Koji looked around his spare living room, his leather rucksack sitting on his armchair. In it he had packed a change of clothes and a few belongings he wanted to take with him down to Hilo. He hadn’t expected the memories of Mariko to return so sharply when he began sorting through his few things. Everything he valued was from her, the past everywhere, in everything. Koji checked his rucksack again to make sure the shirt was there, knowing it was: he had taken it from his closet, neatly folded it, and placed it right on top so it wouldn’t get wrinkled.

“This is for you,” he heard Mariko say again, handing him the gift-wrapped box. It was his birthday, a day he had long ago stopped celebrating. The last time was just after he’d started cutting cane, and his mother had baked him a small cake and surprised him when he came in from the fields. Even his father was happy that night as they sang and he blew out the one candle.

Koji was equally surprised by Mariko and wanted to know how she knew.

Mariko laughed. “Did you really think Razor could keep it to himself?” she said. “He was down in Hilo and came by last week.”

Koji looked away, embarrassed. Razor always looked out for him. They’d grown apart the past few years, and the thought saddened him. He’d missed yet another of Razor’s labor meetings, but his first priority was always Mariko and Daniel. Razor always understood, but he knew his friend’s patience was wearing thin.

Koji was thirty years old and felt like an awkward kid when she handed him the present. “You didn’t have to,” he said.

“I wanted to. It’s from the both of us.”

Koji heard Daniel in the living room playing with his trains, delighted with the railroad tracks he’d bought him, the clickety-clack of the railcars moving endlessly in a circle around the living room. Koji smiled at her and carefully unwrapped and opened the box to see a white dress shirt. On the right cuff, Mariko had embroidered his initials, KS. She had bought it downtown and it looked expensive. She must have had to save for a year. It was the nicest present he had ever received. Koji felt different when he put the shirt on in the quiet of his room. He looked in the mirror and saw a town boy, not a cane boy. Koji had only worn it out twice, once when he and Mariko went out to dinner together at Chu’s Chinese Café, where he sat nervously across from her and could barely eat for fear of dirtying his shirt; and the second time, at Mariko’s funeral.

* * *