Vintage Rob

Chapter 21 - Chance Encounter with Sophia and Yukiko

The street from the train station to Rachel and Makiko's school crossed a wide avenue overshadowed by a monstrous, elevated highway. Not far away, the massive highway turned right and swept through a neighborhood of apartment buildings and houses. Years ago, an earthquake brought down at least one section of elevated highway in Kobe. Judging from the building-sized support columns used here, the force must have been horrific. When the light to cross turned green, Rob hurried to get out from under the highway. It was irrational, but he could not help himself.

After another block, he neared a security guard in a blue uniform who was stopping traffic to let out a BMW from a parking lot. It was the school.

The guard greeted Rob in Japanese without asking for identification, so Rob followed a sign to the main office. The nun he met before would grab him by the scruff of his neck if she saw him, so he turned his face away from the convent and crossed the open space quickly.

In the school's lobby, a large wooden cross and black couches welcomed visitors. A small sign on a tinted glass door indicated the office. Rob held the door for two eight or nine-year-old girls in uniforms. Their blue sweaters with a red shield insignia matched their skirts, crosshatched with blue and green and thin lines of yellow. Inside the office, Rob waited with the girls at a counter while a Japanese woman finished a telephone conversation in English.

One of the girls straightened her sweater. The other tapped the top of her black hair, though it already had a very precise part down the center.

Something inside Rob broke. Their simple gestures brought pain because he thought of the teenage girls with Brian Keating. Despite what they were doing, they possessed an innocence too, or was that sentimental bunk? Paternalistic delusion?

The woman put down the phone. "May I help you, sir?"

"Yes. I'm a friend of Ms. Thurman's. She told me to get a visitor's pass and wait for her in the cafeteria."

The secretary handed him a laminated pass, then gave the children a box of whiteboard markers. "Girls, could you please show this gentleman to the cafeteria?"

Rob's cheerful escorts led him to a large room with a low ceiling on a bottom floor. He thanked them and chose a seat with a view of the entire place.

Parents, all women except for one man sitting alone, laughed and chatted at various tables. Rob scanned their faces for Yukiko. Without success. He surveyed them more closely, lingering longer each time, seeking her small nose, high cheekbones, and angular chin. She would not explode in front of her daughter, the other children, and their parents. To her, appearances were everything. With that in mind, Rob had donned a suit, watch, and new shoes, but more than anything, he wanted to assure Yukiko that he did not pose a threat to her relationship with Makiko. He wanted to be the ideal ex.

***

Girls with unzipped coats burst into the cafeteria from a far door. Many pulled bags with wheels, as if they had disembarked from jets and had connecting flights. Most of them chatted gaily with each other or with parents in English, Japanese, and other languages. They joined their mothers or gathered with friends at tables. Some ran through the cafeteria in a large arc to glass doors and beyond.

Older students like Makiko were probably still in class.

Since Yukiko was a no show so far, Rob tried to spot Makiko's younger sister, a fifth grader, who was possibly 100% Italian by the looks of her in Rachel's yearbooks. Finding her wasn't an easy task in the sea of uniforms and flood of animated faces. Many appeared to be biracial, and the intensity of the energetic faces cascading by did not jive with Sophia's static head and shoulders in the yearbook photograph.