Maddie was not in a place where she was willing to hear any negative talk about her mom. She stood up, the chair screeching against the linoleum floor. “Well, screw you! She wasn’t good enough? Look who’s talking. If you’re so freaking perfect, you’d visit Gram in Palm Springs, instead of letting her rot all by herself in that stupid nursing home—”
“I visit her every other month,” Hiroko said curtly. “I have for years—since she hurt her hip. And if you’d listened, you’d know that I didn’t say your mother wasn’t good enough—”
Maddie was already making a disgusted sound. “Lisa and I lived there for nearly a year, so…”
Hiroko widened her eyes as if waiting for her to continue.
“I never saw you visit,” Maddie said.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Hiroko asked.
“Of course she’s not,” Dingo said hastily.
“I’m just saying, all those months, I never saw you, not even once.” Maddie crossed her arms.
“I don’t drive at night. I had to leave early enough to get back to San Diego before dark, because your mother made it very clear that I wasn’t welcome in her home,” Hiroko informed her. She looked from Maddie to Dingo. “How much money do you need?”
“Three hundred dollars’ll do it,” Dingo said because Maddie had finally been silenced.
“That much?” Hiroko said as she took both Maddie’s and Dingo’s plates and brought them to the sink.
“His car is big and stupid.” Maddie finally spoke as Hiroko gestured for them to follow her out into the living room. “The gas mileage is for shit.”
“And where, exactly, are you going?” the elderly woman asked.
There was a series of black-and-white pictures on the wall, Dingo now saw, that were obviously that internment camp where Hiroko had spent a chunk of her childhood. Long rows of barrack-type housing stretched out into the distance.
Maddie saw those photos, too, and now pointed to them. “Well, Manzanar,” she lied. “Of course. We need to see it. I mean, photos are well and good, but, we need to smell it. Feel it. And since it’s four hundred miles there, four hundred back…”
Hiroko’s eyebrows lifted. “And your car gets…three miles to the gallon?”
“We also have access to more primary source materials further north in…Reno,” Maddie lied.
“Reno,” Hiroko repeated as Dingo leaned in to get a closer look at a photo that had to be Hiroko as a child, standing in front of an exquisite garden, barbwire fencing in the background.
“Yes. Reno.” Maddie stood there, looking at her great-aunt as if daring her to call out her lie.
There was silence then, as Hiroko just looked out her living room window, unperturbed.
And sure enough, Maddie cracked first. “She was embarrassed,” she said. “Lisa. We had this really tiny, shitty studio apartment in a really shitty part of Palm Springs, and she was working as a waitress at this total crap bar, and she hated it, and…There was barely enough room for the pullout sofa. I don’t know where you would’ve slept—in the bathtub? And yes, I wish she’d told me, I would’ve cut school to come to see you at the nursing home when you came to visit Great-Grandma. Because I’ve always thought of you as a superhero, and I really, really wanted to meet you again, because I was, like, five, that one time we did meet. And I’m sorry that you hate me now, I am.”
Maddie started to cry, and Dingo did, too, because God. And he broke his rule and took her hand and she held on to him so tightly even as she pulled them toward the sliding door.
“I don’t hate you,” Hiroko said, surprising them both into stopping and turning back. “I didn’t hate Lisa. She was braver than I ever was. I both resented and admired her…and…I just knew she and Peter wouldn’t…fit. That he was too traditional, too…sane for her.” She shook her head. “Neither of them could bear to hear that, so they stayed away from me, which I suppose was just as well, because I couldn’t bear to watch her break his heart. I don’t carry much cash, but I can write you a check.” She paused. “Do you have the ID you need to cash it?”
Her question was aimed more at Dingo than Maddie, and he nodded even as he wiped his eyes.
“Good,” she said curtly. “Wait here, I’ll get my handbag.”
CHAPTER NINE
They did the coffee-and-bagels-to-go thing, at Shay’s favorite local mom-and-pop coffee shop. She could tell, without even asking, that Peter wouldn’t’ve been able to bear a sit-down breakfast.
And it was a good thing, too, because when they got back into Peter’s truck, Shay realized that Tevin had texted her.
It was a long message—segmented into four, no, five long paragraphs, and she scrolled back to read aloud, “Fiona’s last name is Fiera, and she’s def crazy and gone for good. But biggest rumor via Bobbie Ramone—I’m not sure who that is—is that Maddie’s got a much older BF. That’s boyfriend.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Peter muttered as he unwrapped his bagel and took a bite.
Shay obliged as she continued reading. “More than one member of Bobbie’s gossip-head gang—oh, she’s that Bobbie. Tevin sometimes refers to her as APB because, well, right. Anyway, going on. More than one member of the aforementioned gang saw her with him last Tuesday after school; rumor is he’s a SEAL.” She looked up, filled with pride. “My son is possibly the only teenager in the universe to use a semicolon—correctly—in a text.”
Peter, meanwhile, was choking. “A SEAL…? There’s no way that that Dingo kid…No.”
He was right. Not even in Dingo’s wildest dreams was anyone going to mistake him for a Navy SEAL. In response, Shay read on. “He’s big and blond and kinda hard to miss. Definitely not Dingo. Ooh, Tevin says, Janet Lundgren took these photos. I don’t know who she is, but thank you, Janet!”
Tevin had forwarded two photos to her. Shayla peered at the first one. It was blurry, but yeah, that was definitely Maddie talking with great intensity to a hulking giant of a crew-cutted blond young man outside of what looked like a convenience store.
“This is definitely not Dingo,” she told Peter, who leaned over to look, too, his shoulder pressed against hers. In a friendly manner, because they were friends. Friends, friends, friends, she emphasized to herself, because for once Harry wasn’t present to argue, thank God.
She forced herself to focus. The young man in the photo was wearing a U.S. Navy SEAL tank top over a well-muscled body, but that didn’t mean anything. You didn’t need to be a SEAL to wear a shirt advertising the Teams.
And frankly, there was no law against a man of any age talking to a girl on a public sidewalk.
“That’s Hans fucking Schlossman,” Peter said, his voice tight.
“So you know him,” Shayla said as she scrolled to the second photo. Eek.
That one was far more damning.
In the second photo, Maddie was encircled in the big blond man’s giant arms. He was holding her tightly, her head tucked under his big Dudley Do-Right chin, and she was clinging to him, too, and yeah. Shay realized that it was entirely possible that she and Peter had gotten it wrong. Maybe Dingo wasn’t the girl’s inappropriately older boyfriend—and this SEAL was.