In Plain View. Julie Shigekuni
to regain his balance, the skittering sound of rice hitting the pavement sounding like rain.
The stranger removed the rice sack from her shoulder with exaggerated care and turned it upside down on the sidewalk. Was he Japanese? His stoop-shouldered, scrawny frame bore no connection to his face, which was lit with bizarre self-satisfaction.
Amid the stink that felt so distinctively downtown—brine from the sea contaminated by all the filth hosed from the sidewalk into the gutter—passersby began kicking at the spilled rice. Soon, some thin-boned, elderly person would probably slip and fall and she’d have a lawsuit to add to her burdens. But as if to respond to her concern, the peculiar little man pulled from his back pocket a neatly folded advertisement printed all in Japanese and began sweeping rice grains over the curb. Daidai watched with fascination. “Carry this way,” he said, returning to her side and lifting the heavy sack to his chest.
Daidai held out her arms, but the bag was not proffered back in her direction. Instead, the man turned away with her rice, signaling for her to follow, which she might have done had a familiar figure not appeared just then. Gizo, Louise’s little brother, held an arm out to slow the vehicles on both sides of the busy street so that he could jaywalk, the capped sleeve of his shirt stretched across the taut muscles of his biceps.
“Hey-hey!”
Clearing the curb with his self-assured, athletic stride, Gizo pulled her in for a side hug, his thick hair draping moisture across her cheek. Turning to face him, she noted the line of perspiration streaking his forehead and the cool dampness of his skin. He had the post-workout look of someone freshly showered, but beneath the clean scent of his shampoo, she recognized a familiar musty odor, a fishy tang she associated fondly with the inside of the Hashimotos’ house that caused her to lean in before pulling away. Behind him, the sack of rice, its trademark red peony blossoming wrong side up from the ground, offered no explanation for what had just happened.
“I haven’t seen you all summer. You gonna at least say hi?”
“Hi, Gizo.” She smiled, her cheeks going hot.
“That’s better.”
Gizo threaded the grocery bags through one arm and with the other lifted the rice sack, managing not to let even one grain escape through the rip while she stood by admiring. Reminded of her mother’s claim that rice left behind in your bowl signaled bad luck, she took Gizo’s showing up as a good sign and let him lead her the long way back across the street. The detour meant she’d definitely be late for lunch, but she felt buoyed. The heat of the day and weight of the bags had worn her down, and the approving nods of shop owners as they passed set things right again.
Inside Akai Electric, an attractive teenaged salesgirl smiled at Gizo from behind the counter, the position usually occupied by Louise and Gizo’s father, Danji. Gizo saluted her as he strode down the housewares aisle with Daidai in tow, her eye catching on an assortment of steamers, strainers, teakettles, and, in particular, an industrial-sized rice cooker that she supposed might come in handy given all the rice she’d just bought.
At the rear of the shop, Gizo held the service door open for her to pass through. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. She’d been in the back only once before, brought in by Louise, who’d nudged the heavy bag with her shoulder as she passed and let Daidai try punching the speed bags, purchased by their father to teach Gizo to fight.
After disappearing into a storage closet, Gizo reappeared with tape and scissors, flicked a light switch, and gestured Daidai to his side.
“Didn’t that used to be out in front?” Seeing the old, hand-painted AKAI ELECTRIC sign above the door that led to the alley, Daidai was stirred by a memory of tracing a finger over the Japanese lettering.
“City ordinance made us take it down a long time ago.” Gizo smiled, pointing out the two thin chains from which the sign had once swayed above the sidewalk.
Across the wall separating the shop from the warehouse, rows of wooden shelves held stock that seemed less random than the contents of the store they would replenish. The worktable where Gizo had placed the sack of rice also held a MacBook and a bank of small black two-way radios. A row of lockers leaned, though without risk of falling, slightly away from the far wall and toward two black couches, and the irregular-shaped glass coffee table top carefully balanced on two old wooden crates somehow explicated the intentional decor of the room.
“You like it?” Gizo asked.
Daidai turned, made self-conscious by the realization that Gizo had been watching her. “It’s kind of great.”
“Pretty professional, huh?”
“What’s it for?”
“I have a little side business—keeps Dad’s store afloat so he has a place. I do security for some tourists, mostly Japanese businessmen, when they come to L.A. You know, executive parties, drivers, that sort of thing.
“You need to be careful,” he added, looking up. Having set the rice sack down on the makeshift worktable, he began cutting strips of athletic tape.
“What are you talking about?” Her gaze shifted from Gizo’s smooth, sun-darkened skin to the perfect razor slice in the rice sack, the image juxtaposed in her thoughts with the side part in the stranger’s slick black hair.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Gizo said, casting suspicion on the intentions of the stranger who’d commanded her attention on the street. Having pulled out a chair, he tapped her arm at the elbow to sit.
She preferred to stand, but at Gizo’s urging she sat. Had the stranger been following her? She watched as Gizo lined strips of tape neatly across the table’s edge, the precision of his work seeming to say that the task at hand was connected somehow to his purpose in life. His fingers were square-tipped and callused, with an unhealed gash that ran the length of his index finger to the joint of his thumb, suggesting he knew something she didn’t know.
“How’d you get that?” she asked, signaling to him with her chin, suddenly cowed by doubt.
“That?” He flexed his thumb. “It’s nothing.”
The rice sack repaired, he stuck a strip of leftover tape to Daidai’s forearm in a gesture he found riotously funny. Buckled over with laughter, he playfully ducked under her hand when she attempted to smack his shoulder. In an instant, he’d turned from serious into the annoying boy he’d been as a child. Only he was quicker now.
“Ouch!” Daidai rubbed at the hairless stripe left behind by the tape.
“It’s what you get.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest.
“Heard you left the museum.”
The pang in her chest moved up to her head, and she met his eyes, wondering how much he knew. “What? I’m not allowed to take some time off?”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.” Trying to smile, she felt her cheeks flush again and figured she may as well just answer him outright. He probably knew anyway, since people were always talking. “Hiroshi and I are trying to have a baby.”
“Really?” he gasped. “You gonna be a stay-at-home mommy?”
She shrugged. Why was he mocking her?
“Thought you were a career woman.”
“What are you talking about?” Daidai flinched at his use of an anachronism to describe her.
“Take it easy, Daidai.” He brushed his fingers over the reddened splotch on her forearm in a way that would have made Hiroshi uneasy, and she pulled away. “No one gets to have it all. I understand that.”
“I never said I had it all.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “I thought everything about you said that.”
Daidai drew