“Thank you,” my mother said as I opened my eyes. “I didn’t realize how much I needed that.”
“You’re welcome.” I leaned in and kissed her cheek, then reluctantly stepped back. “Please take it easy today, Mom. If you need help with anything, just call. I’m not that far away.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” she said, shooing me away impatiently. “I’m a grown woman, and you’ve your own life to live. I’ll be fine.”
I grabbed her hand again, and her chin stiffened in the same way mine did whenever I was about to dig my heels in. The healing I’d just done had obviously given her a boost if she was already being this obstinate.
“Promise me you’ll call if you need anything,” I pleaded. “Please.”
The desperate note in my voice worked—she softened, her shoulders relaxing again. “I promise,” she agreed, “if only so that you’ll get out of here. Now shoo! You’re late already. And tell Sanji I said hello.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
Shabu Shabu House, the hot pot restaurant my mom owned, was only a twenty-minute bike ride across town, but as I pumped the pedals as hard as I could, it was the longest twenty minutes of my life. The Presidio golf course flashed by as I zipped down Lake Street, and the late morning sun glittered off the San Francisco Bay beyond the stretch of green. The briny breeze beckoned, practically daring me to change direction and go lounge on the beach.
But my days of being a carefree girl were long over. They’d died the day my mother had been diagnosed.
I liked to split my life into two epochs—Before Cancer, and After Cancer. Before Cancer, I’d been a cheerful college student, working in my mom’s restaurant part time while I took pre-med classes, and hanging out with friends during my spare time.
The last time I’d gone to the beach with my friends had been over a year ago. Before Cancer. Before my mom had received the terrible diagnosis that changed our lives forever.
By the time the doctors identified the leukemia, it had already progressed to Stage III. She’d originally gone in thinking she had anemia. I knew I should have forced her to go sooner—she’d been suffering from fatigue for months, and had grown far too thin. But my mother had always been a workaholic, and she’d refused to listen to me until the day she collapsed and nearly spilled a tea tray on a customer.
That was truly the day that After Cancer began, before we even really knew what was going on. While Mom had been on bed rest, in and out of the hospital as they tried to figure out what was going on, I’d switched to online classes and taken over running the restaurant. She’d already groomed me for it—I’d been by her side from the day she’d first opened it when I was four years old. I knew how to handle the books, how to deal with the vendors and manage the employees.
I just hadn’t expected to be doing it for quite this long.
“Aika!” Janet, one of our waitresses, exclaimed in relief as I entered the restaurant. She was Japanese, like me, but smaller, and her fine black hair was dyed a honey brown and styled into corkscrew curls that bounced around her heart-shaped face. “Thank goodness you’re here. I thought something had happened to you!”
“Just a case of dead alarm clock,” I said, glancing at the clock—twenty minutes until opening time. “Sorry I left you hanging. Where are the others?”
“Sanji and Matthew are in the kitchen, as usual,” Janet said, referring to our chefs. “Mihoko called in sick.”
“Damn.” Being down one waitress on a Saturday was not a good thing. “Guess I know what I’m doing today,” I said, stalking to the closet behind the counter. I shucked off my jacket and hung it up, then grabbed a spare apron and tied it around my waist. “Let’s finish getting set up.”
Janet and I hurried around the orange-colored tables, testing the hot pot burners to make sure they were working and putting out silverware and condiments. Once I was certain she had that in hand, I went into the kitchen to check on Sanji and Matthew.
“You are late,” Sanji said, not bothering to look up from his workstation. He was cutting a loin of Kobe beef into very thin slices, while Matthew chopped up vegetables. Matthew was a culinary student who worked part time, and Sanji had worked for us for close to fifteen years. He was close to fifty, with silver threaded through the goatee jutting from his chin and faint lines creeping in on his thin face.
“Sumanai,” I apologized, biting my tongue at the thinly veiled belligerence in Sanji’s tone. He had a lot of respect for my mom—me, not so much. Not since the day I told her, nearly four years ago, that I had no intention of continuing the family business. “My mother needed a little extra help this morning.” A white lie, but I didn’t need to give Sanji yet another reason to doubt me.
Sanji’s face softened a little—he and my mother had become good friends over the years. “Is she doing any better?” he asked as I went to taste the pork stock that was keeping warm on one of the burners. “I was very worried when I went to visit her in the hospital last week.”
Mom had given us all a very nasty scare recently. The leukemia had gone into remission for a while, and she’d even been spending more time in the restaurant, giving me more time to hit the books and even relax a bit. But last week, she’d collapsed in the middle of making dinner. I’d come home to see her lying on the kitchen floor with a knife clutched in her hand and a pot of soba noodles burning on the stove. Chills of horror still raced through me every time I thought about how close a call that had been—if she’d landed on her knife, or if the place had caught on fire, she could have died.
“She seemed stronger this morning,” I told Sanji, not wanting him to worry. “I think she’ll be starting chemo again soon.” I hated the idea of her going through that again, but dying was far worse.
“Good.” Sanji nodded decisively. “I will go to the shrine and pray for her this afternoon. The kami have smiled down on Hamako before—surely they will do so again. It is not her time to pass yet.”
I nodded as a sudden lump settled in my throat. I didn’t believe in the old gods, but Sanji did, and there was no point in telling him otherwise, especially since he meant well.
Swallowing back my tears, I pasted a smile on my face and went to unlock the front door for the lunch crowd. There was already a small crowd of people out front—Shabu Shabu House was a popular spot in Japantown, known for our cook-it-yourself Japanese hot pot dishes. Within minutes, the place was packed, and I was too caught up in the hustle and bustle to think about my troubles. Taking a deep breath, I stationed myself behind the counter and focused on greeting customers and getting them seated.