Hiro arrived in Honolulu late in the morning, but it took most of the day to get to Waialua. The long ride through the cane and pineapple fields was unlike anything he had seen as he crossed the country, and the mix of people he saw staggered him. The sun was different. Even the air felt soft.
It was late afternoon by the time he made it to the ball field that Dean had described. The game had just ended, and Dean and his teammates were sitting on the old bleachers, not a farm boy among them. Dean stood, still wearing his catcher’s pads, and gave him a smile. “You made it.”
“I made it,” Hiro replied. Dean did a quick round of introductions but Hiro did not remember a single name. He remembered what they looked like, brown and strong men who smiled easily and welcomed him with their manner.
“Come meet Frank,” Dean said.
***
Tom sat in the old bleachers, waiting for the taxi that would take him to the airport. A knot of players, their game just over, sat a distance away. Years of umpiring had taught him every one of their names, and each treated him with respect.
Pulling a windbreaker out of the bag at his feet, Tom stopped and reached into a pocket, feeling for a piece of paper.
***
Frank was a big blonde man in a manager’s uniform, talking seriously to three players in front of him. Hiro couldn’t hear him but he watched as the big man stopped, looked left and right, and spoke again. The players roared with laughter.
“Mr. Clark,” Dean said as they neared the manager, “this is the guy I was telling you about.” Frank looked Hiro over.
“The hard worker,” he asked, looking at Dean.
“Yes sir, a hell of a hard worker,” Dean replied.
“License for the big trucks, Mr. Clark,” Hiro added.
Frank looked at Hiro again, his mouth set. “You think you can handle a cane truck? They’re huge mothers.”
Hiro tried to look confident. “Yes, sir, I think I can. Sure.”
Frank’s stern look finally cracked. He gave Hiro a grin. “Okay, we’ll start on something smaller, but you can work your way up.” He nodded to Dean. “Good catch.” Then he looked at Hiro again, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, son. Dean told me your name, but I can’t recall.”
***
On that sunny North Dakota day, Hiro had stood at his mother’s grave, struggling not to think of Chucky dying and Chieko trying to sob him back to life. He wished he knew how to pray, how to leave someone he’d already said goodbye to. How to unroot himself.
At least his mother was not alone. She was buried alongside the woman who had once been her dearest friend, whom he and Chieko had only known as Missus.
Hiro’s mother and Missus had known each other forever, since Santa Clara, before he was born. They clung to each other during the hardest time in their lives, in any of their lives, and became sisters. They searched for homes together when it was time to go to North Dakota. And one was always in the other’s kitchen when Hiro and Missus’ son got home from school.
The sons were another bond. Her son was exactly one day older than Hiro, so the other boy always insisted he should be the boss. Hiro went along, through all the nudging and wrestling and competing, knowing that they were really equals, despite the timing of birth.
Standing at their graves, Hiro remembered the summer day he and the boy were swinging at rocks with a length of old broomstick in a rough field, and the boy cut his heel on some glass. He cried. Hiro remembered seeing tears. But by the time they got home he had stopped, because Missus had reminded him to wear his shoes but Hiro teased their newness and the boy tossed them off as soon as they reached the field.
At the time, Hiro didn’t understand the infection or what it meant that his mother spent so much time comforting Missus. He didn’t yet understand the look on Missus’ face, the one he would know only as his own mother slipped away. And he didn’t understand when the boy died. But he understood that the boy had never told his mother how he came to be barefoot. They had only been playing.
They buried the boy, and Missus buried her heart with him. She never smiled again, that Hiro could remember. His mother spent more time in Missus’ kitchen than in their own. Within a year, Missus followed her son.
The three lay side by side now, with Missus surrounded by the people she loved most. Hiro imagined them holding hands. His mother must be happy in the eternal company of Missus Odo, and her son Tom.
***
Hiro looked at Frank and considered the simple fact that a death in North Dakota goes unrecorded in California. To the County Recorder of Santa Clara, unless you die within earshot you remain a birth unmatched to a death and, like your record, you live forever. He’ll send you proof of that for a few dollars and a nice letter, as long as you can provide a little information.
Hiro looked Frank in the eye and extended his hand. “Thomas Odo,” he said. “Tom.” The name he had adopted since he left the graveside.
“Good to meet you, Tom. Come by on Monday and we’ll talk some more.”
Dean watched Frank walk away and nudged his friend. “You’re in like Flynn, buddy boy,” Dean said as he turned to face him. “Hey, you got clean clothes in that bag?”
“Sure. Why.”
“Then let’s get cleaned up. Waialua County Fair tonight,” Dean laughed. “Lots of pretty girls.”
***
Tom gazed across the field and remembered how Frank had led that team, helped every boy who wanted to play. But Tom never played again, never laid his hand on another bat. He became an umpire instead, close to the game but never a part of it. It let him stay on at the field decades longer than the players, who found soon enough that age made running a chore. He remembered how Frank led them on a mission to restore the field and bleachers, getting donations of money and materials from people and companies all over the area. He remembered how they gathered at home plate after Frank died, to honor him.
The bleachers were as worn again as they had been when Tom arrived. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the newspaper clipping, flattening it on his knee to read past the crisp folds and precise pleats. Ellie had done her residency in Santa Clara and met Josh, so she stayed. There was no plan in her returning to the place where he had been born and where his family had lived before the war, the internment, and North Dakota. Nor was there a plan in her using this particular page of the local newspaper to lovingly wrap the vase.
But here, from the bottom corner of that page, was a large notice of the passing of Charles “Charlie” Hollister, vice president of operations for a large plumbing fixtures company and member of the board of the Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce, at a ripe old age. There was the picture of that face, a half-century older but still Fat Chucky. Charlie Hollister, survived by his wife, Chieko Hollister, and his son, Dr. Hiroshi Hollister. And another picture, of the three of them together. When Tom had unwrapped the vase and glanced at that photo, he said, for the first time in fifty years, “Ekochan.”
Tom folded the clipping and slipped it back into his bag, grabbing something else on the way out. He was still hunched over when Dean sat next to him, bent and moving slowly but still plenty strong enough to stand with a friend who needed someone to lean on. Dean kicked Tom’s bag. “Going somewhere?”
“Visit family,” Tom said, as his taxi pulled up behind them. He sat a little longer, letting the taxi wait. Dean noticed that he was spinning in his hand a dirty baseball with three torn stitches.
-end-
