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.”

chapter twelve

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.

Mas had lost track of the days of the week, so he was surprised to see a security guard, not the floppy-bow-tied receptionist in the mausoleumlike lobby of Waxley Enterprises. Mochiron. Of course. It was Sunday, not a day of work, at least for white-collar types.

Mas didn’t know what to do. This had been a waste; he should just go back to the hospital and be with his family. But he felt that he needed to get a better sense of Larry Pauley. Maybe take a second look around his office and photos of his prized Thoroughbred. Mas waited by the side of the door and saw a couple of Latino men unloading a carpet shampoo machine from a white van. They spoke a different kind of Spanish than Mas was used to, but he still could make out enough words, and, of course, when language failed, you could always read people’s faces. And one of them was obviously irritated. A third man had not shown up. Mas watched them struggle with their cleaning equipment, and finally stepped in. “ Ayuda, ayuda, ” he offered, lifting two buckets. “I go in, anyways.”

They first protested, and then shrugged their shoulders. So a loco japones was going to help them, they probably figured. What did they have to complain about?

Mas let them lead the way through the lobby, lowering his face as they passed the security guard, who obviously recognized the two regular cleaners. They entered the freight elevator, whose walls were covered with a gray padded blanket. While the elevator rose, the two men spoke to each other, talking about some local soccer tournament the day before. They stopped on the third floor, at which Mas carried out the buckets filled with rags and cleaning products.

“ Gracias, gracias, ” they murmured, as Mas hit the Up button for the regular elevator.

Getting out on the eleventh floor, Mas was relieved to see no one manning the receptionist’s desk. But as he walked down a corridor, he felt the presence of another human in the maze of cubicles. Sure enough, Mas spied hair, the color of a paper bag, frizzed out like cotton candy. As the woman rolled her chair back, Mas finally saw the rest of her. A hakujin, wearing jeans and simple striped shirt.

“Excuse me, sir, can I help you?” she asked. Rather than afraid, she seemed curious. Here Mas’s size and age were obviously an advantage.

“Ah, Pauley. Mr. Pauley,” Mas managed to spout out.

“Mr. Pauley isn’t here.”

“Left sumptin’ in his office last time,” he said, and then charged through the door to the hallway on the left.

With the cotton-candy-haired woman practically tailgating him, Mas charged into Larry Pauley’s corner office. It was dark, but Mas could still see that the walls were empty, no painting of the galloping horses, only a clean blank space where it once was hung. Larry Pauley must have been in this office for a long time for the paint to have faded. The beer steins were also gone.

One leg of the desk had been broken and the window that overlooked Central Park was now boarded up.