nonalien, will be evacuated from the above designated area....
“The Civil Control Station will provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property....
“...transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence...”
Lucy felt cold fingers of dread creep down her neck. She turned away without reading the rest; Aiko had been predicting this day for a while now. Whenever she brought up the subject, Miyako blanched and begged her to stop. Now it was up to Lucy to finally make her understand.
She ran all the way home, and by the time she arrived, her lungs were burning and her feet pinched against the leather of her shoes. Somewhere, she’d dropped the coins without even noticing. She had not bought the tea that her mother had wanted. There would not be enough for tomorrow. But what did it matter?
Lucy burst through the front door and nearly collided with Aiko, who was standing in the parlor. For a moment neither said anything; Lucy could see from Aiko’s eyes that she already knew.
Aiko knelt down and took Lucy’s hand in hers. “I’ve already told her. Lucy... It’s going to be okay. We’ll put our things in storage. It’s not forever. It’s... It’ll be like an adventure.”
Lucy allowed Aiko to caress her arms, to keep speaking. The words blurred together as she nodded; what she most wanted was for Aiko to leave. She had to get to her mother. Had to see for herself what damage this latest onslaught had done.
At last Aiko released her and went to the kitchen, where Lucy could hear her rattling pots. Her mother had started the dinner before Lucy had left; Lucy supposed that Aiko would now finish it. The two worked well together that way. How many times had they cooked together in one or the other’s kitchen? How many times had they taken the sun on balmy afternoons in the backyard, pruned the crape myrtles lining the street in front of both their houses, looked through magazines, listened to the radio, mended and darned and embroidered together?
But her mother needed her now. She crept down the hall to her mother’s room, certain Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly into the room, she let her eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. But her mother wasn’t asleep. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, with her arms folded across her chest and the blankets drawn neatly up over her lap.
“We’re to be evacuated,” she said to Lucy. “Come sit.”
It was the second time in recent weeks that Miyako had invited Lucy into her embrace, and Lucy slipped off her shoes and clambered up onto the bed. She realized that her mother still slept in the same spot that she had when her father was alive, and that, as she crawled under the covers next to her mother, she was on his side of the bed. She wondered if it was true, what the pastor had said when he’d come to the house to pay his respects, that her father was able to look down from heaven and see them. She hoped so. Just in case, she fixed a smile on her face so that he would see she was taking good care of Miyako.
“Auntie Aiko says we can store our things.”
Miyako frowned. “Maybe some of them. But, suzume, I have been thinking, we don’t need so many things anymore. All this big furniture...all those clothes...”
She gestured at the heavy oak armoire, which was just a bulky outline in the darkened room. Lucy had always loved her parents’ furniture, a matched set purchased when they had married. Another of the stories her father loved to tell: taking his young bride-to-be to the best department stores in Los Angeles—how shy she was!—and telling her to pick out anything she liked. She had never been inside Bullock’s before that day, and the sales clerks were practically falling all over themselves to wait on her, assuming she must be someone important, dressed in the finely tailored clothes she had made for herself.
“But you can’t give all of our things away,” Lucy whispered. The neat row of dresses, the drawers full of silken camisoles and slips, the bottles of perfume and the mirrored tray that held her cosmetics—what would her mother be without these things? “We can take them with us. The sign said. You just pack and the government...”
But Lucy