Attic Toys
Page 16
* * * * *
Hikari and Hayao walked back to Seattle, both human, hand in hand.
* * * * *
In the years that followed, once a week, Hikari visited her parents’ graves and brought them fresh flowers and stories of her life. Eventually, years later, she brought her own son and daughter as well. They could picture her parents from her treasured photographs, but went grudgingly. They found their mother old-fashioned and foolish, as all subsequent generations do.
However, Hikari, unlike her mother, thought there were some traditions and superstitions that should be followed exactly, and others that benefited from updating, as times changed. There was magic in the world, but all things thought to be magic were not. Her tea might have been weaker in some regards compared to the old woman’s, but she had not lost a friend for it. Some superstitions were just that. Her children wouldn’t really wet their beds if they played with fire. That was just a tale to keep children safe.
She forgave herself for any hurt she had caused her parents by disrespecting them, and let go of the question of whether she had unnaturally hastened their deaths.
The tea house, which she was eventually able to buy from her father’s partner, prospered as long as Japantown prospered, but that too ended many years later as the world changed and the place of the Japanese immigrants with it.
* * * * *
And this was life, she reflected, sharing a cup of tea with Hayao, who was both her dearest friend and the father of her children, as they sat together in the cramped space of an internment camp. Though they both thought of how his magic might have helped in this dark time, neither regretted the choices they had made.
It was not necessarily happily ever after, this life, but a deep warm swallow of gain and loss, of koicha and usucha, strong and weak, thick and thin, old and new, bitter and sweet, magical and mundane. And like tea itself, most satisfying when shared.
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