Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,15
pocked underneath his beard, his nose flat and his brow jutting. Lucy was proud to be his daughter, to be a Takeda. But she was very pleased that she resembled her mother.
Lucy knew little about the years between her mother’s birth and her arrival, at the age of seventeen, at Renjiro Takeda’s factory, where she applied for a job packing apricots into crates. She knew that Miyako was the daughter of farm laborers, and that her mother had died giving birth. Miyako had managed to stay in school until the tenth grade, had learned to sew and embroider and had earned money with her needlework. Something had happened when she was fourteen or fifteen—something terrible, something that had acted as a turning point in Miyako’s life. She had left her father behind and gone to the city, where it had taken several more years—and these she never spoke of, so Lucy did not know how her mother had supported herself or where she’d lived—before she found herself in Renjiro Takeda’s factory looking for work. Her father had loved to tell stories of how unsuited Miyako was to the noisy, backbreaking work on the line, how he promoted her to a position in the office after a week because he could not bear to see her distress. And then he had married her only a few months later.
Lucy sensed that life had punished her mother for her will to survive, that she had been tested and marked repeatedly, the scars cutting deeper each time they were opened. Lucy, and to some pale extent her father, were her respite and, on the very best days, her fleeting joy. But they were not her central truth. The core of her mother was fraught and dread-drenched, and Lucy feared that the loss of her father and the threat of upheaval were beginning to erode the fragile peace Miyako had molded from the ashes of her early years.
Lucy finished shelling the walnuts. The nutmeats filled the small bowl her mother had given her, the shells rustling in the tin. Lucy took a handful of shells and squeezed, harder and harder until their sharp edges cut cruelly into her palm, before flinging them onto the remains of the backyard fire, which winter rains had reduced to a lumpy, blackened scar on the sidewalk. For a moment Lucy thought she might throw the rest, the bits she’d worked so hard to pry from their shells, the delicate bowl, part of a matched set. Let them be lost, broken, ruined—what did it matter?
But inside the house was her mother, and no matter how fragile the strands that linked them, Lucy would do nothing to further erode her peace. She would endure and she would wait, and she would be ready when Miyako needed her.
7
On a chilly Tuesday a couple of weeks later, Lucy walked to the store with coins in her fist, thinking about the Nancy Drew book she was currently rereading. She’d discovered the series when she was ten, but the first time she read The Secret of Shadow Ranch, she’d missed all the clues. Now as she walked along, she thought about the way Carolyn Keene constructed the mystery, the clues layered in among Nancy’s adventures. Nancy was brave, but she was also lucky, with her friends and her clothes and car and her handsome, dependable father. And she got to go to such interesting places, and war never intruded into her world, and she and her friends stopped the bad guys from getting away with the terrible things they’d done. Lucy thought she might like to be a detective herself, peeling away the layers of a crime until she figured out who the guilty person was. It was always a surprise, always someone you never would have guessed.
Lucy passed the boarded and broken windows, no longer sensitive to the ravages being inflicted on the neighborhood, but when she spotted a cluster of people around a lamppost in front of the movie theater, she stopped to see what the fuss was. The movie theater was one of the few places Japanese still went without fear; perhaps it was the darkness inside that made them feel safe. Had this too been taken away? Were they no longer welcome here?
Coming within a few feet of the crowd, Lucy saw that a sign had been pasted on the pole.
INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY
She craned her neck to read the smaller print below: