“You girls, too modern,” Keiko said. She was as cute as a bird, tiny, perfectly dressed and coiffed, shopping bags dangling from the crooks of her arms. “No man want woman who too independent,” she told us.

“Mommm,” Yuki wailed. “Give it a rest, willya? This is the twenty-first century. This is America.”

“Look at you, Lindsay,” Keiko said, ignoring Yuki, poking me under the arm. “You’re packing!”

Yuki and I both whooped, our shouts of laughter nearly drowning out Keiko’s protestation that “no man want a woman with a gun.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as we stopped and waited for the light to change.

“I do have a boyfriend,” I said.

“Doesn’t she though,” Yuki said, nearly bursting into a song about my beau. “Joe is a very handsome Italian guy. Like Dad. And he’s got a big-deal government job. Homeland Security.”

“He make you laugh?” Keiko asked, pointedly ignoring Joe’s credentials.

“Uh-huh. Sometimes we laugh ourselves into fits.”

“He treat you nice?”

“He treats me sooooo nice,” I said with a grin.

Keiko nodded approvingly. “I know that smile,” she said. “You find a man with a slow hands.”

Again Yuki and I burst into hoots of laughter, and from the sparkle in Keiko’s eyes, I could tell that she was enjoying her role as Mama Interrogator.

“When you get a ring from this Joe?”

That’s when I blushed. Keiko had nailed it with a well-manicured finger. Joe lived in Washington, DC. I didn’t. Couldn’t. I didn’t know where our relationship was going.

“We’re not at the ring stage yet,” I told her.

“You love this Joe?”

“Big-time,” I confessed.

“He love you?”

Yuki’s mom was looking up at me with amusement, when her features froze as if she’d turned to stone. Her lively eyes glazed over, rolled back, and her knees gave way.