CHAPTER TEN
Hiroyuki headed a family-managed consortium of automatic vending franchises that dispensed everything from overnight kits and throwaway shirts to non-prescription pharmaceuticals and office supplies. He was perpetually rushing off to some remote part of the world to expand the empire, at which times Ohira would generally step in to watch over the domestic front and be on hand to deal with emergencies. As a result, Kevin had seen more of, and come to know better, Taki’s uncle than he had his best friend’s father.
Hiroyuki’s house was situated roughly ten miles east of Eric’s, on the other side of Olympia. A large, gaudy affair sprawling beneath a discord of green-tile roofs and gables, it boasted an impeccable expanse of billiard-table lawn with floral beds and borders at the front, and several acres to the rear that Hiroyuki had had landscaped into a private 9-hole golf course. There was a pool, and along with it a sand pit, swing set, carousel, play house, tree fort, and climbing frame for the private army of grandchildren, grand-nieces, grand-nephews, and seemingly limitless friends that appeared in swarms on sunny days. Hiroyuki liked it that way. He said that houses without laughing children around were like mausoleums, and he’d get to spend enough time in one of those soon enough, anyway.
Kevin estimated that at least a hundred people had shown up at the barbecue by early afternoon. Hiroyuki himself, attired in white cowboy hat and blue jeans to announce him an American, was searing steaks to the accompaniment of spectacular gushes of smoke and flame at the grill at one end of the pool, while his wife, Chi, and assorted other smiling relatives dispensed chicken, burgers, salads, and other fixings, including, incongruously, sushi, from a long table taped with red crepe paper. An adjacent table carried desserts and cakes, urns of coffee and hot water, icechests of fruit juices, sodas, and beers. A large tent and several awnings had been erected in case of rain, but they hadn’t been needed. The younger children splashed and screamed in the pool, while teens and a few adults bobbed to music supplied courtesy of one of the cousins turned DJ, piped via loudspeakers fixed to the trees. Taki’s older sister, Nakisha, was at the center of a bevy of Japanese girlfriends, all petite, all pretty, who were drawing the young males like kittens to a cage of canaries. Kevin and Taki were having to deal with a similar kind of situation in reverse.
Avril was one of the high-school cheerleaders and dated football players. She had honey-blond hair that hung halfway down her back, took a 32B bra, and that day was wearing jeans that looked as if they could have come out of an aerosol can. She had homed on Kevin with the determination of a prima donna at a critics’ convention making it clear that she was not someone you ignored, and was making her pitch with calculated professionalism that provoked nervous glances from her father, fifty feet away, who was trying at the same time to follow the conversation of a chairwoman of a local education committee, a Vancouver ferry captain, and an electronics designer with Boeing.
“Where’d you get the shirt?” she asked Kevin. It was a gray cord with black edging at the pocket and collar. “It looks neat. I’m tired of all these guys dressing country.”
He shrugged. “Some store at some mall, I guess.”
“It’s like the one the guy on Open Minds had last week,” Avril’s friend, Janna, said. She was slightly shorter, with curly dark hair and big brown eyes, clad in skimpy white shorts and a tank top—an equiprobable calamity trying hard to happen.
“I don’t know. I never watch it,” Kevin said.
“You never watch it?” Avril looked incredulous, as if he had announced that he hadn’t breathed for the last ten years. “But how can’t you? Everybody watches Open Minds.”
“Well, that’s obviously untrue, isn’t it,” Kevin said. ” ‘Everybody’ would include me, and I’ve just said it doesn’t.”
“But it’s got some really neat stuff,” Janna insisted. “Like the one they did last week about the UFOs and aliens. Did you know we’re being watched? They’re up there all the time.”