A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley Page A

They call him out at all hours.”
    “Be sure to tell him when he gets back,” Satomi insists. “My mother is very ill. Tell him it’s urgent.”
    “Sure thing,” the woman says, and closes the door on her.
    It comes to her later as darkness falls, as her mother’s temperature rises so high that she imagines insects crawling on her blanket, that Dr. Wood isn’t coming.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll make you better, Mama. I promise I’ll make you better.”
    It’s a week before Tamura rallies and takes a cup of soup, and the last of the sweet dark beans that she likes.
    “Sleep and food is what you need,” Satomi says. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”
    While Tamura sleeps, she walks the mile into town stoking her anger to keep her courage up and raps twice on Dr. Wood’s door.
    “You didn’t come. You knew my mother was ill and you didn’t come.” She faces him with a racing heart.
    “Listen, girl, ’bout time you knew your place,” he snarls. “Strutting around our town as if you own it. If you want a doctor, get a Japanese one.”
    “There isn’t a Japanese doctor in Angelina, you should know that, Dr. Wood.”
    “Nothing much I can do about that.”
    “No, but you took an oath, didn’t you, a promise to care for the sick?”
    “I don’t have to answer to you, girl. Best thing you can do is to get yourself home, learn some manners.”
    “You broke your word, Dr. Wood. My mother has never broken a promise in her life. Doesn’t make you much of a doctor, does it?”
    She walks home, hardly noticing the slanting drizzle that soaks through her jacket, and slicks her hair to the color of her mother’s. Stopping at the roadside to wretch up a thin colorless bile, she thinks that it is one fight after another, will she ever get used to it? Maybe Mr. Beck had been right, maybe she and Tamura should leave Angelina. It feels to her as though it has already let them go anyway.
    Next morning at dawn she takes the feed to the chickens and finds a bag of groceries propped against the wire of their run. Two bags of rice, a small sack of flour, two lemons, and a paper twist of tea.
    I’ll fetch more when I can , is faintly written in pencil on the bag.
    Elena had come in the night as Hal slept. Satomi sits on the ground and howls.
    “I’m sorry to have missed Christmas,” Tamura says. “I know that you like it.”
    “I don’t care about it, Mama. I never have, you know that.”
    It isn’t true; despite Aaron’s scoffing, Christmas has always seemed to her a magical time. Lily used to give her a little gift of candy and a homemade card, and Mr. Beck buys the class a big bag of peanuts in their shells to share. The general store dresses its window with cotton wool snow, and sets a SEASON’S GREETINGS sign fringed with tinsel above its door. She thinks it enchanting.
    “When I was a girl,” Tamura says, “even though we weren’t Christians, I always loved the lights they put up along Nuuana Avenue. Do you think they have put them up this year, despite everything?”
    “We could go and see. We could visit Father’s grave and maybe even see your mother too. We have money in the bank. Let’s use it, Mother. Let’s go.”
    “No, that would not be right. I will never return to Hawaii. Your father would not like me to break our agreement. I don’t need a grave to find him. He is in the fields, in the candlelight, and in you. In any case I couldn’t bear to see his name there among the dead.”
    “I know, I know. I understand,” Satomi says, although she doesn’t. Why would her mother not wish to visit her husband’s grave? Why would she not wish to break the cycle of their confinement?
    “Should I get the Buddhist priest to visit you, Mother? I’m sure that he will come if we ask, and it might help you.”
    Tamura shakes her head. “I do not know him, Satomi. In any case, I have no religion left in me, it would be pointless.”

The Roundup
    Three months after Aaron’s death, the