Mozasu shook his head and placed his hand over hers.
Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
Etsuko removed her new watch and put it in his hand. “It’s not that I don’t want a ring—”
Mozasu didn’t look at her, but he put the watch in his pocket.
“It’s late. Almost midnight,” he said gently. “The children have to get home.”
Etsuko rose from the table and went to hand out the party bags.
Not wanting the evening to end, Solomon claimed that he was hungry, so the three of them returned to her restaurant. The place was clean again and looked open for business.
“A little bit of everything,” he said when she asked him what he wanted to eat. He looked so happy, and it pleased her to see him like this. She could count on him to be a happy person. Maybe that was what Solomon was for her and Mozasu.
At the very back of the dining room, Mozasu sat down at a table for four and opened his evening-edition newspaper. He looked like a middle-aged man waiting calmly for his train to arrive. Etsuko headed for the kitchen with Solomon trailing her.
She put down three white plates on the prep counter. From the refrigerator, she pulled out the tray of fried chicken and the bowl of potato salad—dishes that Ichiro had made following an American cookbook.
“Why didn’t Hana come? Is she sick?”
“No.” Etsuko didn’t like to lie to a direct question.
“She’s pretty, you know.”
“Too pretty. That’s her problem.” Her own mother had once said this about her when a family friend had complimented Etsuko.
“Did you have fun tonight?” she asked.
“Yeah. I still can’t believe it. Hiromi-san talked to me.”
“What did he say?” She put two large pieces of chicken on Mozasu’s and Solomon’s plates and a small drumstick on hers. “Was he nice?”
“Very nice and cool. He said his best friends are Korean. He told me to be good to my parents.”
Solomon hadn’t denied her as his mother, and though this should have been a nice thing, it only made her feel more anxious.
“Your father told me tonight that your mother was proud of you. From the moment you were born.”
Solomon said nothing.
She didn’t think that he should need a mother anymore; he was already grown up, and he was doing better than most kids she knew who had mothers who were alive. He was almost a man.
“Come to the sink. Hold out your left hand.”
“A present?”
She laughed and put his left hand over the sink basin and turned on the faucet. “There’s still ink left.”
“Can they make me leave? Really deport me?”
“Everything went well today,” she replied, and softly scrubbed the pads of his fingers and nails with a dishwashing brush. “There’s no need to worry, Solomon-chan.”
He seemed satisfied with her answer.
“Hana told me she came to Yokohama to get rid of her little problem. Is she pregnant? Nigel got his girlfriend pregnant, and she had to get an abortion.”
“Your friend Nigel?” She remembered the blond-haired boy who played Atari with him on the weekends. He was only a year older than Solomon.
He nodded. “Yup. Hana seems great.”
“My children hate me.”
Solomon picked at the ink beneath his fingernails. “Your kids hate you because you’re gone.” His face grew serious. “They can’t help it. They miss you.”
Etsuko bit the inside of her lower lip. She could feel the small muscles inside her mouth, and she stopped herself from drawing blood. She was afraid to look at his face, and though she had tried to restrain herself, she burst into tears.
“Why? Why are you crying?” he asked. “I’m sorry.” Solomon’s eyes welled up.
She inhaled to calm her breathing.
“When Hana was born, the nurses put her footprints on a card. They washed the ink off, but not very well, so when I went home I had to get it off. I don’t think she could see anything really, because she was just born, but I felt like she was looking at me like I was hurting her, and she just cried and cried—”