the tried-and-true language method so long. Mizuki was fun, and if they didn't really communicate all that well, there was always sex to fall back on. He replaced his twin-sized futon with a double, and let her put her hair products and makeup in his bathroom.
Finally, he was experiencing the real Japan. During all his travels, he had no idea how much he was truly missing. It was all well and good to go to the Kusatsu fish market, but without being able to haggle-and clearly a gaijin-it was just a place to buy over-priced fish. With Mizuki, he mingled with the vendors, tasted bits of sushi, found the freshest Japanese catfish, which he fried in cornmeal. He even bought a few dozen oysters and followed his mother's oyster stew recipe to the letter. It wasn't very good; he was sure he'd done everything right, but it just didn't taste like home.
She took him to the Okonomiyaki building, named for the local culinary specialty. They tried the dish each Saturday in all 17 restaurants in the place. Crepes with noodles and seaweed was weird, even for him, but Mizuki loved it, so he went along for the ride. He made her pancakes with black-market Mrs. Butterworth's, and she ate them most Sunday mornings to keep him happy.
They went to Peace Park to watch the preparations for the New Year's Festival, and bought ice cream from a vendor: octopus for her and about two bites of crab ice cream for him. It was the first time in his life that he didn't like ice cream and the first time he'd ever thrown out crab-flavored anything. He bought Neapolitan at the American market a few weeks later, and Mizuki spit it out, saying it had too much sugar.
Feeling more confident in his love life made everything easier. Well, everything but kanji. His teaching was better, his students were learning more. Naoki advanced to a new English book and learned to like peanut butter sandwiches. Tim made more friends in his apartment building, and made a regular TGIF date with a few Japanese teachers from his school. He met some other JET teachers, and they set up a regular American dinner and board game night. We need to do Mexican food soon. His mom sent him a box of brand-new games: Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble, Chinese checkers. He taught Mizuki to play backgammon, and not to let him win.
When one of his American friends decided to go home instead of renewing his one-year contact, he offered to sell Tim his motorcycle, and Tim was psyched to have an engine to take him from point A to point B. First time out, though, he dropped the bike and came down hard. He limped around feeling sorry for himself for a few weeks, but finally got back in the saddle and learned how to ride the damn thing. He kind of thought the coolness of it all might make him look more like a geek.
He also tried his hand at Japanese cooking. Tired of the high price of imported American food, and lacking a basket on the motorcycle, he convinced Mizuki's sister to teach him how to use the wok as something besides a rib smoker. He was a quick study, if not a good cook, and soon he was cooking five or six simple meals. A few months more and he was ordering sticky rice at the restaurant down the street and using it to make his own sushi. When his parents came to visit during his spring break, he made okonomiyaki and laughed at the look on his mother's face while she ate it politely. He kindly didn't follow it up with eel or wasabi ice cream, but made her peach cobbler recipe instead.
He wasn't quite so much gaijin as he used to be.
***
Dear Tim,
I wasn't sure how long it would take to get to you, so I mailed your birthday box today. There should be no way that it isn't there on our big day. I included the phyllo and baklava as requested. I still say that an "American Dinner Club" can't actually hold a Greek dinner. But hey, when has anyone ever been able to tell you anything? I also included this past season of The Simpsons, in case your mother hasn't sent it to you yet, and your birthday present, which shall remain nameless. I'll just say that it isn't the answers to the Foreign Service Exam, as I couldn't figure out which spy to seduce.
I never told you much about my Dad, but he was really into Japanese culture (not just the Grateful Dead). So, I spent a lot of time in Sakura Square in Denver when I was growing up. I had a kid-sized kimono and everything. After your last letter, I actually convinced one of the restaurant owners to make me okonomiyaki. Wow, blech. I'd rather eat eel ice cream. Adventures in food are overrated.
I can't say that I'm delighted to hear you have a great girlfriend, but times change, don't they? I am reluctantly happy that you are happy. I do admit that I am exceedingly, inappropriately, deliciously giddy that Mizuki isn't pregnant. Be careful now; your mother would never recover from a "shogun" wedding (yeah, I know I'm not funny...). You can buy condoms from any of 400,000 vending machines. Stop blushing and buy the birth control or I will sign you up for the Condom-Of-The-Month Club.
Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful birthday. Get someone to make you a cake that doesn't have fish flakes in it. (I shudder to think of a Japanese ice-cream cake.) I sent birthday candles just in case.
Love, Joy
***
When the box came in the mail, Joy was beyond excited. Since they shared the same birthday, July 30th had always been the most important holiday in their house. Last year was bittersweet. They'd both known he was going; his flight out would leave for Tokyo on August third, and from there, he would be assigned to somewhere else in Japan. His mother was coming on the first so she could see him off at the airport with Joy. "It would just be so terrible if you had to get on that plane all alone." Thank God she always stayed in a hotel.
For his birthday, Joy gave him a Japanese phrase book with dirty words and pictures, and a framed photo of the two of them working on his cousin's shrimp boat, docked next to his crab shack on the Wando. He was in denim cut-offs and old tennis shoes, tan and laughing; she had on a half-see-through shirt and cargo shorts and a silly, floppy sunhat. They were both covered in shrimp guts and sea water and drinking long-neck bottles of Corona.
His gift to her was a blue china dolphin to go with her collection, a long night of passionate goodbyes, and a measure of dignity. He hadn't left her with any promises that he wouldn't keep.
The package in her hands was fairly small, but heavy. She opened it as soon as the mailman handed it to her. It's only two weeks. Who's going to know? She used her mother's sewing scissors to open the packing tape and pulled back the flaps. On the left-hand side, spines forward, were three books. The first had a solid yellow cover and was all in kanji. You can't read it, so I can? Next was an English-language book about Japanese sexual culture. Please tell me the Post-its aren't at the good parts. Oh, my God. What a geek. Then there was a book about Japanese dream interpretation. I guess I'm not so transparent after all.
There were Japanese cat toys for Catfish: a battery-operated mouse with a fluffy tail and a cellophane bag filled with short paper streamers on bamboo sticks: the kind you could get in the US, but they would be made of plastic. There was a sushi kit and a sake set decorated with dolphins, boxes tied together with a note: "You will make far more sense out of these than I can, but don't even try making sushi rice. Get it at whatever sushi place is down the street." He sent a tacky plastic photo album of his favorite places on his many trips.
Taking up the largest part of the right-hand side of the box, though, surrounded by bubble wrap and Styrofoam pellets, was a box covered in green fabric. It was about the same size as a recipe box. When she slid the ivory slide holding it shut, and the box opened, she rolled out into her palm a perfect crystal ball. In a second compartment was a lacquered wooden stand. She set the stand up on the table in front of her, and tipped the crystal ball onto it. She wasn't quite sure what to do next, why he had sent some sort of psychic device. Seems much more like a gift for my mother. She noticed that the area under the stand was about the same size as the coin she'd hidden away all those months ago, so she went to the junk drawer and pulled out the leather cord. She used the sewing scissors to unfasten the coin, and slid it under the crystal ball and its stand.
She felt really stupid looking into its depths for some sort of divination miracle, and she didn't really see anything but the coin underneath, magnified and distorted. She decided that it wasn't really meant to do anything but be very pretty. She moved it to the china cabinet, along with the sake set, so Catfish wouldn't knock anything delicate off the table to play, and cleared away the boxes and wrapping paper. She put batteries in the mouse and set it loose for the cat. He spent a good two hours trying to figure out how it was moving.
Joy spent a little while at her desk that night, writing a short thank you note and a long letter to Tim. She slid the note card and the letter into an envelope, stamped it, and put it on the mailbox to be picked up. By the time she was finished, it was near midnight, so she tidied up a bit around the house and went to bed.
There was a school of glass dolphins splashing in and out of a crystal ball. Joy held it in her hand and it grew larger and larger until she was looking at a translucent globe, countries and cities marked by glowing lines and stars, oceans waving, clouds hiding, and wind breathing. She set it down on the table, and before it rolled off the edge, her father held his hands out to catch it. She spent a few minutes pointing out locations and talking to him too softly to be heard. He laughed and threw the globe into the air where it disappeared. Joy was distracted for a moment by her mother pulling a chair up to the table, and when she turned back, he was gone. Her mother was holding a baby in her arms. It might have been Joy, but its face was hidden under the blanket. Sunflower was singing: "And if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama's going to buy you a looking glass..." Joy reached out to hold the baby and it disappeared. Sunflower turned to her and held out the crystal ball. Joy took it from her and it shrank smaller and smaller until she was holding a small, transparent stone in her palm. When she looked up, her mother was gone, and she was alone in an empty room, holding a raw diamond with a tiny school of dolphins splashing away in her hand.
***
Dear Joy,
I don't know where you found original Doors posters, but HOW COOL! They are already framed and on the walls. I haven't gotten anything this fabulous since you sucked it up and got tickets for the Dead reunion concert. I have the most adorable picture of you scowling in that tie-dye shirt. I still say that your mother ruined all the good music for you.
The phyllo and such was great. You can get just about any international food in Japan except Mexican and Greek. There are rumors of a new Mexican place, but no tacos yet. If you pack up another box anytime soon, masa and pinto beans, please? I'm trying to get the American store to import some things for me, but they're low-margin; unless 20 people a month want it, they can't be convinced.
I was inspired by your birthday candles, so I got a Betty Crocker cake mix and a tub of icing from them and made myself a chocolate birthday cake. Mizuki hated it, Naoki loved it, and the leftovers went to school with me. Mixed reviews, but no fish flakes. On the plus side, no one sang the stupid birthday song to me. Hopefully, you will get your birthday present before you get this, but just in case, I'm not saying anything about anything.
The Condom-of the Month Club was a great idea. Monthly shipments. Plain, brown wrapper. And all sorts of weird things I would never actually buy for myself. Awesome. I should have done this years ago.
Happy, happy birthday!
Tim
***
The day he got home from the post office with Joy's package, Mizuki met him at the door to his apartment. I didn't mind giving her the key, but she never leaves. She had learned from him, "Can we talk here," but she never got that it was a joke. He even had his mother send a DVD of the talk show and her only comment was that Joan Rivers was ugly. The sex was still great, but The Simpsons was incomprehensible to her, and she was no longer being polite about eating his bad Japanese food or his bad American food.
So, when she opened the door and said, "Can we talk here," he laughed at her accent, and she turned away from him in a huff. He put his arms around her and smiled and she let it go when he took her just a little more seriously. "Okay, honey, what is it? What do you want to talk about?"
Her parents were increasingly angry that she was dating an American and they were making her life miserable. They were upset that she was working at Hiroshima Bank, and that she didn't want to meet the young men they brought home. Her father banned her from leaving the house in the evenings, and took her cell phone, and he was not happy at all that she bought a new phone and left the house anyway. He even used scissors to cut up the clothes that she wore to clubs, and it was expensive for her to replace them.
Even though her English classes were going well, and the time she spent with Tim was really helping, her father wanted her to stop taking them and spend her time serving tea and arranging flowers. Sure, they sacrificed to raise her as a traditional girl, but that wasn't her fault, was it? Traditional girls don't get boyfriends.
Her mother found a condom in her room this morning and went crazy. Mizuki had been lectured about fallen women all day long. She'd heard about STDs and being pregnant without a husband and how no good Japanese boy was ever going to want her now. Her father had even called her a baishunfu-a prostitute. It was completely unbearable living with them.
She wanted to move in.
***
Joy was a little drunk, and feeling more than a little maudlin. I should have let Marisa take me out. The phone rang while she was mixing another Cuba Libré, after losing at computer solitaire for at least the fortieth time. She picked up the receiver and held it between her shoulder and chin while she cut a lime into quarters.
"Hello?"
"Hi, sweetheart. How's your birthday?"
Her eyes grew misty. Enough with the crying already. All she could get out was "Oh, my... Tim."
He chuckled. "So, how early did you open your birthday present?"
"Pfft.... If I did, I wouldn't tell you. But it was perfect. So, thank you." She squeezed the lime and dropped it into her drink, then wiped her hands on a dish towel and reached for a cigarette.
"I'd bet you five dollars you opened it a week ago and now you are all alone on your birthday with no presents. I still remember the Christmas you opened all the presents in the closet, looking for yours." His teasing was a little boy, pulling on her pigtail.
She cleared her throat and waved away the cigarette smoke and the emotional fog. "Well, what did you expect, wrapping everything up early like you did?"
"I fooled you this year. There's still one present and you don't know where it's hidden."
Joy's eyes lit up. "Really? What is it?"
"If I tell you, will you promise to act like a lady about it, instead of biting and clawing?"
Joy laughed. "Who lied to you and told you I was a lady? I promise nothing. And I'm not even sure I believe there is a present."
The doorbell rang. Joy's face got very still as she turned toward the chime.
"Okay, then, wench, go get your delivery at the door. Watch it, though. It bites back."
Joy stopped at the mirror in the hall and ran her fingers through her hair. "You're pretty sure of yourself for a man with no present in his hand."
"Who said I don't have a present?"
She downed half the drink, and carried it with her when she went to the door.
###
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