Tug walked over to a plaque. “This statue is originally from Hiroshima. Survived the bomb, like you.”

Then Mas faintly remembered seeing the statue a couple of miles northwest of Hiroshima ’s ground zero. How had it come to be moved to New York? thought Mas.

At first the statue looked totally out of place, fenced in behind an iron gate on New York ’s Riverside Drive. But the longer Mas stared at it, the more at home it seemed to be.

chapter fifteen

Mas walked through the long plastic strips hanging from the doorway of the grocery store. The Korean shopkeeper was perched on a stool next to the cash register this time. Maybe business was slow this morning, thought Mas.

“Haven’t seen you in a couple of days,” the shopkeeper said as Mas approached the counter.

“I really goin’ home now,” Mas announced, drumming his callused thumbs against the counter’s rubber surface. “Tomorrow.”

“Good to go home.”

Mas nodded.

“Talk to my sister last night. She says it’s seventy degrees over in L.A. ”

“Oh, yah.” It would be good for his muscles and joints to feel the beating of the sun again. Yet a part of Mas was going to miss the coldness. It made him move around more than he ever would, even in spring.

“Marlboro?” The shopkeeper started to reach for a carton of cigarettes, but Mas shook his head. He remembered what Takeo’s doctor had said. You need to cut back or quit altogether, Mr. Arai. Don’t you want to see your grandchild graduate from high school? That was a ridiculous challenge; Mas didn’t even know if he could count that high, but what if he beat the odds, confounded all the handicappers and prognosticators at the local lawn mower shop? Instead he reached for a package of Juicy Fruit gum. A jumbo pack almost as wide as a deck of cards. Seventeen sticks should keep him busy on the plane. And in terms of overdosing on sugar, who cared about that? Since he had no teeth anyway, it didn’t make much difference.

He took out a dollar, but the shopkeeper pushed the money back toward Mas. “Free,” he said. “On the house.”

Mas got on an underground train on his way to the Eighteenth Street station for Joy’s exhibition opening. Lloyd had plotted Mas’s path on both subway and street maps so carefully that Mas thought that each footstep had been calculated. Neither Lloyd nor Mari could make it, because of Takeo, so Mas was supposed to be the Arai-Jensen household representative.

As he sat in the train car, Mas thought about what it was really going to be like when he returned to the house in Altadena. He had spoken to Haruo earlier, updating him on all the news, including the latest, that Larry Pauley had been arrested at the Canadian border. He had been carrying one hundred thousand dollars in cash and was on his way to purchase a Thoroughbred reared in British Columbia.

Haruo had news of his own. “When you get back, there’s sumbody you gotsu to meet,” he said. “Izu gotsu a new friend.”

Mas’s ears perked up. He had heard this tone of voice before. He knew what it was about even before Haruo went further.

“She’s a routeman. You knowsu, buys flowers at the Market and delivers them all ova the place. Sheezu been doin’ dis ever since the fifties.”

A routeman? Must be a big, strong woman, one who could easily toss Haruo from one side of the room to another. But then Haruo was partial to strong women, as all Japanese American men were.

“How’s Tug doin’?” Haruo had asked.

Sitting in the train car on his way to the art gallery, Mas honestly wasn’t sure. Tug had said some strange things last night, that Joy would never get married and have children like Mari. How do you know? Mas had asked him. Joy still young. Has time. But Tug had just nodded his head sadly, saying that it wasn’t in the cards for her.

Mas ended up at the gallery a little late-he had taken a couple of wrong turns, in spite of Lloyd’s detailed maps-and sure enough, there was Tug, wearing a light-blue suit and a red and blue striped tie. With all the cigarette smoke from the young people waiting outside, Tug looked like he was emerging from a mist from the heavens.

“Sorry Izu late,” Mas apologized.

“No problem,” Tug said, opening the gallery’s glass door.

The pervading color was black, which made Mas feel that he was at a funeral reception. He thought that he had seen a flash of red in a corner, but that was actually a windowpane lit up from the back. As he got closer, he noticed that red raindrops bled down the glass. The artwork was aptly labeled, Blood Rain. Mas, who had seen enough blood on this trip, moved to a ceramic hot dog and bun the size of a small sports car, and then a mound of trash, complete with sanitary napkins and empty beer cans.

“Whatsa point?” he asked Tug about the trash installation. “Dis on every street corner.”

“The guy’s famous, I guess.” Tug read the label. “Selling for three thousand.”

Three thousand? Could pay one third of my new credit card bill. Mas imagined throwing down fresh grass cuttings and a rusty Pennsylvania push lawn mower. How much would these thin hakujin pay for that?

More black clothes, but no sign of Joy. There was an African American woman with a huge wrapped yellow headdress the size of a beehive. And a hakujin woman dressed in an old black kimono cinched at the waist with a piece of dyed blue fabric. Mas grimaced. Although this woman maybe didn’t know any better, the kimono she was wearing was strictly reserved for men and for funerals. And the belt was furoshiki, a piece of cloth that Chizuko had used to wrap around bamboo containers of musubi, rice balls wrapped in black seaweed. When Mas brought that to Tug’s attention, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t matter, Mas,” Tug said. “This is America.”

Besides Mas and Tug, there was another Asian face-a young woman wearing a pair of monpe pants, the pantaloons, cut at the calves, that Japanese peasants wore in the rice paddies. But instead of straw zori slippers, the woman wore military boots, not that different from the ones Tug had probably had in Europe. Mas feared that Tug was going to try to make conversation with the girl. She must have sensed it, too, because she disappeared in the crowd of black as soon as Tug made eye contact.

Waiters came around often, offering glasses of wine and strange appetizers. As usual, Tug declined the wine, with Mas accepting each one of Tug’s rejects. The same went for the Ritz crackers topped with caviar, sour cream, and avocado. Who would have known such a strange concoction to taste so good?

“Wherezu Joy?” Mas asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tug. His military-trained eyes surveyed the crowd, searching, searching.

The two friends finally landed up in a corner, surrounded by X-rays illuminated by metal light boxes.

“This reminds me of Dr. Hayakawa’s office,” Tug said, referring to a gastrointestinal specialist in Pasadena who had yanked out Tug’s gallbladder last year.

While doctors’ offices always made Mas feel cold and alone, this X-ray gallery felt warm, like a line of fireplaces glowing from the middle of the wall. The X-rays were cut up and brightly colored in fluorescent paint. One light box held a montage of head X-rays, with a negative of a girl in the center.

Mas lowered his reading glasses from his head to his nose. In the photo negative, the girl’s teeth were black, the pupils of the sloping eyes white.

“Who’s dis?” Mas asked.

“It’s Joy.”