The Tutor

Chapter 3: The Other Half

About half an hour after Nick let her out, he happened to be passing through the living room on his way to the extra refrigerator in his garage, and he saw Sumire's blue Honda still sitting in his driveway. The hood was up, and there was a towel spread over part of the engine.

What the hell?

He opened his front door and nearly tripped over Sumire herself. She was sitting on the top step, in the shade cast by the deep roof of the porch, reading a book. The sound of the door made her jump and she looked up at Nick in surprise, closing her book.

"What are you doing here?" he asked bluntly, standing in his doorway.

Sumire gestured toward her car. "Louie--that's my car," she gestured toward the Honda, "can be kind of temperamental, and I can't get under the hood quite yet because it's too hot. Don't worry, I'll be out of here in a few minutes." She rose.

"Unless I'm in the way here on the porch? You need me to wait somewhere else? I mean, I can't move Louie, but I can go wait under the trees or whatever if you're expecting people--"

"No, no, nothing like that, but you could've waited in the house, for crying out loud," Nick said, opening the door wider. "Why didn't you ring the bell?"

"I didn't want to bother you," she responded. "I had my book, I was fine."

"Well, come in now," he insisted. "Please, I'm not doing a thing, I can't leave you out here, it's too hot."

She relented and followed him back in.

"Look, you don't have to keep me company or entertain me or anything," she said when he sat with her in the spacious and comfortable family room. "Please, do whatever you were doing."

"I was going to get some cold water from my garage," he told her. "In fact, hold on--" He quickly ran to the fridge, grabbed a few bottles and and came back, handing her two of the bottles. He once again sat down with her.

"There, that's all I was doing," he assured her.

"Well, thank you very much," she said. She cracked open a bottle and nearly drained it before setting it aside and giving him a small, measured smile of gratitude to go with her words.

"So how does a half-Japanese daughter of a botanist end up a linguistics student in LA?" Nick asked, sitting back on the sofa.

"Really? You're interested in that? In me?"

Nick shrugged. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, okay. Uh, my mother was the daughter of a diplomat who was posted in Japan, and she met my father, who was a student at Tokyo University. They fell in love and got married, and had me. He got a job working for the prefectural government, maintaining the parks and grounds in Tokyo, and I think they were very happy." Sumire smiled, and Nick noticed that, for the first time since they'd met, it was a big smile, a normal smile, a smile that transformed her face to a thing of beauty, made it exotic, sloe-eyed, lovely. It was gone all too soon. "I used to go with him sometimes, help him, you know, though I don't know how much help I was," she laughed.

She gave herself a shake. "So then, well, he died, very suddenly, and it was terrible, and we left Japan and moved back to Boston, to where my mother's people lived. And she met her second husband, who was a professor at Harvard. She married him two years later."

She was silent for so long that Nick prodded her, asking, "Was that bad? Did you not get along with him or something?"

She looked up Nick.

"No, he's fine," she answered with a shrug. "I mean, he makes my mother happy, I guess, so that's nice. She was awfully young to have to spend the rest of her life alone, you know? So it's nice that she found someone."