“So,” I began. I wanted to know if my parents were going to play pretend like my sister. If, by the grace of Baba’s death, I had somehow been granted probation by my mother and would be reinstated into the family without a lecture. “What’s going on with Mom and Dad these days?”
“You mean are they going to rip your head off?” Tamami was the easy sibling, a kind of doormat, the sort of person who went along with the wishes of others and didn’t complain, but she was no idiot.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Dad is just happy to see you. Mom, on the other hand, I’m not so sure. She asked about your flight.”
“Basically a fifty-fifty shot of being murdered or tied to a chair.”
“There are too many people coming and going, paying their respects. She’s not going to make a scene.”
Of course, Tamami never received the brunt of our mother’s wrath—like the time my mother had found me making out with a bad boy, Kosuke, outside a nearby corner store and dragged me home so hard I had bruises on my arm for a week. Or the time she found my report card and didn’t talk to me for a month because she said I was a hopeless cause who was going nowhere. But where would I go? And where would she want me to go that wouldn’t be considered abandoning home and her sick sense of loyalty to the grave friend network? The next town over? The one after that? By the time I turned eighteen, the lure of the big city no longer existed—even Tokyo and Osaka had become a muted collection of islands with barely any room for new residents. This is where you belong. This is where our family has always been. Everything you need in life is here with us. This street is a shining example of how people should be in Japan. We’re not a cult, I tried to explain to friends in America, not really.
When we finally arrived home, my father ran to the door and hugged me tightly. I’d missed the smell of him—a strange mixture of cigarette smoke and tropical deodorant. He cinched his bathrobe, hiding one of the ancient and yellowed undershirts he refused to throw away. My mother was in the garden, trying desperately to appear busy. I noted that the typhoon and tsunami seawalls beside our street were taller now, casting a shadow over our house. Instead of blue sky, there was concrete horizon from our windows.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispered in my ears. “We’ve missed you.” He carried my suitcase up to Baba’s old room and told me to take a load off, sit, relax. They had remodeled the first floor into an open floor plan. Somehow the furniture seemed more cluttered than before, as if they were living in a secondhand shop showroom.
“I’m staying in Baba’s room?”
“Well, we’re not sharing a room again,” Tamami said. “That’s for damn sure.”
I perched on a kitchen counter stool as if I were a stranger, too afraid to make myself comfortable, ready to bolt. I could sense my mother staring at me. How would she guilt me? How might she try to pull me back into the fold? Perhaps she would even suggest that I move back home with my husband, start a life here where everything and everyone would be waiting for me. There was a tiny holo-portrait of Baba on the entertainment center surrounded by flowers and fruit. I could feel my face growing hot on top of my already clammy skin from the summer humidity, a flush of shame for not sending so much as a postcard the whole time I was gone. After all Baba had done for me—my ally after every shouting match, comfort in the form of freshly cooked dumplings, the only one who’d known I was planning to run away. While unpacking my bags in America years ago, I’d found an envelope with nearly a thousand dollars in yen and a brief note: Follow your happiness wherever it may take you, but remember your family. I still had the note somewhere. I tried not to dwell on it, though, because a part of me always knew how much Baba loved our street, having everyone all together.
“Are you hungry?” my mother asked, washing the dirt from her hands before rummaging through the fridge. “Not sure if you had enough on the plane.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I watched her ignore me and continue to fix rice balls stuffed with salted salmon, probably left over from a previous night’s dinner. From where I sat, I could see the shrine in the hall with photos of everyone on the street who had passed. A stick of incense and a tiny memento sat before each one—a button, a harmonica, a lock of hair, an earring, a pair of glasses. In a glass cabinet beneath the altar sat an inoperable robot dog named Hollywood that belonged to one of my great-great-aunts who had died of the plague. When I was a kid, one of the main rules of the house was to bow to every single member of the shrine before moving on. My mother had frequently made me turn back and pay my respects until I convinced her I wasn’t half-assing it with a lackluster bow.