angry with her, he was always kind—but of what the shift in his mood signified. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Nobody. I mean, the kids at school talk.”
“President Roosevelt will keep us out of the war. You don’t need to worry.” But he didn’t sound as certain as Lucy would have liked.
“But Papa...I was supposed to be lunch monitor today.”
Her mother’s steps echoed in the hall; she was coming to see what the delay was. Lucy put a hand on her father’s arm and spoke quickly, lowering her voice. “Papa, I was supposed to be lunch monitor but Nancy was instead, and Yvonne said it’s because I’m a Jap and her father says things are changing and—”
But her father was cupping a hand to his ear and frowning, and she knew he was about to tell her to slow down and not talk so fast, to speak up so he could hear her. He was becoming hard of hearing; her mother teased him about it and threatened to buy him one of the new Dictograph hearing aids that were advertised on the radio.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” her mother said, sweeping into the room. She’d touched up her lipstick as she always did before Renjiro came home, a slash of stark red against her fine, pale skin. “I made marble cake. And there’s ham.”
Lucy watched her father’s expression change; neither of them had missed the faint edge to Miyako’s voice, the fact that her smile was a little too brittle and her words a little too breathless. But the biggest giveaway was the cooking. Miyako was a good cook, but she rarely had the energy for more than a cursory effort. She was having one of those days, and Renjiro’s outward calm faltered before he recovered and went to kiss his wife.
Many afternoons when Lucy came home and let herself into the house with the key she wore on a chain around her neck, her mother would be lying down, her room darkened, the drapes closed. On her bedside table would be a glass of water and a folded cloth. Occasionally her mother would wet the cloth and drape it over her forehead. Lucy no longer went into her parents’ room on afternoons when the door was closed; her mother had asked her not to.
“You’re thirteen,” she’d said shortly after Lucy’s birthday the prior year, before closing the bedroom door gently on Lucy’s face. “Old enough to take care of yourself for an hour or two while I rest.”
But sometimes, every week or two, there would be a day when Miyako’s mood would swing in the other direction. She would have energy to spare. She cleaned and rearranged furniture, even though a lady came to clean every week. She tried new recipes and produced more courses than the three of them could eat. She met Renjiro at the door in her nicest apron and sat with him after dinner, talking breathlessly, her words chasing each other, instead of working on her embroidery by herself in the kitchen as she usually did. Nights like these were likely to end with the muffled sounds of Miyako crying in her bedroom, her father’s voice a smooth blanket, his words unintelligible through the wall their bedroom shared with Lucy’s. Long after they were finally silent, Lucy would lie awake in the dark, wondering what had made her mother so sad.
She’d missed the signs today, so preoccupied was she with what had happened at school. Now she saw her opportunity slipping away, the chance to ask her father what to do about it. Renjiro was ever solicitous of Miyako, and Lucy knew—without jealousy, with calm acceptance—that she was the lesser planet in her father’s orbit.
She felt more and more discouraged as they worked their way through her mother’s elaborate dinner. Miyako kept up a steady conversation, her sentences breaking off and starting over on entirely new subjects. She talked about a neighbor who had had something delivered in a large truck and a forecast she had heard on the radio that mentioned the possibility of hail and an article she’d read in a magazine about the first lady’s social secretary, and a dozen other things, too many to keep track of. Renjiro seemed even quieter than usual, answering in Japanese as often as he did in English, something he usually worked hard to avoid. Several times he set his fork down without eating the food he’d lifted halfway to his lips.
After dinner, Lucy stayed in the kitchen,