Southland. Nina Revoyr
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how she felt about her parents, who were too much like herself. All of their major faults, all the things she’d spent her adolescence railing against—their tension, their rigidity, their inability to deal with strong emotion—she’d inherited right along with her mother’s thin nose and hazel, light-for-a-Japanese-girl’s eyes; and to avoid the reflection, she saw them as little as possible. Lois, on the other hand, was easier to be around—more generous, more interesting, both more intense and also somehow more relaxed. And if Lois was going to leave now, she didn’t know what she’d do. There’d be no one in her corner, no relief.
Lois seemed to sense Jackie’s fear, and she reached out and patted her niece on the arm. “We’re sticking close by, don’t worry. Culver City or West L.A. I just don’t want to be here anymore—I’ll never get used to Dad not being around, and I don’t really want to. I mean, the day he died, all I could think was that I had to hurry home from the hospital so I could make him dinner in time for him and Ted to go out bowling. He told me that morning that he wanted black bean chili, and I took the cans down out of the cupboard before I went to school. They were still sitting there on the counter when we got home.” She began to tear up at this, and Jackie looked away. “And I keep missing the stupidest things,” Lois continued. “I mean, like the toilet flushing at two in the morning. Or the coffee grinder waking me up at five.”
“At five?”
“Every day, including Sunday. Drove me fucking crazy, to tell you the truth. But I think it was something left over from when he used to have the store. Even after all these years, he always lived like he had to be at work by six-thirty.”
The store. It was one of the many parts of her family’s past that Jackie’s mother had never discussed. Before Jackie, before marriage, before medical school, Rose and the rest of the family had lived in the Crenshaw district, where Frank owned and managed a little corner market. Jackie didn’t know very much about that era—just that they left sometime in the sixties, after the riots down in Watts. As for Crenshaw itself, Frank’s boyhood home, she’d only driven through it—by mistake mostly, and once or twice on purpose, when she was trying to avoid the traffic on the freeway. It was pretty much a black ghetto, as far as she could tell—an image that had only been confirmed by the funeral.
The service was held in Culver City at her grandparents’ church, which she hadn’t entered in six years, since her grandmother died. That funeral had been uneventful, attended mostly by family and a few long-time neighbors from Gardena. But when Jackie walked into the church for her grandfather’s service, she was surprised to see that half the people in attendance were black. She was even more startled, and then slightly embarrassed, when, during the service, the black mourners—who were mostly clumped together on the right side of the room—began to answer the pastor, to shout “Amen” after each of his supplications. Jackie had only been to this church once or twice, but she was sure this call-and-response wasn’t a usual part of the proceedings. She learned later that the one thing Lois had managed to do in the days after her father’s death was to put a notice in The Sentinel, the local black newspaper. Lois still seemed attached to the old neighborhood, unlike Jackie’s mother, who always grimaced when she spoke of it. And it was Lois, mostly, to whom the mourners expressed their condolences—although some of them smiled at Jackie, too, or spoke to her warmly, gestures of reflected sympathy she knew she didn’t deserve. One thing they made her realize, though, and she was seeing it more and more: Frank had had an existence outside of her, outside of the whole family. All the strangers at the church knew Frank Sakai not as an aging old grandfather, but as an individual with a story, as a man.
Jackie was about to ask her aunt why Frank had given up the store when Ted Kanda appeared, his booming voice filling the room. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said to Jackie. “What’s cooking?”
“Breakfast was, I guess,” Jackie replied. “Not that you saved me any.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and sounded it. Ted was a big man, shaped exactly like Lois although a good foot taller, and it was funny to see his strong, wide shoulders fall into an exaggerated slump of remorse.
“You didn’t miss much, believe me,” Lois said. “He burned the omelet so badly I had to throw half of mine out.”
“I’m a good cook, usually,” he insisted to Jackie, who knew differently. “I’ve cooked for some very important people.”
Lois rolled her eyes. “He served some pasta to Jerry Brown once in the dining hall in college. To hear him tell it, he made a ten-course gourmet meal for heads of state.”
He turned toward Lois, his ponytail swinging. “You be quiet. Or next time I’ll slip some rat poison into the food.”
“Well, at least it would improve the taste.”
Again, Jackie thought her aunt was doing better; Lois almost smiled at this last exchange. But Ted could do that for her, only Ted. He wasn’t really Jackie’s uncle—he and Lois had never married—but they’d been together for almost twelve years now. And Jackie, after not knowing what to make of Ted at first, had grown to adore him, although her parents still regarded him with a kind of half-benign suspicion. Rose acted like he was a grunting, dirtcaked cowboy, swinging his lasso in their living room, endangering their lamps, and her father, Richard, was more friendly, but still bewildered. The fact that Ted was an engineer for TRW did nothing to improve their opinion of him. They were also displeased with Lois’s living situation, especially after Frank moved in (presumably he’d be offended by his daughter’s scandalous domestic arrangement), although Jackie couldn’t imagine that they’d like Ted much better if he and Lois ever got married.
Now he turned to Jackie and asked, “So did Lois tell you that we’re looking at houses?”
“Yes, she did. You have an appointment for today?”
“Yeah, you wanna come? It’s a three-bedroom place off of Braddock. We don’t know if we can afford it, though. I just bought a computer program that’s supposed to help us figure out what we can borrow and what kind of mortgage we should get. I have to install it later. Which reminds me.”
“Oh, right,” Lois said, pulling the scattered paper out from under the cat, and sounding somber again. “Jackie, can you cancel Dad’s online account? Ted couldn’t figure it out.”
“Sure,” she responded, shrugging. “I can try. But I don’t know if I can do any better.” It amused her that Ted, who understood the inner workings of engines and robots, could hardly find his way around a personal computer. Now, suddenly, she thought of a part of the past she did know about and remember. “If you’re looking for a house, what about Grandpa and Grandma’s old place? What ever happened to that?”
“I’m not crazy about Gardena,” Lois said. “Anyway, it’s gone—he sold it right after Mom died.”
“But the money from the sale…” Jackie didn’t want to ask what had happened to it, because it brought up, awkwardly, the question of the will, which was going to be read that coming Tuesday.
Lois clearly caught the drift, though. “I don’t think he left much, but we’ll find out on Tuesday.” Now she and Ted exchanged a glance, which Jackie caught.
“What?”
“Actually,” Lois said, “the reason I wanted you to come over today has something to do with all that.”
Oh, God, Jackie thought. There’s going to be a problem. She and Rose disagree about something as usual, and it’s all going to explode over the will.
Lois stood and walked over to her desk, where she picked up a spiral notebook. Carefully, she pulled out a folded piece of paper, and then came back over and sat across from Jackie. “I’m wondering about the validity of a will,” she said, “written in 1964.”
“Whose?”
“Dad’s.”
“Is that what the lawyer’s going to read on Tuesday?”
“No,” Lois said.