A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley

end, he knows that for sure. He can’t fool himself, though, the cut has been made, and she has somehow been wired into his emotions. He smells the clean scent of her, notes her hands shaking a little. It has taken courage for her to come, but she has overcome her fear. She makes him feel old beyond his years, already on the downward slope.
    “Can I ask you something, Mr. Beck?” She hadn’t known that she was going to, or that she cared about his answer.
    He pauses, putting his head to one side as though considering.
    “I guess,” he says hesitantly.
    “I’ve always wanted to know where you placed me in your class.”
    “Placed you?”
    “Yes, was I white or Japanese to you?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Know that I favored you, though.”
    “Wrong answer, Mr. Beck.”
    “What’s the right one?”
    “Wish I knew.”
    Some way along the road home she hears him calling and turns, squinting into the sun, waiting for him to catch up with her.
    “You should read Little Women ,” he says breathlessly when he does. “My present to you, no need to return it.” He hands over the book. “If you do read it, though, the answer to your question might be that I think of you as half Jo, half Meg.”
    She takes the book and laughs. “Half and half, of course, that’s just perfect. Thanks, Mr. Beck.”
    Much as it goes against its citizens’ idea that the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, there is no disguising the fact that the Japanese have come out on top. The attack, lit by the rising sun, planned down to the last detail, had been exquisitely efficient. People can’t sleep easy in their beds anymore. To be American, it seems, doesn’t mean you can’t get your ass whipped.
    “They won’t catch us sleeping again,” they brag in Angelina.
    “Yeah, chose their time, all right, the sneaky bastards.”
    “Can’t call what they did a fair fight.”
    But however much they puff themselves up, the realists among them know that it is going to take more than bravado to send those cocky bastards to hell. Angelina along with the rest of America is already paying in blood, Aaron’s included.
    “Not one condolence letter from anyone in town,” Tamura says. “Not one word of regret for our loss.”
    The harsh realization that Aaron’s death is to count for nothing in the judging of them brings with it an anger that Satomi nurtures. Anger feels better than the grief that comes when she is off guard.
    At first Tamura refuses to write to Aaron’s parents.
    “They didn’t love your father. They chose to lose him years ago.”
    “Maybe, Mother, but it’s your duty to let them know. It’s only fair.”
    Unable to resist the idea of duty, Tamura writes a single page telling them of Aaron’s death. She says that she feels for them in their loss, but that she will never return to Hawaii herself. Perhaps one day Aaron’s daughter Satomi might.
    A few lines come in return. Aaron, they say, has been dead to them from the moment he chose to marry her and disgrace them. They are old now and have no wish to know his Japanese family. They ask Tamura to leave them in peace.
    “That’s the end of it,” Tamura says. “It’s what I expected.”
    “It doesn’t matter, Mother. You did your duty, that’s what counts.”
    They greet Christmas without enthusiasm. Tamura catches a bad case of flu and stops eating again.
    “I’ve seen blood on the moon,” she says. “It means that there is worse to come.”
    “Well, if there is, we’ll face it together. We still have each other, Mother.”
    “Satomi, you do not understand that without a husband a woman has no purpose. There is no dignity in being a widow.”
    “There’s dignity in being a mother, surely?”
    When Tamura takes a turn for the worse, complaining that she is freezing one minute, burning up the next, Satomi runs to town in a panic and asks for Dr. Wood to call.
    “He’s not here,” his wife says. “Babies still get born, Christmas or not.