From the small shopping bag, Mr. Yoshioka withdrew a manual drill with a crank handle, a tape measure, a pencil, a hammer, a nail, and a two-piece security-chain lock with screws.
“I have already installed one on my door. Of course this cannot keep Miss Eve Adams out when no one is at home to engage the chain. But it will assure us that she cannot intrude at night when you are sleeping.”
He held the jamb plate to the door frame and with the pencil marked the holes where the four screws would go.
“Hey, wait a second. How am I going to explain this to my mom?”
“What is there to explain? Miss Eve Adams is a dangerous and unpredictable person. She—”
“I haven’t told my mom about Eve Adams or the knife threat or the Polaroid of me sleeping, none of it.”
He blinked at me, as though I had suddenly blurred and he were trying to bring me back into focus. “Why have you not told her about such an important thing?”
“It’s complicated.”
He regarded me with a look that reminded me of someone else, and for a moment I couldn’t think who, but then I realized this was the look with which Sister Agnes regarded me on those rare days when I showed up at Saint Scholastica without my homework complete.
“You do not seem to me to be a boy who would lie to his mother,” said Mr. Yoshioka.
“I haven’t lied to Mom about Eve Adams. I just haven’t mentioned her, that’s all.”
“I suppose there must be a distinction if we think hard enough.”
“I didn’t want to worry her. She’s got enough on her mind.”
Putting down the brass jamb plate and the pencil, picking up the hammer and nail, he said, “I will explain to your mother that I worry about the two of you alone in these times of high crime. Therefore, I installed this security chain as I have in my apartment.”
“But, see, the thing is—why just us?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why wouldn’t you put one on Mrs. Lorenzo’s door and on everyone else’s door, why just on ours?”
He smiled and nodded. “Of course, because you are my friend and the others are mere neighbors, many of whom never speak to me, none of whom ever brought me cookies.”
“Well, okay, but my mother doesn’t know we’re friends.”
“You brought me cookies, we had tea together, we both recognized that Eve Adams is a dangerous person. We are men of very different experiences yet of like minds. Of course we are friends.”
When he said “men,” I think I loved him a little then, like the way I loved Grandpa Teddy. Mr. Yoshioka didn’t pause before using the word, didn’t say it with any calculation, but included me among the grown-up and mature with apparent sincerity.
Embarrassed, I said, “Well, see, I didn’t tell Mom how I brought you cookies and then had tea.”
At nearly forty, he possessed a face as unlined as mine, most likely because he didn’t often squinch it up in dramatic expressions. His gentle smile was always slight, his frown hardly detectable, and to assess his mood, you were left with little to read other than his eyes. Now, smooth-faced, allowing no clue in his eyes, his voice without telltale inflection, he said, “You seem to keep more from your mother than you tell her.”
Abashed, I said, “Not really. We share almost everything. We really do. Sometimes she calls me a chatterbox because I’m always sharing so much. It’s just that if I tell her about the cookies and the tea, I’ll have to tell her about Eve Adams, and I don’t want to do that because—”
“Because you do not want to worry her. She has enough on her mind,” he finished for me, sort of quoting me.
Suddenly I thought I saw the solution to our dilemma. “You know, maybe instead of the security chain, we should just call the police and tell them Miss Adams is messing with stinky chemicals in Six-C, she might blow us up or something.”
Because it is impossible for me to turn pale, I am especially aware when white folks lose what color they have, just as I am quick to notice when they blush. Mr. Yoshioka was a kind of light bronze, but when I suggested calling the police, he went pale in his own way. His skin was still bronze, but a little gray now, as though it were an alloy of bronze and pewter, if there was such a thing.
“No police,” he said.
“Sure. That’s the way. They could go up there and she’d have to let them in. So if she’s up to no good—and we know she is—then the cops would see it and arrest her, and we wouldn’t have to worry about her taking revenge on us or anything like that.”
He shook his head. His skin was more pewter now than bronze. “No police. Bad idea.”
“Why’s it a bad idea?”
“Not all police are reliable, Jonah Kirk.”