The Lone Rice Ball

Sushi series, Book 5

Mahina Security series, Book 1

A Christian Romantic Suspense Novel

Mimi Sakai has held the infamous title of the Oldest Single Female Cousin in her family for many years now, but her independent streak enables her to ignore the nagging and pitying looks. When she spends Christmas in Hawaii to help her favorite aunty out at her high-end cosmetics store, Mimi is reunited with Tosh, a boy she wronged when she was much younger and much more stupid. She tries to meet with him to apologize, but she unexpectedly becomes embroiled in his undercover work.

Security consultant Tosh Kusunoki has become a loner after being hounded by the gossip about his father’s fatal car accident, which happened to also kill his girlfriend. He never expected to see Mimi again after all these years, nor could he have predicted that she would be caught up in his investigation into drugs on the North Shore.

Mimi agrees to help Tosh, and as they work together, they fall back into the comfortable friendship they had in the past. But Mimi struggles with loneliness, with regret over who she used to be, and uncertainty over who she wants to become. She knows she’s just a mass of emotional baggage and Tosh should run away screaming.

Despite all that, could Mimi possibly hope to receive the gift of a Christmas romance in paradise?

Previously released in the multi-author anthology, Once Upon a Starry Night.

Take 10% off when you buy from Camy’s store with coupon code: website10

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Excerpt

The Lone Rice Ball

A Romantic Comedy Suspense

Sushi series, Book 5

Mahina Security series, Book 1

Camy Tang

***

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1:9

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:12-14

***

Prologue

Apologize and leave. That’s all she had to do.

Assuming her apology wasn’t coming too late.

Mimi turned into the driveway to the Molokai Red Restaurant, narrowly avoiding stalling out. She hated driving her cousin’s ancient stick shift pickup truck, but while she was staying in Hawaii, this was the only vehicle she could borrow if she didn’t want to spend the money on a rental car.

The truck lumbered down an aisle as she looked for parking. The lot was small, as was most parking lots for stores and restaurants here in Haleiwa, and was packed full since it was eight o’clock at night.

Mimi groaned when she realized she would have to back the truck into the parking stall she found because the aisle was too narrow for her to turn into it. Gritting her teeth, she went excruciatingly slow, because she wasn’t very good at parking.

She might have been a tad too close to the car next to her passenger-side door. Well, she didn’t intend to be here that long.

Mimi squeezed herself out of the driver’s seat since her door could only open a scant few inches, but it was probably a bit easier for her than it would’ve been for someone taller. Since she was less than five feet in height, people often mistook her for a middle school child. It used to bother her a lot, but these days, she was just glad that she looked much younger than her actual age.

The humid air crawled down her blouse and clung to her skin. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if she hadn’t been wearing pantyhose, but that was a requirement of her uniform for her aunt’s cosmetics store. Mimi’s legs felt like they were wrapped in wool as she walked to the front door of the restaurant.

There were rows of hibiscus bushes lining the path up to the front door. The blooms were a dark, velvety crimson, the rare Molokai Red variant from which the restaurant took its name. Mimi wished she could have seen the flowers in daylight. Especially because it was unlikely she would be here again.

This restaurant had not been here the last time she had been to Haleiwa, which had been several years ago. Most of her family lived near Honolulu, and she had only rarely gone to the North Shore whenever she came to visit. When she looked the restaurant up online, she saw that it had quickly grown popular and was known for its excellent food as well as the extensive bar lounge attached.

She paused in front of the door, which was made of some heavy, dark-colored wood, and took a deep breath. Then she grasped the handle and pulled it open.

Air conditioning blasted into her, making her feel less like she was melting. She expected to hear the din of voices from the diners, but it was only a soft murmur.

She had entered at the end of a short hallway, with a reception desk facing her several yards ahead. A closed set of wooden double doors stood to the left of the reception desk, while an open archway led out on the right.

As Mimi approached the desk, she glanced into the archway and saw that it led to the large, dimly lit bar lounge, which looked almost as large as a restaurant itself.

The young woman at the reception desk gave a polite smile. “How may I help you?”

“I came to speak to an employee, Toshiro.”

“He’s working in the lounge tonight.” The girl gestured toward the open archway. “It isn’t very busy at the moment, so he should have a few minutes to speak to you.”

Mimi thanked the girl and headed through the archway. The long bar counter ran along the left side of the large room and boasted a dizzying array of alcohol stacked on shelves behind it. A few people sat on stools at the counter, but the majority of people reclined in chairs and sofas scattered around the room, with small tables set up between them within easy-reaching distance. The lighting was not too dim, in varying shades of gold and rose. Servers wove their way around the various groupings of chairs, taking orders and delivering food and drinks.

Mimi glanced at the servers closest to the door but didn’t recognize any of them. She then realized that she might not recognize Tosh at all. After all, it had been more than twenty years.

She decided to make her way to the bar. Surely the bartender could point out Tosh to her.

There were three bartenders, one woman and two men. The woman was about Mimi’s age, not quite as short as Mimi. She was at the right height for men’s protective instincts to kick in and want to protect her, and she had the sweet features and delicate figure that brought to mind a geisha. The bartenders wore uniforms, but the top buttons of her blouse were opened, revealing a shadow of cleavage cut off by her dark red vest.

Of the remaining two bartenders, one looked to be in his mid-twenties. He was lean and slender as if he had only just shed the coltish awkwardness of his teenage years and was starting to fill out. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke to a patron, and his nose was much larger than she remembered Tosh’s nose had been. The patron said something, and the man gave a wide, toothy smile while tossing back his long, dark hair. No, that smile was not Tosh’s.

The third bartender had his back to her, but he had wide shoulders, and she could see the curve of muscle under the long sleeves of his white dress shirt. His short-cut hair was dark, but as she looked at it, she recalled that Tosh’s hair had been a lighter brown color. But then again, he had spent a lot of time at the beach in those days, so it could have been bleached by the sun.

Then the bartender turned around and she got a good look at his face.

Mimi froze. Was that Tosh? Now that she was looking closely at him, scrutinizing his features, her recognition kicked in and she saw the familiar features of the boy she had once known. He was smiling at a patron, and she saw his sweeping black eyebrows, his eyes crinkled in mirth with laugh lines at the corners, the gentle smile with the dimple that only appeared on one side, and only when his smile was wide enough, as it was now.

But recognizing Tosh wasn’t what caused her to feel as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over her head.

She had seen this man just yesterday.

He had come into her aunt’s cosmetics store. But at that time, he had colored hair swept far forward over his forehead, a prominent overbite, and rounded cheeks.

And very pale skin. It had been the skin that piqued her interest because when she came up close to him, she’d seen that he was wearing makeup. It lightened his skin dramatically, but he’d forgotten to apply makeup to his ears, which were slightly tanned.

It wasn’t just the fact he wore makeup—it was the fact that it seemed to have been applied to disguise his features.

She had quickly chided herself as being ridiculous. She’d probably been watching too many Korean suspense dramas.

But now, standing only a few feet away from him, Mimi was almost certain that this bartender was the same man. It might have been difficult to tell because of the man’s possibly false teeth and thick makeup, and his nose might have been a slightly different shape from the bartender’s, too.

But she remembered the man’s figure. This bartender stood with his shoulders back, projecting a confident, affable air while the man had been slightly hunched as he looked over the cosmetics on the display table.

However, the proportions of the two men were the same, as was their height and the width of their shoulders. The bartender’s skin was darker than the man’s had been—in fact, the same tanned color of his ears.

It was as if this bartender had come into her aunt’s store as a secret undercover agent. But why would he do that?

And if this bartender was indeed Tosh, did that have anything to do with it?

What in the world was going on?

Chapter 1

A few weeks earlier

At least the food was good.

Mimi tried not to look as though she were suffering quite so much as she clapped with the rest of the wedding guests. On the dance floor at the front of the Chinese restaurant, the bride and groom cut the wedding cake.

For once, her family didn’t dominate the guest list since the groom had nearly as many relatives on his side. They had reserved the entire restaurant for the wedding, but the round tables were still packed closely together, making it difficult for waiters to maneuver around and deliver the food.

The next course, a platter of steamed seabass, was finally delivered to the table with a thunk as the waiter rushed away with another plate for another table.

“Yay!” Lex cheered as she served herself some of the fish. Her seat was nearest to the narrow aisle, so most of the food was placed in front of her.

Lex’s ginormous appetite had tapered in her mid-forties, so she didn’t take half the platter as she would have a few years ago. She moved the Lazy Susan toward Mimi on her left. Mimi took a small serving and moved it toward Venus on her left.

“The seafood has been really good so far.” Venus served herself some fish.

“This restaurant is known for good seafood,” her husband Drake said.

On Drake’s left, Jenn’s eyes practically had stars in them as she stared at the fish, impatient for it to move the few inches to bring it in front of her. “I was reading that out of all the Chinese restaurants in Milpitas, this ranked number one for fish and crustacean dishes,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for the fish dish.”

“You said that about the shrimp dish,” her husband Edward said.

“And the clams,” Trish added, seated on Edward’s left. “And clams aren’t crustaceans.”

Spencer jabbed his wife with an elbow. “Cut your cousin some slack. Especially because I distinctly remember you saying a few weeks ago that you might actually look forward to this wedding because the reception was being held in this restaurant.”

Mimi hadn’t been looking forward to the wedding, but she also hadn’t been dreading it like a triple root canal—she had begged the bride’s mother, her Auntie Noriko, to seat her with her cousins rather than trying to shove her at a table filled with other singles.

After Jenn married, Mimi was the Oldest Single Female Cousin in the Sakai clan, and she had held the title for many years now. She had gone to more weddings as the OSFC than the other four cousins combined.

Mimi had been mostly ignoring the MC, partly because the acoustics in the restaurant were terrible, with the wedding guests’ conversations drowning out the speakers. But naturally, she would pick up the two words she hated most in all the world, “bouquet toss.”

Mimi’s hands clenched the side of her padded seat. For the last three weddings, she’d aimed straight for the restaurant bathroom like a rocket, conveniently missing the bouquet toss. But her mother had called her last night specifically to tell her that under no circumstances was she allowed to miss another bouquet toss.

Mimi told herself that she no longer lived with her mother, she was thirty-eight years old and had no obligation to obey a parental order that was obviously cruel and unusual punishment.

On the flip side, the last time she had annoyed her mom, she’d been given the silent treatment for two solid months, and it had been excruciatingly uncomfortable for her whenever she went home for a family dinner, which usually happened once a month.

Mimi had finally been the one to give up and apologize and admit that yes, her mom’s donburi was ten times better than Jenn’s (which was so obviously untrue that Mimi worried a bolt of lightning would strike her down for telling such a blatant lie).

So she sat there, forcing herself to keep to her seat. She wasn’t about to jump up and head to the dance floor, but if they spotted her and called her name, she was resolved to trudge up to participate.

Mimi sighed, ready to give in to the inevitable when she happened to catch Trish’s eyes.

Trish casually stood up, moving around to the back of the seat even though there was hardly any room in between her chair and the table next to it. She leaned back against the chair and crossed her arms.

Mimi was about to ask her what she was doing when she realized that Trish very neatly screened her from the sight of the MC at the front of the restaurant.

The next second, Venus followed suit, urging Spencer and Drake to do the same.

Lex took a little longer to notice, blinking at them in confusion before exclaiming, “Oh!” She leaped up and hauled Aiden from his seat, making him drop the piece of fish that he was carrying to his mouth.

Soon, there was a wall in front of Mimi. To anyone else, it would look as though the cousins were simply standing to get a better view of the bouquet toss.

Venus suddenly moved out of place and instead planted herself directly beside Mimi, although still facing the dance floor. She made a hand motion to Drake, and the cousins shifted to fill in the gap.

“Why’d you do that?” Mimi asked.

“Auntie Meiko is sitting over there, and she was looking our way,” Venus said coolly.

While Mimi was grateful that Venus had thought to screen her from Auntie Meiko, her proximity to Mimi’s chair put her shapely rump right next to Mimi’s face. Venus’s discipline had ensured that she kept her hourglass figure even into her forties, which Mimi envied since her own metabolism had started to slow down in her thirties.

“You don’t have to do this,” Mimi said to Venus’s backside. “I could have gone to the bathroom.”

From above her head, Venus answered, “No, Trish’s mom heard from your mom that she’s very unhappy that you missed the last five bouquet tosses—”

“It was only three tosses,” Mimi retorted.

“—and she expressly forbade you from hiding in the bathroom this time.” Venus’s voice took on un-Venus-like dulcet tones as she added, “Why, some of the aunties are going to think that you don’t want to be married.”

“Heaven forbid,” Mimi answered in a monotone.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be married. It was that once she started seriously looking around, she simply couldn’t find anyone she could stand—er, wanted to spend the rest of her life. It didn’t help that she had dated so many men in her younger years—or perhaps it was because she had dated so many men in her younger years, the majority of them either losers or not marriage material. She had a habit of being attracted to men who were exciting, as opposed to those who might reasonably treat her well in a committed relationship.

The MC now started calling up young women by name.

“This isn’t going to work,” Mimi muttered.

“I’ll make it work,” Venus vowed.

“We would’ve had a better chance if it wasn’t Uncle Charley,” Jenn said in a low voice.

Uncle Charley was one of the cousins’ older uncles on the Sakai side, so he had changed the diapers of every single female cousin present at the wedding. On the groom’s side, he was aided by a middle-aged Chinese lady who would say something while pointing to a table so that Uncle Charley could shout out the unfortunate girl’s name and nag her until she came up to the dance floor.

The old familiar feeling of anxiety was rumbling up inside of Mimi like nausea, but the sight of her cousins’ backs acting as a stalwart bulwark to surround her made her feel … loved.

Yes, real friends saved you from the bouquet toss.

“Thanks, guys,” Mimi said.

She wasn’t as close to the four cousins as they were to each other, although she had been roommates with Lex for a time, and Jenn was technically her boss. But even among themselves, they were never particularly touchy-feely or affectionate with each other—mostly because Lex was still a bit uncomfortable with being touched in general. So they didn’t respond to Mimi’s thanks with a group hug, although Trish winked at her and blew her a kiss.

As Lex stared at the crowd of women gathered on the dance floor, her face had gone dark. “This was the reason I eloped,” she said with a frown.

“This was the reason we got married in Hokkaido in winter,” Venus said.

“This was the reason I made the pork dish extra spicy just before I did the bouquet toss,” Jenn said.

“Ugh! It was so hot I was crying,” Lex complained.

Jenn smiled in fond memory. “Exactly.”

Mimi liked spicy food and thought the pork dish had been fantastic. “Was that the reason no one called me up for that one?” she asked. “People were crying so hard they couldn’t see me?”

With a triumphant shaking of her fist, Jenn said, “I saved eight single female cousins from abject humiliation that night.”

Mimi flashed her a thumbs-up. “Good going!”

“Now, honey,” Edward said, grabbing Jenn’s wrist and lowering her fist, “not every woman hates the bouquet toss. My relatives love to fight over it.”

“That’s true,” Lex said thoughtfully. She glanced back at Mimi. “You liked the bouquet toss when you were younger.”

“Emphasis on younger,” Mimi said.

Mimi could see nothing except the zipper of Venus’s designer dress, but her heart beat faster as she heard the MC say, “I think that’s all the single ladies.”

She hunched down even further in her seat, which was rather low already, so it put her face practically on the tabletop. She nervously sipped some cold jasmine tea as the MC called the bride up to throw her bouquet.

It wasn’t the actual bouquet from the wedding because Mimi’s cousin Paulette wanted to preserve the flowers (although why she’d want a bunch of dried flowers collecting dust, Mimi didn’t know), and Auntie Noriko had very generously stuck a one hundred dollar bill inside of this alternate bouquet.

But even one hundred dollars of cold hard cash wasn’t enough incentive for Mimi to get up there in front of everyone, reminding them that she was approaching forty and still single. So many of her younger cousins had already gotten married that there was a huge age gap between Mimi and the next oldest cousin on the dance floor.

There was shouting. There was squealing. (Unlike at Jenn’s wedding, the squeals here sounded more like girls trying to avoid the bouquet landing on them rather than women scrambling to grab at it.) Then there was cheering and clapping.

It was over. Praise God, it was over!

The four cousins sighed, and their spouses did as well, although their sighs had more of a tinge of eye-rolling than relief. They started climbing back into their seats.

Amid all the conversation filling the restaurant, Mimi managed to hear Auntie Meiko’s abnormally loud gasp.

Thundering footsteps, and then Auntie Meiko was at Mimi’s side. “Oh! Mimi! We forgot about you!”

“It’s fine, Auntie Meiko,” Mimi said, trying to plaster a smile on her face, although she had a feeling it looked like a rictus grin.

“No, it’s not fine,” Auntie Meiko said. “We should tell them that we forgot you—” Her words cut off as she looked down at Mimi, and suddenly her cheeks turned pink. She stuttered, “Oh, you’re probably too ol—“ Her mouth worked open and closed a few times before she finished, “… not interested.”

Mimi’s smile at her aunt grew a little feral. “Exactly,” she said in biting tones. “I’m not interested.”

Auntie Meiko scurried away.

She knew Auntie Meiko didn’t intend to be insulting, but at the same time, it was insulting. Mimi had been the next oldest single female cousin after Jenn, and there was a seven-year age gap. And her younger cousins had somehow simply been much more motivated to get hitched.

Mimi caught her cousins’ sympathetic looks. “It’s not that bad,” she mumbled. “Some of the aunties are starting to give up entirely.”

But in some ways, that was almost worse. It made her feel as though hope was slipping away. It made her feel like she no longer had any worth because she was getting too old.

No, forget that. She might be almost forty, but she refused to think she was past her prime. Besides, not all women wanted to be married.

Except that Mimi did want to be married. And she struggled with doubt and insecurity that there was something wrong with her.

She found herself more often fighting the fear that perhaps her inability to find someone was just a consequence of her flirtatious and promiscuous past. She was starting to believe that maybe she deserved this kind of loneliness.

Mimi saw Trish looking at her strangely, which jarred her out of her morose thoughts. What was she thinking? This wasn’t like her. The wedding had made her mood go in a maudlin direction.

She wasn’t going to simply sit here and feel sorry for herself. She grabbed the empty plate at the place setting next to her, which had been empty since she hadn’t brought a date, and started loading food onto it.

“What are you doing that for?” Venus asked.

“I’m making a plate for Chester,” Mimi answered.

When the plate was heaping and nearly spilling over, Mimi made her way around the other tables toward the entrance.

The front foyer of the restaurant was separated from the rest of the space by just a few standing screens, which did little to muffle the din of conversation. The cashier for takeout food stood to one side, and Mimi was shocked to find a line of people in front of it. The restaurant was still allowing takeout orders even though they were busy with the wedding.

On the other side of the foyer stood the reception table, only sparsely decorated with two tablecloths, one placed over the other at an angle, in the bride’s colors of amber and sage. The wedding guest book lay open in the middle, and on the side was a collage of photos of the bride and groom.

Behind the table sat her cousin Chester, a tall, wide man whose hair was starting to look more gray than black these days. He was quite athletic, playing football with his friends almost every weekend, although he had also started to develop a slight paunch from all the beer and pizza they ate afterward.

Poor Chester was always asked to man the reception table, and he was always stuck with the job when everyone else was seated and began to eat. His large size was a good deterrent against anyone trying to steal gifts or envelopes, and he was so good-natured that he never told anyone no.

He gave Mimi a toothy grin as she approached the table. “Hey, Mimi.”

“Here, Chester.” Mimi placed the plate, chopsticks, and napkin in front of him.

“Oh! Thanks.”

“I’m sorry you have to do this.” She waved a hand at the mountain of gifts he was protecting.

His smile became broader. “Naw, you don’t have to worry about me. I like doing it.”

“You do?” Mimi glanced at the empty table, where his only companion was the specially decorated box that held the envelopes of money for the married couple. “You like being by yourself?”

He stared at her in disbelief. “We have four kids. Of course I like being by myself.”

Mimi laughed. “You’re right, my bad.”

“Besides …” He picked up the chopsticks and then gestured under the table. “Look under there.”

Mimi hesitantly bent down and lifted the edge of the tablecloth, wondering if Chester was simply going to release a fart like he used to when they were kids. Instead, she saw three empty plates that had been scraped clean of food, along with three sets of chopsticks and three dirty napkins that had been piled haphazardly on top.

As she straightened, Chester said around a mouthful of walnut prawns, “Whenever I do the reception table, my wife brings me a plate of food, and then my mom brings me another plate of food, and then Grandma always sends one of the cousins with another plate of food for me.” He swallowed and grinned at her. “I get to eat way more than I would have sitting at a table.”

“And you’re still hungry?”

“Of course.” He circled his arm around the plate as if she was going to snatch it away.

“How are your kids doing? Is the baby walking yet?” Mimi asked.

They chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes, occasionally needing to shout over the voice of the MC and the clapping of the wedding guests.

Finally, Mimi glanced at her watch. “I think it’s late enough that I can leave now.”

Chester leaned down to deposit his empty plate under the table. “Make sure you say goodbye to Grandma, too.”

“Of course,” Mimi said, offended. “I don’t have a death wish.”

Mimi went back to the table to grab her purse and said goodbye to the cousins. Then she managed to shout her goodbyes to the bride and groom, who were on the other side of a nearby table, doing their rounds of visiting all the guests.

Mimi gritted her teeth, then steeled herself as she made her way toward the front of the restaurant. She needed extra fortitude to run the gauntlet.

As she passed tables, she tried to move quickly, but she was inevitably noticed by some of the guests. Her cousins usually only nodded or waved at her, but aunties and uncles would often reach out and grab her arm to stop her and say hello.

“Oh, Mimi, we haven’t seen you in so long. How great that you’re still looking so good.”

“Hey, Mimi, have you got a boyfriend yet? Uncle is working with this new hire at the company, and he’s a nice boy…”

“Oh, Mimi, you weren’t up there for the bridal toss, were you? Although I guess there’s no point for you to go up there by now…”

Mimi gave all of them a bland smile paired with a chilly stare before peeling them off her like leeches and making her escape. She wasn’t that old. Thirty-eight was not old! And it wasn’t the end of the world for her to still be single!

Just as she thought that, she caught a snatch of conversation from a table she had just passed. It was one of her cousins, who was a little drunk and thought that his “indoor voice” was a lot quieter than it actually was.

“Yeah, poor Mimi. She’s getting a little overripe, and all the good ones are already gone. Well, at least her parents will have someone to take care of them when they get older.”

Mimi considered ignoring it, except that she recognized the voice. She slammed to a stop, then turned and directed an ice-pick glare that stabbed her cousin Bobby between the eyes. “What did you say, Bobby?” she demanded. Her voice might have been a little bit shrill.

Bobby paled, his eyes going as round and white as the steamed bao bread buns accompanying the Peking duck. “N-n-nothing, Mimi.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll understand that the next time your family needs a last-minute reservation at Jenn’s restaurant, we’ll be too busy to be able to seat you,” Mimi bit out.

His wife, sitting next to him, frowned and slapped him on the arm, even though she had been nodding in agreement as she listened to him bad-mouthing Mimi.

Mimi spun around and continued toward the front of the restaurant. Ultimately, it was simply pettiness, and it didn’t make her feel much better. But she was getting tired of all the times that Bobby would come to Jenn’s restaurant without a reservation and expect them to somehow seat him and his four kids—and their boyfriends or girlfriends—at a moment’s notice, and offer them a discount on top of that.

She made her way to the large circular table to the side of the dance floor, which had been designated as the head table for the bride and groom and their immediate families.

Grandma Sakai managed to look like a queen on her throne as she sat in her chair. She seemed a little smaller every time Mimi saw her, but she still wore her neatly tailored suits and dresses with panache. Tonight, she wore a black silk dress with screen-printed kimono designs around the neckline and hem.

“Hi, Grandma. Hi Auntie Noriko! It’s good to see you again.” Mimi hugged her auntie, who owned a high-end cosmetics store in Hawaii but would naturally fly to California for the wedding of her youngest daughter, Paulette.

Mimi sat down in the empty chair next to Grandma Sakai, which she guessed was the bride’s chair. “Are you both enjoying the party?”

“The food is very good,” Auntie Noriko said.

“Yes. I haven’t had good Chinese food in a long while,” Grandma said.

She used to eat out quite often when she had numerous business meetings, but Grandma had given control of the bank to her oldest son just before Jenn’s wedding. Since then, she had slowed down a lot.

“How is PT going?” Mimi asked. Grandma had had hip replacement surgery in both hips several years ago, but she hadn’t recovered as well from the last surgery.

“I’m still going to PT every week, but I still have to walk with a cane.” She gestured to the beautiful ebony cane hooked onto the back of her chair. Mimi had heard from several of the aunties that Grandma really should be walking with a walker, but her pride would not allow her to do so. After a great deal of arguing, she was allowed to walk with a cane, but very slowly, since it wasn’t quite enough for her to maintain her balance.

“Are you and your mother coming by on Wednesday?” Grandma asked. “I’m having lunch with Mrs. Matsumoto a little later that day, so come by around seven or eight instead.”

“Sure thing.” Mimi and her mother, or sometimes just one of them, would bring some food over for Grandma once a week and eat dinner with her. Sometimes they would tag team with Jenn, and Jenn would bring not only the food but also her family. Mimi always liked those weeks because the food was always better, and she liked playing with Jenn’s kids.

“Where are you sitting?” Grandma asked, her eyes scanning the crowded restaurant.

Mimi pointed toward the far corner. “They stuck us way back there. I’m sitting with Lex, Trish, Venus, and Jenn.”

“What about their kids?” Grandma asked.

“They all chipped in and paid for a few of Edward’s cousins to watch them tonight,” Mimi said. “The kids are sleeping over at their grandparents’ house at the winery.”

“Is Castillo Winery still doing well?” Auntie Noriko asked.

“I think so,” Mimi said. “They’re expanding the restaurant next summer, and they just finished renovations on the tasting room.”

“Are Edward’s parents still running the business?”

“Yes, but they’ve also started handing over portions of it to Edward, his brothers, and a couple of his cousins.”

Grandma’s eyes suddenly narrowed as she regarded Mimi. “I don’t recall seeing you out there for the bouquet toss.”

“Oh, yes, I was out on the dance floor,” Mimi said. She had been out there when she was helping to set up the audiovisual equipment and the wedding cake, not the bouquet toss, but it was still perfectly true.

To distract her grandmother, she quickly asked, “Did you teach the kids at the Japanese school this past Thursday?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Matsumoto’s son picked me up.” Once a month, her grandmother and her best friend, Mrs. Matsumoto, volunteered at the local Japanese school, which was run by the Buddhist temple as an afterschool program. Grandma taught keigo, or business Japanese, which involved different vocabulary and sentence construction.

Grandma tilted her head. “You speak business Japanese, don’t you, Mimi?”

“Sort of,” Mimi said hesitantly. “I haven’t spoken it in a long time.” She had learned it so that she could speak politely to Japanese customers who came to her mother’s restaurant, but ever since she started working at Jenn’s restaurant, she hardly needed to use it. She only used it once in a while if a Japanese-speaking couple wandered in.

“Oh, you’ll pick it up again quickly,” Grandma said blithely, then turned to Auntie Noriko, sitting beside her. “Noriko, you should ask Mimi to help you out.”

“Help with what?” Mimi asked.

END OF EXCERPT

***

THE LONE RICE BALL

Copyright © 2023, 2025 Camy Tang

Previously published in 2023 by Winged Publications.

This edition published in 2025 by Camy Tang.

All rights reserved.