Free Southern Fried Sushi by Jennifer Rogers Spinola

deeply. Could Mom
    have worked at the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind?
    Mystified, I recalled snatches of conversations I’d pushed aside so many years ago: “Billy learned his alphabet…. They said he couldn’t, but he did…. Wish I could have gotten a degree…. Kids with difficulties shouldn’t get sent off to institutions and forgotten…. If I had more money … if I could do it over again … if I had a chance to do what I did with Billy …”
    At the time I could only hear complaints and injustices, pressed down so tightly they overflowed like a plugged sewage pipe. More lectures about Mom’s problems, way too big for my own shoulders, and more things to blame on Dad.
    I tried to imagine Mom working with blind students, pressing their hands to pages of braille, and felt a sudden warmth flood through me … a strange aching that also condemned me. I should have spent more time with her. I should have known who she was. I should have cared about what she wanted.
    “Tea?” The starched-uniformed flight attendant scared me by stopping the cart by my seat, and I jumped.
    I accepted the steaming cup. The fragrant, slightly grassy scent reminded me of Shiodome, morning sun through the buildings, and the call of crows.
    As I stared into the chartreuse depths of my teacup, I wondered how much more of Mom’s life I had missed.

Chapter 7
    T raffic cleared out once I circled Richmond in my rented Honda, leaving me with wide open lanes and endless thickets of pines. Not a car in sight. The college rock station crackled and finally disappeared. I was really in the middle of nowhere. Which was probably good, considering I’d tried to drive in the left-hand lane at least three times, like back in Japan. Cars honking angrily as I swerved out of the way.
    I stretched my legs, clad in preppy dark blue jeans and high-heeled boots, tugging on the scarf tied around my neck in the heat. Turned up the air conditioner.
    Sunday already, and Mom’s funeral tomorrow. I’d fallen asleep still in my traveling clothes in the hotel bed, completely “flown out.” My flight from Chicago was delayed, and I’d been lucky to make it to Virginia, even half asleep.
    My eyes sagged. I yawned. Tried to remember what my businessman seatmate told me about Staunton—a “stopover,” he’d called it—where tradition still lives and will probably rise again. “The Civil War and all that.”
    He corrected my pronunciation, too. “It’s STAN-ton. You’ll sound like a Yankee if you call it STAWN-ton.”
    “I am a Yankee.”
    “Well, then, good luck. But remember how to say it.”
    I yawned again, turning the radio dial as my mind blurred with sleep. Static. Nothing but static. And then a shaky organ.
    “Welcome to Bible Today,” said the announcer. “We’re glad you’re listening.”
    Great. Sunday in the Bible Belt. And apparently Bible Today had forgotten to pay whoever was supposed to come up with catchy titles.
    A bunch of sermons hardly piqued my interest, but my eyes were glazing. I rubbed them with the back of my hand, yawning again. I needed something, anything, to keep me awake.
    “When you rely on yourself and your own abilities to accomplish everything in your life, some might call that self-confidence,” the kind-voiced man was saying. “But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that our sufficiency is not from us, but from God.
    “Why did God create us then? To know Him and be known by Him. To give Him glory. We deserve death—the wage we earned for our sins, says the Bible—so He sent His Son Jesus to die in our place and give us eternal life.
    “God urges us to call on His name and be saved. ‘Choose life!’ He says. ‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God.’
    “And because of Jesus, we can now cry out like the Psalmist, ‘I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done!’