Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,85

would have to say that you’re not one to talk about holding grudges,” Jae said quietly, fiercely mincing a bunch of green onions. “Go talk to your brother and work this out. I’m making us something to eat.”

I looked at what he’d assembled on the counter, giving him a skeptical look. “You look like you’re about to open a salad buffet. Are you actually cooking all of this or are you trying to give us time to get into a fight?”

“I’ve got some bulgogi thawing out in the microwave, and I’m going to make soon dubu chigae. The rice is going to take thirty minutes. That’s how long you and Ichi have.” His knife began moving again, expertly gutting a hapless jalapeno minding its own business on the chopping board. If ever he murdered me, I took great comfort in knowing he could probably fillet my corpse like he did the California yellowtail Bobby and I caught when we went deep-sea fishing. His blade stopped moving, but his gaze was as sharp. “Go fix things with your brother. He hates this is between you.”

“Then why doesn’t he start the conversation?” I muttered, pinching a bit of bean sprouts from a bowl and popping them into my mouth.

“He won’t have a chance to if you stand here and talk to me in the kitchen,” Jae sniped back. “Go away. I’m trying to cook. You’re worse than the dog.”

And with that, I fled, taking a bowl of kimchee and a pair of wooden chopsticks with me as I went.

“Here.” I held out one of the bottles to Ichi, setting the kimchee down on the apothecary chest, making sure it was between us. He took the chopsticks, going through the ritual of removing them from the paper sleeve they’d come in and checking them for splinters. I wasn’t offended. I was going to do the same thing in a few seconds. “Do they really give you shit in Japan if you rub those really cheap ones together to get the splinters off?”

“If you’re eating someplace where the chopsticks are so poor quality that you risk getting a piece of wood in your mouth, they’re going to expect you to rub them together. So no one like that would take offense,” Ichi replied, picking a green leaf sliver of kimchee from the bowl. “It’s considered rude if you’re doing it at a restaurant or a ramen house, but they also wouldn’t serve you those kinds of chopsticks. These are okay. I like the kind you don’t have to pop apart.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “Mostly because I can never pop them apart evenly. And don’t talk to me about the trick of separating them with equal force near where they’re joined because it’s just easier if I hand them over to Jae and give him puppy-dog eyes so he does it for me.”

We picked through the kimchee slowly, ignoring the conversation we were meant to have. About three pieces in, the fire finally hit my throat, and I once again regretted marrying somebody who had a cast-iron mouth and made his own kimchee. Just as I was wondering if I was going to have to say something, Ichi cleared his throat.

“When I was growing up, everything I learned about America was through television and movies.” He furrowed his brow, lost in the contemplation of his kimchee bowl. “When she was dying, our mother used to talk about the two of you once in a while. She would wonder how you looked. How you turned out. I promised myself I would at least meet you and Mikio one day. It wasn’t until my father married that I realized I was no longer welcome in his family, so I came looking for the two of you.”

“And you definitely found us,” I said, cracking my iced tea open. “I know I was kind of an asshole to you in the beginning. Lot of anger I had to work through.”

“It was understandable. Your father told you she died, and for us—as a traditional Japanese family—she didn’t have a right to you anymore. I know that’s hard to understand from an American perspective. It was hard for me to understand how you felt until my father began his second family and my name was no longer important to him.” Ichi set his chopsticks down, resting their pepper-sauce-stained ends against the rim of the bowl. “I hated growing up as a Tokugawa. Everything in my life was laid out for me.