Contenders. Erika Krouse
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looked so relieved, Isaac thought he was going to pee on the carpet himself. Jackson studied Kate, who squirmed under the weight of his gaze.
“Stop looking at me,” she whispered.
“Kate!”
“That’s okay,” Jackson said. “I think I have something to eat.” He trudged into the kitchen, Hank licking his leg all the way across the apartment.
Left alone, Kate got up to study the framed cross-stitch picture of a cowboy riding a horse. She poked her finger in the empty candy dishes.
Jackson padded back in, bearing a tray with coffee cups and a chipped plate with little round, flattish balls on it. He set the plate on the table. Cornstarch trembled on his fingers as he poured green tea.
Kate climbed into a chair, waggled her legs, and grabbed one of the round balls from the plate. She sniffed it and studied it at close range until her eyes crossed. She bit into it.
“Squishy,” she said, mouth full. “What is it?”
“Omochi,” Jackson said.
She squinted at the smooth, white cake before taking another minibite. “What’s inside? Chocolate?”
“Red bean paste,” Jackson said.
Carefully and immediately, she placed it down on the coffee table.
Isaac smiled at the old man, who didn’t smile back. “I was friends with the Black kids,” he said. “I remember seeing you with Nina sometimes. Do you still teach?”
“No. I quit karate. I’m retired,” Jackson said.
“You seem young for retirement.”
“I’m sixty-three. I get a VA pension.”
Isaac lied, “You look much younger. What do you do now?”
The lines in Jackson’s face multiplied. “This and that.”
“Do you still practice Chinese medicine?”
“Here and there.”
Kate said, “I know a girl in my school who’s allergic to her own spit.”
“What happens to her?” Jackson asked.
“Her mouth swells up.”
“That sounds uncomfortable,” Jackson said.
“She uses special toothpaste.”
Jackson wiped something invisible on his pants. “So.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Isaac sat up. “We’re looking for Nina. Her brother died.”
Jackson’s face elongated, his creases sharpening. “I’m very sorry to hear it. He was a nice boy.” He looked at Kate. “Your father died, then.”
“He died in the hospital,” Kate said.
“You were there?” he asked. “With him?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
Kate’s eyes grew wet, and then dried instantly in the arid air. She tugged at her sleeves, wiped her nose, stared at the dog.
Isaac leaned back, exhausted by his own failure. How did Jackson understand Kate better than Isaac did, after just a few minutes?
“How do you fit in?” Jackson asked him, sipping from his cup. “You’re taking care of her?” He nodded at Kate.
“I have power of attorney over her, but not guardianship. That’s supposed to go to Nina, wherever she is. I’ve had the power of attorney for two years, but it expires in about a month. Chris didn’t think he’d last that—” he glanced at Kate. “We all want this thing to be settled.” Isaac realized that he had just called Kate a “thing.” “This…custody matter.”
Everyone drank their tea.
In the silence, Hank started biting at his leg, and licking it over and over. Kate asked, “Why is he doing that?”
“The same reason dogs do everything. Because it feels good, smells good, tastes good.” Jackson looked wise then, a doctor of obscure medicines. Isaac rested his bleary eyes on Jackson’s still form. I want to be a dog, he thought. I want to be his dog. Isaac understood why Nina spent so much time with this man. He was sinking lower into the man-eating couch. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a hundred years among the yellowing lead paint and bean paste.
Jackson said, “I don’t know where Nina is. I haven’t seen her since I left Junction. We had a fight.”
“About what?”
Jackson drank his tea. Kate kicked the chair harder and harder.
“You knew their mother, right? Before she vanished into the ether,” Isaac said.
“Not the ether. Tokyo.”
“You knew where she was?”
“I gave her the money for the ticket.”
Something curled up inside Isaac. “You what?” After his mother left, Chris slept in Isaac’s cluttered basement for days, peeing in cups and leaving them on the stairs for Isaac to empty. Nina stared for hours and hours at the sheets on the clotheslines. “Why?”
“She wanted to go.”
“She had children! How could you?” Isaac was now yelling, yelling at a man in his own home.
“I didn’t want her to do the things that desperate Asian women do.”
“What? Something terrible, like stay and raise her family?”
“Ritual suicide.”
Isaac’s jaws flapped open, then shut. “Oh.” His gaze hooked on a photo tucked into a mirror. It was the same one he had brought from LA, of the three of them. Isaac leaned over and pointed at his image with his thumb. “That’s me. In the middle.”
“I know.”
The refrigerator hummed.
Jackson said, “You like to talk about yourself, don’t you?”
Isaac cleared his throat. “Did, uh, Nina ever contact you after your falling out?”
“It wasn’t a falling out. It was a fight.”
“You didn’t try to find her again? After you wrote this postcard?” Isaac picked it up off the coffee table and waved it in the air. He felt oddly invisible.
Jackson leaned back in his folding chair and glanced at the clock on the wall.
Kate tugged at Isaac’s shirt, but he ignored her. “I mean, you were best friends. You were her only friend.” Isaac opened his palms. “So you have no idea where she is. Or why, in twelve years, she never once looked you up.”
“I don’t know why!” Jackson suddenly shouted, his Hawaiian accent thickening. Kate shrank in her seat. “Sometimes people leave! Sometimes you leave, too, and nobody knows where anybody’s going, and just like that, you lose them forever! This is America! It happens all the time!” Jackson popped up and clenched his hands into gnarled fists. Isaac’s stomach contracted. He didn’t want to be Jackson’s dog anymore.
“I lost my friends, too! I lost everyone in my unit! You’re asking me why?” The old man loomed, sweating. “Do you still keep track of everyone you once knew? Everyone you loved? Your favorite teacher? How about your first girlfriend?”
“No, sir.”
“No! Sir! She’s gone, or dead, and you don’t know ‘why’ either! Huh!” Standing in profile, Jackson downed his tea, his throat chugging. Isaac held his own scalding cup in his shaking hand, wondering how the man could drink it like that without burning his throat.
He