Dead Ringer

turned it into a giant electronics firm.” She paused, took another sip of her margarita, licked some salt off the rim. “Now, tell me, did you go on to college? Did your father ever find oil? What happened to your mother?”

Maggie found herself laughing as she thought of her father. “Yeah, he found oil, lots of times, in Libya, but every time he did, some young Libyan right out of college took credit for it. It would make him so mad. He’d tell me and Mom about it and we’d think his head was going to burst, he’d get so red and puffed up.” She ran a finger through the salt on the rim of her glass, but didn’t drink.

“Mom and I had our first real fight when it came to college. I wanted to go to the Sorbonne in Paris and study art. She wanted me to go the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, because they had a program in Japanese Studies where you spent two years studying in Japan. She wanted me to know my heritage.”

Maggie smiled at the memory. “Every day of my life I was my mother’s child, as Japanese as she. If anybody ever said different, they met the full force of her wrath. You didn’t mess with my mom, let me tell you. She was hell on wheels.”

“So, you went to Hawaii?” Tomoko said.

“We made a deal, get the degree from U of H, then, if I still wanted, they’d send me to France. So I got that degree, but I never went to Paris. By the time I graduated, I was pretty tired of school. Besides, I’d met this great guy from Nevada in my senior year. He’d come to Hawaii on a two week vacation and stayed till I finished school. He could drive like nothing you’d ever seen. He had oil instead of blood in his veins and he taught me how to race a car in the dirt. He was an off road racer.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Tomoko said.

“He raced cars off road. You know like the Paris-Dakar race, or the Camel Trophy. He raced in jungles, deserts, the bush, you name it. Sometimes the races last less than a day, sometimes they’re as long as a couple weeks-grueling conditions-mud, rain.”

“You can make a living doing that?” Tomoko said.

“If you’re good and Bobby was. We lived together for three years and I became his co-driver and navigator, till I caught him in bed with a couple racing groupies. I was supposed to be at a co-driver’s meeting, getting the route for a race, but I forgot my phone, so I went back to get it.” She laughed at the memory. Bobby in their hotel room in Mexico two days before the Baja Five Hundred. Shocked as he was at being caught, he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. The girls were beautiful and couldn’t have been older than eighteen. What was it about men?

“I went out on my own after that, got my own sponsors and my own car, a Mitsubishi Montero. I have an overactive imagination and I imagined myself famous, on television doing the talk shows, a woman at the top of a man’s sport. And it was starting to happen. I was starting to get coverage, my sponsors we’re paying more. I fell in love with and married the guy on the local news here. I was on top of the world.” Then Maggie told her new friend about the accident and why she’d given up racing.

“So, I got a job at a magazine and started to live a normal life, till now.”

“And now,” Tomoko said, “we get to the reason why you’re telling me all this. A stranger who can’t speak English. Someone you can trust won’t tell your friends, or worse, your husband. It’s not his baby, is it?”

“No.” Maggie didn’t ask how the woman figured out she was pregnant, how she knew it wasn’t Nick’s. She just picked up her drink, held it up. “Kanpai.”

“Kanpai.” Tomoko said. They both drank.

“We’ve been married for three years,” Maggie said. “He can’t have kids. He had, you know,” she made a scissors out of her fingers, “snip, snip.”

“Ouch,” Tomoko said.

“Usually men say that,” Maggie said.

“I have an imagination too,” Tomoko said.

“Anyway, I met this man, boy really, from Ireland. He was a young race driver I was interviewing for the magazine.”

“This boy is the father?”

“Yes.”

“So, now you are in itabasami.”

“Yes, I’m stuck between two walls, between a rock and a hard place. I lose no matter what I do.”

“And you don’t think your husband loves you as much as your mother loved your father? I’m not surprised, women love more deeply, suffer more pain.”

“Of course Nick loves me. What are you talking about?”

“Your mother accepted you. Loved you before she knew you, because you were her husband’s child. But you are not willing to give your husband the same chance with your baby. You assume he’ll reject it.”

“The situation’s a little different. My father wasn’t cheating, I was. My mother wanted kids, my husband doesn’t.”

“I still think you should tell him. Maybe you’re underestimating him.”

“He has this stupid pride.”

“Pride,” Tomoko said. “Maybe men should be gelded after their wives give birth. That would take care of their pride.”

“Yeah.” Maggie laughed, despite how she felt.

“You should tell him.”

“How can you say that?”

“Isn’t that why you told me? So you could get an honest opinion about what you know you should do anyway.”

“He’ll divorce me.”

“Not if he loves you.”

“If he does, what would I do?” Maggie couldn’t imagine living without Nick. He was the rock she counted on. He was always there for her.

“You’d do what a lot of other single mothers do. You’d raise your child.”

The taco plates came and they ate in silence. Maggie thought about what Tomoko had said. She wanted to tell Nick. Wanted to keep the baby. But could a man with his pride live with another man’s child? She didn’t think so. As much as he loved her, he’d leave her. It was the way he was.

“Maggie,” Dick said from behind the bar, “phone call for your friend.” Maggie translated and Tomoko got up to get the phone. It was her husband telling her he wasn’t going to make it after all and could she take a cab back to the hotel.

“Meishi onegaishimasu,” Tomoko said. Here’s my card. Maggie took it. She didn’t have a card of her own, so she scribbled her phone number and address on the back of her gynecologist’s card, then gave it to her new friend. Tomoko promised to write. She wanted to know what Maggie decided to do about the baby. Maggie promised she’d let her know.

She took her place back at the bar after Tomoko left and ordered another rum and coke. Maybe she could get the baby drunk. Maybe then it wouldn’t hurt so much when they killed it.

The DJ had just finished setting up his stuff behind the dance floor when Maggie heard, “Hey, good looking.”

“Gordon!” She turned toward a handsome man dressed in corduroys and a yellow Polo shirt. He was wiry, graying at the temples, had a dimple in his chin that set off his wicked handsome face and a smile that could light up the Forum.

“Nick said he had to stand you up, something about a hot story he was working on.” Gordon took the stool next to her. “It was too much for me, a lady waiting for a man, I had to come.”

Maggie laughed. Gordon Takoda was Nick and Maggie’s downstairs neighbor and landlord. Their duplex on Ocean was across the street from the beach.

“I’ve decided to let the pet store have the bird,” Gordon said. “They promised to find him a good home. Besides, they say they can get me over a thousand bucks for him.”

“Aw, Gordon, not Fred, you’re gonna miss him.”

“I miss Ricky, I won’t miss his bird.” Ricky, his partner, died of leukemia six months after she’d moved in upstairs with Nick. Gordon and Ricky were fun to be around and in no time they’d become fast friends. And she’d grown closer to Gordon since Ricky’s death. If asked, she’d have to say he was the best friend she’d ever had.