Dixieland Sushi Read online

  Dixieland SUSHI

  “So, what’s your plan for ruining the wedding?”

  “I’m not going to ruin any wedding,” I say.

  “You’re driving how many miles and you’re just going to chicken out at the end?” Riley asks me, looking incredulous.

  “I’m going to take the high ground.”

  “Come on. You’ve got to at least have a speech planned for the ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ bit.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “How about ‘I’m a crazy woman who’s been in love with you since I was ten. Marry me instead!’”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I say, but I can’t help but smile a little. “Besides, I’m not in love with him. That was a long time ago.”

  “Uh-huh,” Riley says, sounding unconvinced. “So that’s why you were so desperate to have a stand-in boyfriend tag along for the ride.”

  “I didn’t say you were my stand-in boyfriend,” I protest.

  “Uh-huh, right.”

  “Do you have a problem with that … being a stand-in, I mean,” I say. I am dangerously close to crossing that line from innocent platonic flirting to innuendo flirting.

  Riley just looks at me, an impish smile on his face.

  I think, suddenly, he doesn’t seem like he’d mind crossing that line at all.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

  Also by Cara Lockwood

  In One Year and Out the Other

  Pink Slip Party

  I Do (But I Don’t)

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  DOWNTOWN PRESS, published by Pocket Books

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Cara Lockwood

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-9942-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-18453-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0-743-49942-2

  First Downtown Press trade paperback edition May 2005

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

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  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Mom and Dad, who give advice nearly as good as Mr. Miyagi’s. Thanks, too, to my grandparents, Mitzi and Tom Tanamachi, to Uncle Smokey and Uncle Pro, and all the Nimuras, who may have lost their savings in the internment camps but never lost their sense of humor. Thanks to my brother, Matt, who will always tell me when I’m not being funny and to my husband, Daren, who will tell me when I am.

  Thanks to my editor Lauren McKenna whose sharp editing is more nimble than Daniel LaRusso, and to my agent Deidre Knight, who can do a mean crane kick, especially during contract negotiations.

  A special thanks to Jerry White, who gave me a crash course in television journalism, to my tireless volunteer copyeditors, Jean Hess and Joanne Lockwood, to my publicist, Susan Schwartzman, and to my volunteer gang of fierce marketing ninjas: Elizabeth Kinsella, Kate Kinsella, Shannon Whitehead, Jen Lane Lockwood, Keith Lockwood, Jane Ricordati, Kate Miller, Stephanie Elsea, Cyndi Swendner, Stacey Causey, Mary Chalfant, the Girls’ Night Girls, and everyone else in my honorary Cobra Kai publicity team not afraid to use karate, Tae Bo, or any means necessary to persuade others to buy my books.

  For the Tanamachi and Nimura families

  Dixieland Sushi

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  To make honey, young bee needs young flower.

  The year was 1984, the evening of my tenth birthday, inside the Dixieland Roller Rink, also known as the local Rec Center. The basketball nets were up, the disco ball was down, and it was a Free Skate Friday night.

  I wore my brand new Gloria Vanderbilt jeans with the hot pink piping and my favorite lavender-colored roller skates with the clear plastic wheels carefully decorated with sparkly, puffy silver star stickers and tried my best not to fall on my face as I coolly attempted to skate along to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” which was blasting through the speakers as the disco ball overhead spun in tune with the beat. I was on the outskirts of the skaters, avoiding the center of the rink, where the teenagers were doing advanced spin moves and wearing satin short shorts.

  “Another one down, and another one down … Another one bites the dust …”

  My birthday cake, topped with pink gel icing and a decorative plastic pink roller skate, sat on one of the long tables by the Ms. Pac Man and Frogger video games. I was ignoring (read: desperately trying to get the attention of ) Kevin Peterson, my fourth-grade crush, who wore a very cool red Members Only jacket and black roller skates as he leaned against the roller rink rail. He, in turn, was doing his best to ignore me, a sure sign that he, too, felt the unspoken attraction between us. We were so blatantly ignoring one another that it should’ve been obvious to anyone that we had serious chemistry.

  “Another one down and another one down …”

  Kevin was by the rail where I should be, because it’s hard to look cool wobbling about with your hands outstretched like wings, trying to keep your balance. If I fell, my too-tight, pre-the invention-of-spandex jeans would rip straight down the rear seam in what would become a serious Therapy Moment. Luckily, I had on my training bra underneath my rainbow baseball T-shirt, which, as anyone knows, wasn’t so much a support garment as it was a status symbol. It screamed, I don’t have boobs yet, but they’re on the way.

  I glided to an awkward stop about ten feet from Kevin, under the pretense of adjusting my silver laces. I turned my back to him in order to complete my cool indifference, and to offer him a view of the strap through my T-shirt, so that if he was so inclined, he could come and snap it. But Kevin was too cool to resort to bra-strap snapping. He, in fact, had sisters. And a boy with sisters was far more advanced in terms of romantic strategy. He was what you would call a fourth-grade ladies’ man.

  I noticed for the hundredth time how much he looked like a younger version of Ralph Macchio. I’d seen The Karate Kid somewhere in the neighborhood of six times, partly because I had a small crush on Ralph Macchio, and partly because our town’s one-screen movie theater played only a single show for two months at a time. Our small Southern town didn’t offer the newest movies, or the newest anything, which accounted for the song selection at the local roller rink.

  For a whole week, I went about talking in broken English like Mr. Miyagi (“Mama-san, Miyagi no do dishes” and so on), and stopped only after my mother, Vivien, threatened to ground me until I was fifteen. Still, standing so close to Kevin Peterson, I couldn’t help but wish that I could conjure Mr. Miyagi and some of his wisecracking advice.

  “Another One Bites the Dust” came to a close, followed by that awkward moment of the fade-out of a song, when the skaters paused in their moves, waiting for the next beat. My heart pounded in my small rib cage, and I wasn’t sure if this was because of the proximity of Kevin Peterson or the fact that I had downed one too many “Suicides.” This was my cocktail of choice at age ten: a mixture of all the fountain drinks at the snack counter. The drink had enough corn syrup and caffeine to keep me awake for three days.

  After a second of sil
ence, the opening chords of the theme song to The Dukes of Hazzard piped in over the speakers in a triumphant blare. A cheer went up from the free skaters. Everyone loved this song. It was, after all, the unofficial theme song for Dixieland (that is, Dixieland, Arkansas, population 10,230) and current Southern Pride, even if it came from a show that seemed to bolster all the ignorant southern stereotypes. At the Dixieland Roller Rink, it was a hit.

  Even Kevin Peterson, stoic, cool, immobile Kevin Peterson, pushed himself away from the wall; he was going to join the skate. As he did so, he caught my eye, a perfect and subtle end to the Ignoring Phase of our courtship. This was a pivotal moment. He looked at me. He was about to extend his hand, to offer me a holding-hands skate, which was practically one step from a declaration of going together.

  My mind raced ahead: First, going together. Then, going steady. Then, we’d be married and incredibly wealthy (Kevin would be a self-made millionaire industrialist and I’d be an internationally known freelance journalist—like Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers on Hart to Hart).We’d have a grizzly but lovable butler named Max and we’d tolerate his insolence because he was grizzly but lovable and he talked nonstop about how generous we were. Like on Hart to Hart, Kevin would wear expensive suits, and I’d wear impractical heels and big floppy hats, and we’d fly around in our private jet solving murder mysteries with the help of our scruffy dog, Freeway.

  I was thinking of us, Max, and Freeway as I reached out to take Kevin Peterson’s hand, which would seal my romantic destiny forever, when Grandma Saddie (short for Sayoku) and my mother, Vivien, appeared from nowhere, carrying a giant Tupperware tray full of foul-smelling sushi and pickled vegetables.

  “Birthday treats!” Vivien cried, oblivious to the fact that she, wearing her slick black hair in a teased helmet, blue eye shadow on the lids of her almond-shaped Asian eyes, along with pencil-straight jeans, gold platform shoes, and matching elastic gold belt with the butterfly clip buckle, was Ruining My Life As I Knew It. The tray she and Grandma Saddie carried was stacked high with little cucumber rolls and inari (what Grandma called “footballs” for their shape)—fried tofu sacks filled with sushi rice—and what seemed like mounds of Japanese pickled cabbage, squash, and ginger, and a good helping of dried fish—ordered especially for the occasion from San Francisco—which all together gave off the powerful odor of toe cheese.

  Now, in the privacy of my own home, away from the questioning eyes of Kevin Peterson, I would gladly have devoured the sushi and pickled treats. But under his gaze, as I saw the look of horror and surprise as the pungent combination of smells reached his nose, I found myself frozen with mortification.

  “Ew,” he breathed, his nose wrinkling, his calm exterior for the first time showing cracks. “WHAT is THAT?”

  He could have meant anything—the neon-yellow pickled radish, the dried shreds of fish that look surprisingly like shriveled monkey claws, the “footballs,” which, in the roller disco light, looked suspiciously like cat livers.

  “Have a bite,” my mother insisted, her Asian features hopeful. “Come on, we made all your favorites.”

  Kevin Peterson looked at the tray of food and then at me and declared, “You eat that stuff ? Gross!”

  Vivien and Grandma Saddie would’ve been better off offering me the chilled monkey brains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. As I watched, helpless, Kevin Peterson skated away from me as if he’d been stung, never once looking back, dashing forever my dreams of drinking champagne on our private jet as we laughed over the misfortunes of the evildoer we’d just put in jail.

  “What is wrong with you, anyway?” Vivien asked me, when I clambered out of the rink, pouting, my skates catching on the carpet skate-free zone, the voice of Waylon Jennings singing “And that’s just a little more than the law would allow” echoing in my ears.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid III

  Everything can heal; just take time and patience.

  If fate were kind and sympathetic, the roller rink would have been the last time I saw Kevin Peterson. But fate is neither kind nor sympathetic. Otherwise, life would be like a teen movie, where everything works itself out at prom.

  Instead, nearly two decades later, I am going to be standing up at Kevin Peterson’s wedding, watching him marry my cousin Lucy, which ranks in the top three list of Things I Never Want To See Before Turning Thirty (it’s outranked only by my parents having sex and Mariah Carey in Glitter).

  As if I don’t have enough emotional scarring from being half-Japanese and raised in Dixieland—a small southern town known for fried pickles, an annual barbecue cook-off, and a higher than average teen pregnancy rate—I now have to endure the humiliating event of my twenty-year-old former beauty queen cousin getting married before I do, and to the same boy I first dreamed of k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

  It was my mother, Vivien, who broke the news first in an email six months ago that read like a telegram from the Titanic:

  KEVIN PETERSON AND LUCY ARE GETTING HITCHED. AUNT TERI WANTS YOU AND YOUR SISTER IN THE WEDDING. DON’T MAKE PLANS FOR JUNE. XOXO MOM

  It came as a bit of a shock. It shouldn’t have. There are only so many eligible singles in Dixieland, and the odds of your cousin and your former childhood sweetheart dating are only about twenty-five to one.

  And while I had thought I long ago buried all my feelings for Kevin Peterson, when I read my mother’s email, they all came bubbling up again. Along with a panic I hadn’t felt since two weeks before my high school homecoming dance.

  Because all I can think about is one single, sad fact: I have only a month to find a date for this wedding.

  I realize that I should not care that I don’t have a date, or even anything approaching a date.

  I am no longer the girl skating along to the theme song to The Dukes of Hazzard at the roller rink, desperately hoping for a glance from Kevin Peterson. I am the producer of Daybreak Chicago (in fact, the second-youngest producer in the history of the show). I haven’t been back to Dixieland in nearly five years, not even for a Christmas visit. My job doesn’t allow for much time off, and you don’t get promoted by taking holidays. And I want to be promoted. I want to be promoted as high as it is possible for me to go.

  That’s what separates me from most of my classmates in Dixieland, who generally did not aspire to achieve much beyond covert cow-tipping missions while stoned. Half of my classmates didn’t bother to go to college and the two most upwardly mobile people in our class were me and our Homecoming Queen, who had a brief brush with fame after being featured in Penthouse. It’s no wonder that I’ve stayed away from home as long as I could.

  I wish I could say I’m like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid II, and I’m an exile from my homeland, after my true love was forced to marry my evil rival (cue, Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love”—“I am the man who will fight for your honor …”). However, I have no such romantic story.

  If I’d stayed in Dixieland, I would’ve had the kind of love story that restraining orders are made of. I would’ve probably ended up marrying a truck driver who couldn’t be bothered wearing shirts with sleeves. When we made our debut on Cops, he’d be wearing a white undershirt, a Wife Beater’s Special, and I’d be wearing a housecoat and smudged mascara, waving a broken bottle while screaming that my no-good husband stuffed our electric bill money into neon pink G-strings at the local strip club.

  Part of me still feels scarred from living in Dixieland. I spent the first year at college wondering if being half-white meant that I could still qualify as “white trash.” It’s a debate I haven’t fully resolved.

  I landed my first assistant-producer assignment in a remote part of Arkansas, worked my way up to the Little Rock market, then to Dallas, and now to Chicago, where I am a baby step away from moving up to New York.

  I realize I should not care what Kevin Peterson thinks of me. If he even thinks of me at all. I should not be worried about what people will say when I come home, age twenty-eight and single, when most of my classma
tes are working on Baby Three or Husband Two. In fact, I should be paying attention to my job, which at this moment is heading at high speed toward the next calamity.

  “Uh-oh,” says my assistant, Anne, as we both watch the broadcast monitors during Chicago Daybreak, while the anchor, Michelle Bradley, is interviewing the director of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Said director has brought a small spider monkey, which looks like a big squirrel with a Confucius mustache. Now, having booked enough morning guests to know that animals are always trouble, I should mention that I did it only as a last resort, since two of my guests canceled earlier this week.

  Michelle, who never comes in early enough to read her scripts in advance for the morning show, is mispronouncing the director’s name, calling him Mr. Vulva instead of Vul-vay. Even worse, she has veered off script entirely and is now asking a question about whether the spider monkey is, in fact, related to spiders.

  Some of the crew members are putting their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing out loud. I sigh. I would love my job so much more if it didn’t involve working with anchors.

  I realize that without anchors, no one would watch the news, and that people do make decisions about which news show they want to watch based on their perceived likeability of certain reporters. And I have worked with the rare breed of anchor, the one who is generous, reasonable, and has no diva tendencies. However, Michelle is not one of them. She is the sort who believes that she is a star and that everyone else working at the station is just one more warm body who can fetch her coffee.

  Because she is a star, nothing is ever her fault. Ergo, the fact that she is butchering the zoo director’s name is not her mistake but mine for booking someone who has a name remotely approaching a part of the female anatomy. After this broadcast, I’m certain she’ll march right into the office of our assistant news director (our boss) and demand I be fired. In the last month alone, she’s called for my resignation twice: once because she mispronounced the mayor’s name, calling him “Davey” instead of “Daley,” and another time because she said I use too many “four-syllable” words in her newscasts, including “interrogate,” which she found too difficult to pronounce.