it was only after Lucy started seventh grade last year that she had realized what should have been obvious: she looked exactly like her mother. Maybe her childish features had hidden the resemblance for a while, but when Lucy walked down the street with her mother now, she knew that the double takes and catcalls were meant for both of them. Her mother would not allow her to roll her hair or wear lipstick, but the resemblance could no longer be disguised.
Lucy knew that she still had some maturing to do before her transformation was complete. Where her mother’s lips were sensually full, her own were still the bow shape of a child’s. Her mother’s eyes narrowed and tilted, elongated at the outer corners in a manner that suggested mischief, while Lucy’s retained the wide-open look of youth. Miyako’s fine cheekbones sculpted the planes of her face exquisitely: Lucy’s had yet to become pronounced.
But there was no hint of her father in her face. Despite his success, his breeding—his father’s father had been an important man in Japan, a respected merchant with several homes—Renjiro’s appearance had been coarse, his skin pocked underneath his beard, his nose flat and his brow jutting. Lucy was proud to be his daughter, to be a Takeda. But she was very pleased that she resembled her mother.
Lucy knew little about the years between her mother’s birth and her arrival, at the age of seventeen, at Renjiro Takeda’s factory, where she applied for a job packing apricots into crates. She knew that Miyako was the daughter of farm laborers, and that her mother had died giving birth. Miyako had managed to stay in school until the tenth grade, had learned to sew and embroider and had earned money with her needlework. Something had happened when she was fourteen or fifteen—something terrible, something that had acted as a turning point in Miyako’s life. She had left her father behind and gone to the city, where it had taken several more years—and these she never spoke of, so Lucy did not know how her mother had supported herself or where she’d lived—before she found herself in Renjiro Takeda’s factory looking for work. Her father had loved to tell stories of how unsuited Miyako was to the noisy, backbreaking work on the line, how he promoted her to a position in the office after a week because he could not bear to see her distress. And then he had married her only a few months later.
Lucy sensed that life had punished her mother for her will to survive, that she had been tested and marked repeatedly, the scars cutting deeper each time they were opened. Lucy, and to some pale extent her father, were her respite and, on the very best days, her fleeting joy. But they were not her central truth. The core of her mother was fraught and dread-drenched, and Lucy feared that the loss of her father and the threat of upheaval were beginning to erode the fragile peace Miyako had molded from the ashes of her early years.
Lucy finished shelling the walnuts. The nutmeats filled the small bowl her mother had given her, the shells rustling in the tin. Lucy took a handful of shells and squeezed, harder and harder until their sharp edges cut cruelly into her palm, before flinging them onto the remains of the backyard fire, which winter rains had reduced to a lumpy, blackened scar on the sidewalk. For a moment Lucy thought she might throw the rest, the bits she’d worked so hard to pry from their shells, the delicate bowl, part of a matched set. Let them be lost, broken, ruined—what did it matter?
But inside the house was her mother, and no matter how fragile the strands that linked them, Lucy would do nothing to further erode her peace. She would endure and she would wait, and she would be ready when Miyako needed her.
7
On a chilly Tuesday a couple of weeks later, Lucy walked to the store with coins in her fist, thinking about the Nancy Drew book she was currently rereading. She’d discovered the series when she was ten, but the first time she read The Secret of Shadow Ranch, she’d missed all the clues. Now as she walked along, she thought about the way Carolyn Keene constructed the mystery, the clues layered in among Nancy’s adventures. Nancy was brave, but she was also lucky, with her friends and her clothes and car and her handsome, dependable father. And she got to go to such interesting places, and war never intruded into her world, and she and her friends stopped the bad guys from getting away with the terrible things they’d done. Lucy thought she might like to be a detective herself, peeling away the layers of a crime until she figured out who the guilty person was. It was always a surprise, always someone you never would have guessed.
Lucy passed the boarded and broken windows, no longer sensitive to the ravages being inflicted on the neighborhood, but when she spotted a cluster of people around a lamppost in front of the movie theater, she stopped to see what the fuss was. The movie theater was one of the few places Japanese still went without fear; perhaps it was the darkness inside that made them feel safe. Had this too been taken away? Were they no longer welcome here?
Coming within a few feet of the crowd, Lucy saw that a sign had been pasted on the pole.
INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY
She craned her neck to read the smaller print below:
“All Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien, will be evacuated from the above designated area....
“The Civil Control Station will provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property....
“...transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence...”
Lucy felt cold fingers of dread creep down her neck. She turned away without reading the rest; Aiko had been predicting this day for a while now. Whenever she brought up the subject, Miyako blanched and begged her to stop. Now it was up to Lucy to finally make her understand.
She ran all the way home, and by the time she arrived, her lungs were burning and her feet pinched against the leather of her shoes. Somewhere, she’d dropped the coins without even noticing. She had not bought the tea that her mother had wanted. There would not be enough for tomorrow. But what did it matter?
Lucy burst through the front door and nearly collided with Aiko, who was standing in the parlor. For a moment neither said anything; Lucy could see from Aiko’s eyes that she already knew.
Aiko knelt down and took Lucy’s hand in hers. “I’ve already told her. Lucy... It’s going to be okay. We’ll put our things in storage. It’s not forever. It’s... It’ll be like an adventure.”
Lucy allowed Aiko to caress her arms, to keep speaking. The words blurred together as she nodded; what she most wanted was for Aiko to leave. She had to get to her mother. Had to see for herself what damage this latest onslaught had done.
At last Aiko released her and went to the kitchen, where Lucy could hear her rattling pots. Her mother had started the dinner before Lucy had left; Lucy supposed that Aiko would now finish it. The two worked well together that way. How many times had they cooked together in one or the other’s kitchen? How many times had they taken the sun on balmy afternoons in the backyard, pruned the crape myrtles lining the street in front of both their houses, looked through magazines, listened to the radio, mended and darned and embroidered together?
But her mother needed her now. She crept down the hall to her mother’s room, certain Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly
