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Ricky Matsui is young, and not very smart yet.
Ricky is five (five whole years! And Emiko is even younger, only two, and she speaks sometimes and her words are babbles and nonsense to Ricky’s full sentences, but it’s okay because her cheeks are big and soft like steamed buns.) (Ricky pinched her cheeks once, to see if they were really as soft as the siopao that they always bought from the corner stall manned by the kind old lady that always told him to call her Lola Santos, but he just made Emiko cry and his mom got mad at him.) (They were just as soft, and Ricky was sorry that he made Emiko cry but happy that he could tell his mom about his discovery.) He is only five, but he knows that most kids his age don’t go days without seeing their dad.
“Mom,” he asks, tugging on her shirt as she moves around the kitchen, a practiced dance of flame and oil and pans that Ricky has learned not to touch after a few too many burned fingers, “why doesn’t Dad wish me and Emiko goodnight, like you? Why is he always gone?”
His mom lets out a sigh, almost too small for Ricky to notice, her shoulders drooping the way the big leaves of bok choy wilt in the big metal pot they have, filled with broth and meat and making the yummy soups that Ricky loves. She crouches, pushing a stray hair out of her face, and Ricky loves her eyes, so full of life and warmth and glimmering with the embers of a fire that could never be put out.
“Your dad and I have to work very hard, Ricky,” she says. She hesitates, she smiles, she cups Ricky’s face in her hands. They are worn, and calloused, and smell like green onions and carrots and home. “America is not forgiving. We want you and Emiko to have a good life here. And if that means we have to work a little more, so that you two can work a little less — that is okay with us. Your dad and I love you very much, and sometimes that means he can’t wish you goodnight all the time.”
Ricky is only five, and he doesn’t really understand yet, but he nods, and asks if he can taste some of the noodles she’s frying in the big wok that always smells like sesame oil no matter how much they clean it, and his mom smiles before saying yes, and the noodles are soft and a little bit crispy and they taste like how the sun feels on his skin.
(That night, he could swear he feels a kiss pressed softly against his forehead, lips ghosting the skin gently, a quiet “Goodnight, Ricky,” uttered before footsteps leave his room, a door shutting quietly in the darkness.)
Ricky Matsui is ten, and he knows a little more than he did when he was five.
Ricky can count on his two hands how many times he gets to eat breakfast and dinner with his dad in a month. He knows it’s not normal, because the other kids at school complain about boring dinner conversations constantly, or get picked up from the school by their dads driving shiny cars, freshly washed, but Ricky thinks he understands things a little better.
He learns the words ‘devotion,’ and ‘duty,’ and Ricky already learned the word ‘family’ a while ago but things make a little more sense when he puts them all together. His dad isn’t loud like his friend Matt’s dad — his dad doesn’t hug him tightly on the playground, or say that Ricky is the ‘best son ever’ — but Ricky’s dad is quiet and that’s okay. Love can be quiet, too.
Ricky learns that his dad loves in the silent, soft goodnight kisses that he leaves on his temples. That his dad loves in his long days at work, to make money for him and his mom and Emiko and to make sure that they can live well here. That his mom loves in a way that is a little louder, but still reserved — that she loves in the way she insists on cooking dinner, every night, even when she complains about how her feet hurt and the bags under her eyes only get bigger. In the way that she walks Ricky and Emiko to the bus stop each morning and squeezes their hands tightly before she lets them go.
Ricky is his parents’ son, and he learns this quiet sort of love as easily as the way the word devotion slips from his tongue.
Devotion in the form of working hard in school, because his parents work so hard to make sure that he can go to school in the nice neighbourhood that they live in. In the form of keeping Emiko, who is less even-tempered than Ricky, busy and happy on the nights where his mom’s shoulders droop a little lower, her eyes look a little more tired, and his dad stays even later at work. Love in the form of waking up early to go greet Lola Santos at the corner and buy some siopao with the money he saved from walking dogs on the weekends so that his mom can have a break from cooking for even just one day, one meal. Ricky learns what devotion is, sees how his parents love, and he takes to it like a fish in water.
High school — high school isn’t nearly as simple as things were when he was 5. Or 10.
Ricky isn’t dumb. He knows this. But he can’t force himself to care, to truly and deeply care about the classes that he knows he needs to excel in if he wants to forge a path for himself that makes the most of the opportunities that his parents sold so much of their time and their energy and themselves to give him. (It’s unspoken, it’s his friend Devendra studying physics through lunch because he needs this AP course to get into an engineering program, it’s Emiko researching the requirements for nursing admissions as soon as she starts her freshman year, it’s the knowledge that there’s jobs that pay well and jobs that don’t, and that there’s jobs that take an unwavering, steady devotion.)
He spends a lot of time at the rec center, jogging around the worn racetrack and lifting weights until his muscles burn with the fire of exertion. It takes his mind away from the knowledge that if he doesn’t put himself on a path that can only ever begin to pay back the heavy debts he owes to his parents he’ll always have this burden in him, the feeling of failure.
Salvation comes in the shape of a career day at his school.
Ricky’s never considered it before, work that’s more physical and less mental, work that can put his years of stress-relief workouts to good use, but the firefighter in the hall gives him a warm smile and says, “You seem like the kind of guy that appreciates safety.” (He does. He’s the one that made sure their fire alarm had batteries and was working every year after he realized his parents never really had the energy to remember to do it themselves, he’s the one that double-checks that the front door is locked and someone has keys whenever they go out. It stokes the fire in his chest, the warmth of knowing that he can at least do this little bit to protect his family. To protect the chances his parents have given him and Emiko and to ensure that nothing stands in the way of receiving their love and sending it back the only way this little family knows how.) He gives the guy a nod, walking over to the table he’s manning — stacks upon stacks of pamphlets, and a bright red trifold explaining the duties and responsibilities of being a firefighter.
Three words stick out in bright, glittery gold from the top of the trifold, sparkles somehow catching in the sickly artificial light from above. Duty. Honour. Protect.
To Ricky, the words taste like home.