Breaking Free

Chapter 1-1

Chapter One

When Janelle had been told her best friend Rose’s wedding would be in mid-April, she’d foolishly assumed that meant a decently warm, sunny day. The fact that she’d spent most of her life in California, with frequent trips to family in Hawaii, had clearly skewed her perspective on April weather.

No matter how much she checked her weather app as she packed for her trip to Wildlife Ridge, Colorado, her brain had a hard time accepting that she needed to be prepared for rain, snow, and sun. Giving in to the inevitable, she called her mom and asked if she could borrow her parents’ big suitcase. A wedding event wasn’t the time to not have the right clothes, and Wildlife Ridge didn’t have any clothes shops that she could recall. It was a charming and tiny town, and she was looking forward to returning, but she wasn’t planning a shopping spree.

She checked her watch. Her parents lived in Westwood, less than five miles from her house. If she tried to make the drive during commute times, it would take about forty minutes. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, she bet herself ten dollars that she could do it in fifteen.

Grabbing her purse, she locked up her guesthouse and walked the half block to her car. She liked her little rental, but the one thing she would change, if it wasn’t stupid expensive to do so, was her lack of a parking spot.

Weaving in and out of traffic with the ease of someone born and raised in Los Angeles, she quickly pulled into her parents’ driveway and checked her watch. Fourteen minutes.

“Yes!”

She pulled out her phone and made an entry in her budgeting app, pulling ten dollars from her discretionary category and moving it into her treats category. Then she frowned. The stupid category was up to one hundred and eighty dollars.

She had a…well, could you call it a bad habit? Maybe. She had a habit of letting the treats category fill up and not actually treating herself to anything. Now that Rose had moved away, she and Naomi had fewer excuses to celebrate with dinner at a nice restaurant. She made a mental note to decide on something special for herself once she got home from the wedding weekend.

When she walked into the house, she smelled incense and stuck her head around the corner into the den. Her parents were there, in front of the open butsudan, eyes closed, chanting.

While she’d fallen out of the Buddhist habits she’d been raised with, seeing her parents in their peaceful moment made her happy and a bit nostalgic. They’d had the same butsudan, the alter where they kept the gohonzon and offerings, since she was a kid, and the same routine. Plus, it meant that they’d also bet she’d be at least twenty minutes in her drive, giving them enough time to go through their process, and they had lost.

Grinning, she jogged up the stairs. When she got to the top, she stopped, turned round, went back down, turned around, and jogged back up, panting a bit as she reached the top. She’d read this was a good exercise technique for people who didn’t want to specifically plan a time in their day for working out. Every time she encountered stairs, she was supposed to do them twice.

So far, she had discovered that there were actually very few staircases in her day-to-day environment. Who knew?

She pulled the suitcase out of the closet and headed back down. Was it cheating to leave the suitcase at the bottom on her return trip up? There hadn’t been a rule about what she was carrying. Panting more substantially by the time she got back up, she turned and walked down, smiling at her parents as they stepped out of the study.

They exchanged hugs and moved to the living room to chat.

“I’m sorry I missed dinner last night, my boss decided to go to Mumbai and it was a bit of a scramble at the last minute.”

Her mother frowned. “That boss of yours.”

“True, but I got a raise last week, so I can live with his bad time management for a little longer. And, this means he’ll be otherwise occupied for at least a few days while I’m in Colorado.”

“That’s good. Your grandmother is excited to be joining you.”

“Rose loves her, and it’ll be fun to have her there. And I know she’s really looking forward to going to the war memorial in Denver.”

“Honey, are you sure you don’t want a ride to the airport?” her father asked.

“Thanks, Dad, but no reason to drag you out to LAX. The company has a contract with a valet service. It’s one of the few company perks that I can actually use once in a while.”

Her dad’s lips twitched. “Getting fancy on us.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Yeah, that’s me, next thing you know I’ll be ordering a car service and sipping champagne while they drive me to my chartered jet.”

He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Go big, buy the jet yourself.”

Laughing, she hugged them both again and headed out.

With the larger suitcase, packing was much easier. She just threw in two-thirds of her closet and called it done. She ate a light dinner and set her alarm. She needed to be at the airport earlier than normal in order to meet her grandmother’s arrival. They would have time for lunch before catching the flight to Denver.

The drive to the valet service was easy, and she only had to pause at the curb for a moment as the driver jumped into her passenger seat. She gave the young man her company’s corporate info as she drove the rest of the way to the airport, and he filled out the form on his tablet. He was out of the car and waiting for her to pop the trunk by the time she’d shifted into park and detached her car key from the rest.

He had her suitcase on the curb and her receipt ready for her by the time she’s made it to the back of the car. Nice and smooth. She hoped the rest of her trip managed to go so well.

Three hours later, she and Grandma were settled into their seats and ready to go. She texted the update to Rose, who responded with a series of emojis that made Grandma laugh.

“How come you didn’t fly out at the same time as Naomi?”

Naomi, third best friend in her and Rose’s trio, had left two days earlier. “She was going to travel around and scout some rental properties she’s thinking of buying.”

Janelle didn’t add that she hadn’t been about to let Grandma make the full flight from Hawaii to Denver on her own when it was simple enough to coordinate the layover with her own flight from Los Angeles.

“I’m just amazed at what that girl has accomplished. How many buildings does she have now?”

“She has the triplex she started with, the one you visited. She moved out of that two years ago and bought a four-unit building, but so far that’s it. She’s decided that it’s silly to only invest in Los Angeles when she can get so much more for her money in other markets, so that’s what she’s looking at now. She liked Colorado when she was visiting Rose and figured she might as well look around. She has the money ready to invest somewhere cheaper, now, or she’d have to wait another year to be able to invest here.”

“Smart girl. I’m so proud of all of you, making your way on your own, not waiting for a man to get your life started.”

The plane started to taxi and Janelle held her grandmother’s hand. “Do you regret marrying Grandpa so young?”

Grandma pursed her lips. “No, but it’s a different time now. I worried about your mother when she followed suit and married even younger than me. But that girl met your father and knew what she wanted and wasn’t going to waste any time getting it.”

“She had me when she was only twenty.”

“They were here in California by then, and she told me the only time she got weird looks was when her hands were swollen in pregnancy and she had to take off her wedding ring.”

“That, and people asking her if she was the nanny when she would take me to the park.”

Grandma looked at her solemnly. “She told you that?”

Nell gave her a wry smile. “She said I was a super-white baby, didn’t start getting my color until later. And there weren’t many other half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian natives in the neighborhood.”

“She told me she hoped California would be more progressive with a mixed marriage, but sometimes she wondered if she should have talked your dad into going back to Canada. But…”

Nell and her grandmother grinned at each other as they both mock shivered. “Cold,” Nell agreed. “And here we are, heading to Colorado. Have you ever been to the mountains?”

“Your grandfather and I took the kids to Park City, Utah, when they were in high school. Your uncle begged and begged for the chance to learn how to ski, and the girls said they would try as well. He took a couple of lessons and did okay, but he never asked again. Your mom did fairly well, and your Aunt Linda was too busy flirting with all the boys to give it a proper try.”

Nell grinned again at her grandmother as the flight attendant came by to offer them drinks. They relaxed and chatted for a while, until a nicely muscled Latino man moved down the aisle towards them, presumably on his way to the bathroom.

Grandma nudged Janelle’s arm. “You haven’t told me about any dates lately. You could go stand in line for the restroom, you’ll have a few minutes to chat, see what he’s like.”

“Ah, come on, don’t you have enough grandkids by now?”

Grandma put her hand on Nell’s arm. “It’s not that, my darling. It’s that I want to see you happy.”

“I am happy. And maybe I’ll get married and have kids, maybe I won’t. But I promise you, I’ll be happy either way. I enjoy my life. Dating is fun. But I haven’t met anyone that…I don’t know, makes me excited to see them after the first date.”

“No quiver in your loins?”

“Grandma!” Nell laughed. “I mean, I’m not saying I’m not having fun now and then, but no, I haven’t found anyone who makes my loins quiver with excitement at the idea of seeing them.”

Grandma frowned. “But you’re happy? Working a job you don’t like, playing with cars in your spare time, and having occasional fun with dates?”

“It’s not my job I don’t like, just my boss. The work is fun. And the cars are fun. I sold that Porsche I fixed up for a nice profit, and I had a great time doing the work. I know I’m thirty-six and you already had all three of your kids by my age—”

“No, don’t go by that, it was a whole different world for women. My mother got married at the end of the war, and she was twenty; her parents were afraid she was already too old. But she insisted on waiting for my father to come home.”

“And you got married at twenty, too. Did you think you were getting too old?”

“No, I just felt ready.”

“And you found a Hawaiian boy, who wasn’t Japanese. Were you worried about bringing him home?”

Grandma smiled, her gaze going fuzzy with memory. “No, it might have been different if it hadn’t been for the war, but after…I guess they didn’t hold on to many of the old traditions. I can’t even speak Japanese anymore. I wanted my children to learn, but it wasn’t taught in the school, and I didn’t know it well enough. I tried to get my mother to speak it to them, but it didn’t really take. I’m glad your father taught you his French.”

“Me, too. And mom followed tradition and got married at twenty.”

“She was ready to get off the island. Which was funny, because your father wanted to stay.”

“And surf.”

Grandma laughed. “Yes, and surf. That’s why he’d come, after all. But your mother was smart enough to know he wouldn’t want to stay forever, and once he was ready to go, she would have her chance.”

“Couldn’t she have gone away for college?”

“Yes, but—and you must never tell her I told you this—she was too afraid to go off on her own. She didn’t have your independence. With your father at her side, she was ready to dare anything. But on her own, she would not have left the island. At least not for several years.”