“Yumi?” The old lady’s eyes turned inward. “Oh, yes. She is at whatchamacallit.”
“Where?”
“Where you go for studying.”
“You mean, like a school? A college?”
“That’s right,” she nodded. “You know, too. You go to same one. How come you not go today? You sick or something?”
Lloyd shifted his long legs under the sheet. “She doesn’t know anything,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “We haven’t heard from her in years.”
“I know! I know! You playing hooky!” Momoko screeched with laughter.
Will jerked on the sagging screen door to see if he could straighten the hinges.
“Don’t bother,” Cass said. “We’ll have plenty to fix once we take possession.” She looked around the kitchen. The air was close and still, and her voice sounded loud. “I’ll start in here and then go upstairs. You do the living room. Look for bankbooks, too. Maybe they sent her money.”
Will hesitated. “Bankbooks? That’s awfully personal . . .”
“What else can we do? Lloyd said they hadn’t heard from her in years, but that means they heard from her sometime. I want to know when, and where she was living, and—”
“Maybe she phoned.”
Cass tugged at the top drawer. It stuck. “I’ll bet she wrote. She was always writing things down.” She pulled harder, forced it open.
The contents illustrated the virtue of thrift gone mad. Nothing had been taken out in years, just added to, until each drawer was crammed full of rusting twisties, wads of cling wrap that had lost its cling, twists of tinfoil filled with crumbs, crumbling rubber bands. There were miniature shower caps made of grimy vinyl for popping over leftovers. Dingy sandwich bags that smelled of old onion. Stained paper towels folded and stacked for reuse. Cass longed to discard, to disinfect, but she finished the kitchen quickly and went upstairs.
She searched the master bedroom, then continued down the hall to the bedroom that had once been Yummy’s. She remembered the room as it used to be, with shelves of books and a plastic record player and albums in stacks on the floor. Flower Power decals on the walls, the ceiling speckled with constellations that glowed in the dark. The room’s only ornament now sat on top of a white wooden dresser. It was a small framed photograph, in black and white, of a solemn Indian princess standing in front of the screen door of the farmhouse, hand in hand with Lloyd. Noble Pilgrim. The tip of her feather barely reached his hipbone.
Cass opened the dresser drawer, expecting to find the good linens or Lloyd’s spare winter underwear, but it was filled with Yummy’s old clothes. Socks, some underpants, T-shirts and jeans, all neatly folded, but musty. Cass lifted a T-shirt speckled with blue paisleys and held it to her nose. A familiar smell clung to the fibers—a little animal, some sandalwood, a hint of patchouli. A mother would hide things here. Cass dug beneath a pile of underclothes. Sure enough.
It was a small bundle, carefully wrapped in a worn freezer bag and secured with a thick rubber band. Inside, wrapped in yet another plastic bag, was a collection of photographs and letters. Cass set the photos aside and flipped through the envelopes. There weren’t many, maybe two dozen or so, all addressed to Momoko in Yummy’s wild, loopy handwriting. The earliest was on the bottom, dated April 1976. The most recent was from 1997. Cass slid her fingers under the rest of the clothing but found nothing more. As she leaned on the drawer to close it, the blue paisley again caught her eye. She pulled out the T-shirt and held it up against her. She’d lost so much weight, it might fit her now. She tossed it around her neck like a gym towel and went downstairs.
Will sat at the old rolltop desk. Cass draped her arms over his broad shoulders and laid her face against the plane of his jaw. She waved the letters in front of his face.
“Got ’em.”
“Good girl. You find an address?” He was poring over a ledger of old farm reports, handwritten in Lloyd’s antique script. “Poor old guy. What happened in ’75?”
“’Seventy-five?” Cass started flipping through the letters in her hand.
“The year he leased out over half his acreage to your father.”
“I don’t know. I was just a kid. Why?” She checked the postmarks: San Francisco, Berkeley, several from Texas—all places that Cass could imagine.
“He was doing so well up until then. Look at this. Those Nine-Dollar Potatoes in ’74, and then next season he goes and leases to your father. How come?”
Cass looked up. “That was the year after Yummy ran away. He had a heart attack. His first one.”
“Weird. Look at this. Two years later, after he took the acreage back, he was fighting soil contamination more or less constantly. From what he was spraying, he must have had a problem with leafroll.”
“He did. I remember Daddy going on about the aphids. Lloyd hired Daddy on to run the operation for him, but they never saw eye to eye. Daddy was a lousy farmer and lost a lot of the crop to net necrosis. He blamed Momoko’s peach tree for attracting those aphids. Wanted to chop it down, but Lloyd wouldn’t let him. Momo means ‘peach’ in Japanese.”
“I’m with your Daddy on this one. That tree’s just asking for trouble. Do you think I can take these records? It’s helpful to know.”
“You mean, do I think it’s stealing? I don’t care if it is, Will. Anyway, we own the land now. We got a right to it, I should think.”
“I asked him to show me these way back in ’83 when we started leasing. But he kept putting it off.”
“Well, now you know why.”
“He’s a proud man.”
“Daddy said he was a cheat.”
“Ornery, maybe. You know he’s not a cheat.” Will would always give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and he was right to do so.
Cass draped her arms around his neck again and held the stack of letters in front of his nose. “Look,” she said, pointing to a postmark. “Where’s Pahoa?”
yummy
Two peas in a pod. You remember how that went?
Lloyd would come in for lunch. He’d be sitting at the kitchen table, and you’d dance up behind him and throw your arms around his neck, still hot from the sun, and there would be dirt in the pores under his collar and the sour smell of fertilizer on his fingertips as he reached up to cup your chin and hold you still—remember what his cheek felt like, pressed against yours? Then Momoko, sitting across, would compare the two of you, her large husband and her eager little daughter. She’d peer, long and slow—the same appraising look she gave to a pair of melons, figuring how much
