Elly stopped at the Center the next day. Alicia was at the desk. “Connor’s back at the computers. Want me to get him?
“Not if he’s busy. Tell him I’ll come by after my office hours.”
Connor had taken Alicia’s place at the supervisor’s desk when she returned at five. He was busy with a Chinese girl.
She sat down at a table across from the counter and got out the day’s kana quizzes. At this point she could predict the distribution of grades, just as she could predict that Bradley would attempt the kanji for all the vocabulary items (even if not required) and get most of them right.
The Chinese girl left. Elly went to the counter. “Osu,” she said.
“Howdy to you too.”
She saw the delight in his eyes and her own face warmed with pleasure. “Can I come back there?”
“Is anybody waiting?”
Elly glanced around and shook her head.
“Come on down. There’s an aisle between the end of the counter and the reference bookshelf.” Elly found her way in and sat in the chair next to the desk. He asked, “How’s your class going?”
“I just finished grading the last kana quiz. Now all that’s left is finals.”
A student rushed into the Center. “Hey,” he wheezed, “how late are you guys open?”
“About forty more minutes. Sign your name on the sheet there.”
Elly got up. “I’ll wait. I’ve got kanji to study.”
Connor worked with the student till five after six. He turned the key in the lock and kicked out the doorstop. “Who’s left?” he called out.
“I am,” Eddie yelled from the computer carrels.
“Door’s locked.” He replaced the key in the desk drawer, ducked into the break room for a minute and emerged with his backpack. Elly reached out her hand and he took it.
They were leaving the Center when Alicia rushed up. “Hold the door! I assume Eddie’s in there? Hi, Elly.”
“Hi, Alicia.”
Alicia disappeared inside the Center. The door closed and locked.
The early evening sky was filled with clouds. Elly asked, “The dream you had about the samurai at the school in Kudoyama—who did you say he reminded you of?”
“Oh, you mean Pat Morita, from Karate Kid. Yeah, the next dream was even weirder. It reminded me of Soleil Rouge. Ever see that movie? A western with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune.”
Elly shook her head. “Do you think it was your grandfather?”
“McKenzie? He wouldn’t be caught dead wearing cowboy boots.”
“Tell me about him, your grandfather.”
“Not much to tell, except I didn’t like him. The feeling seemed to be mutual. I can’t remember him ever calling me by name.”
“But how would you describe him?”
“A package of distilled McKenzieness.”
“Which is?” she pressed.
“A large measure of introversion. An inability to suffer fools at all, let alone gladly. Passive-aggressive to the max. Probably the product of those long winter nights on the Orkney Islands. When my parents retired, they moved to Peaks Island in Maine. As the joke in the family goes, Dad is trying to prove that a man is too an island.”
They crossed Ninth East. Elly asked, “And on the plus side?”
“A pragmatic view of the world. A minding of one’s own business. An attention to detail. And yet some growing self-awareness. I’ve watched my father fight those negatives all my life. Every generation, that McKenzieness gets a bit more diluted. Compared to his father, my dad’s an outright extrovert. Though you’d never guess it from being around him.”
They turned down the path from the sidewalk. Elly said, “Let’s go to the baseball field. Melanie’s probably with her kids.”
The field was aswarm with children. Melanie was setting up the T-Ball stand in front of home plate.
Connor said, “After Grandma died, it was like he sank into a black hole. He’d sit in the study with his headphones on, listening to his opera, tuning everything out for hours.”
“There must have been something he cared about.”
Connor agreed emphatically. “The car.”
“The car?” Elly’s attention sharpened to a fine point.
“A 1966 metallic blue Mustang GT. My Mom called it his late midlife crisis car.”
“And—”
“I don’t know. I got to ride in it two, maybe three times in my whole life, and then only because Grandma insisted. ‘Hands off the car, kid,’ was the longest sentence he ever spoke to me. He died the day after Thanksgiving, my freshman year at college. He was sitting there with his headphones on and just stopped breathing. One moment he was here, the next he wasn’t. We called 911 and the cops showed up and then the EMTs. All I could think was, Wow, just like on TV.”
He paused. “Though I suppose that says more about me than him.”
The T-Ball game got underway. Connor said, “Your roommate, she’s sort of like a sheep dog.”
“A sheep dog? Unkind!”
“In a good way. Keeping all the chaos in order.”
“Melanie’s very pretty, don’t you think?” She used the Japanese world bijin, more specific to her overall physical attractiveness.
Connor gave her an examining look and said, “You’re prettier.”
Elly stared back at him. He voiced such opinions in that unadorned McKenzie manner, as if stating that two plus two equals four. It foreclosed any reply on her part.