Akiko
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5
Veneta, Oklahoma, 1988
The funeral was crowded. Neighbors, former coworkers, people from church filled the pews of the small chapel where Akiko and Steven had been married thirty-eight years earlier in Honolulu. But this was Oklahoma, and the faces were different, the building was different, yet the weight of witness felt the same.
The librarian came—Miss Hodges, now ancient and frail, leaning heavily on a cane but insisting on being there. “He was a good man,” she told Akiko after the service, gripping her hand with surprising strength. “You were both good people. This town was better for having you.”
Dr. Callahan’s son came, a doctor himself now, practicing in Oklahoma City. He found Akiko during the reception at the church hall.
“My father spoke of you often in his last years,” he said, his voice quiet amid the murmur of conversation. “He said your daughter had the strongest lungs he’d ever heard.” He smiled. “He was proud to have delivered her. Proud of how wrong he’d been about you at first.”
Akiko felt tears sting her eyes. “Your father was a good man. He came through the ice when he didn’t have to.”
“He told me about that night. Said it taught him something important—that prejudice makes you stupid, and stupid gets people killed. He tried to be less stupid after that.” The younger Dr. Callahan squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sims.”
Chaplain Ellery came too, older and slower, leaning on a cane that matched his careful steps. He’d retired from the Army decades ago but had stayed in Hawaii, occasionally visiting the mainland for occasions like this.
He found Akiko sitting in a corner of the church hall, temporarily alone, a cup of coffee cooling in her hands.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the chair beside her.
“Please.”
Ellery sat with a grateful sigh. For a moment, they were both quiet, watching the crowd mill around tables laden with casseroles and pies—the currency of grief in small-town America.
“I brought something,” Ellery said, pulling a worn ledger from his bag. “The marriage records from Honolulu. November 1950.” He opened it to a marked page, the ink faded but still legible. “I thought you might want to see it again.”
Akiko looked down at the page. There, in careful script: Steven James Sims and Akiko Yamamoto, married November 7th, 1950, Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii.
Her vision blurred. She traced the words with one finger, remembering that gray morning, the rain on the chapel roof, Steven’s trembling hands, the parachute cord ring she still wore beneath her wedding band.
“Some promises,” Ellery said softly, “are kept against all odds. Yours was one of them.”
“Thank you,” Akiko whispered. “For everything you did. We couldn’t have ... without you...”
“You would have found a way,” Ellery said with certainty. “People like you and Steven—you don’t give up. That’s why the promise held.”
After everyone went home, after the casseroles had been delivered and stacked in the refrigerator, after Grace and Michael had tried to convince her to come stay with one of them and she’d gently refused, Akiko sat alone in the house that had been her home for thirty-seven years.
The silence was profound. For the first time since 1951, she was truly alone—not waiting for Steven to come home from work, not listening for his footsteps on the porch, not feeling his warmth beside her in bed.
Just alone.
She walked through the house slowly, touching things: the rocking chair where Steven had held Grace on the night she was born, the kitchen table where they’d shared thousands of meals, the bedroom where he’d died peacefully in his sleep.
Everything was exactly as it had been, and yet everything had changed.
That night, she lay in their bed—her bed now, just hers—and allowed herself to cry. Not the careful, controlled tears she’d shed at the funeral, but great heaving sobs that came from somewhere deep and primal. Grief for Steven, yes, but also for everything they’d survived together: the wire fences, the bureaucracy, the prejudice, the hard winters, the slow acceptance, the years of building something from nothing.
She cried until she had no tears left, and then she slept.
In the days that followed, Grace and Michael took turns visiting, bringing groceries, checking on her, trying to fill the silence with chatter about grandchildren and work and the small dramas of daily life.
“Mom, you can’t stay here alone,” Grace said one afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table while Akiko made tea. “The house is too big, too much work. Come live with us. We have the room.”
“No,” Akiko said firmly. “This is my home. I not ready to leave it.”
“But—”
“Grace.” Akiko set the teacup down and looked at her daughter. “I survive war. I survive detention camp. I survive being stranger in strange land. I can survive being widow in my own house.”
Grace’s eyes filled with tears. “I just don’t want you to be lonely.”
“I know, sweetheart. But lonely and alone are different things. I need to learn the difference.” Akiko reached across the table and took her daughter’s hand. “I be okay. I promise.”
Michael was more practical. He came over twice a week to handle repairs, check the pipes, make sure the truck was running. He didn’t talk much—had never been as verbal as his sister—but his presence was steady, reliable.
“You need anything, you call,” he said every time he left. “Day or night, doesn’t matter. You call.”
“I will,” Akiko promised, knowing she probably wouldn’t.
The weeks folded into months. Spring came, and Akiko planted the garden the way she always had—tomatoes, beans, squash, the same vegetables she’d planted for thirty-seven years. Her hands remembered the work, even if her back protested more than it used to.
Mrs. Patterson—now in her nineties and barely mobile—sent her grandson over with a basket of seed packets. “Grandma said you’d need these,” the young man said, looking uncomfortable with the errand. “She said to tell you that gardens don’t stop for grief.”
Akiko took the seeds with trembling hands. “Tell her thank you. And tell her ... tell her I remember when she walked through the ice storm to get the doctor. I never forgot.”
The young man looked confused but nodded. “I’ll tell her.”
The garden grew. Life continued. The seasons turned.
In the summer, Grace brought the grandchildren to visit. They ran through the yard chasing chickens, exactly as Grace had done forty years earlier. Akiko made them lunch—simple food, rice and vegetables and the pickles she’d learned to make from Dorothy—and listened to their chatter about school and friends and the small concerns of childhood.
When they left, the silence returned, but it felt less oppressive. More like a companion she was learning to live with.
One evening in late July, Akiko sat on the porch watching a thunderhead climb the horizon. The air was thick with the promise of rain, and the light had that particular golden quality that came before storms.
She heard Steven’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside her.
You’re mine now.
Three words, reckless and raw, spoken forty-three years ago in a holding camp on Okinawa where barbed wire divided the world into boxes. Words that had sounded like conquest but meant custody. Words that had survived bureaucracy, prejudice, winter, loss, and time.
Akiko twisted the gold band on her finger—the parachute cord ring hung on a chain around her neck now, too loose for her thinning fingers but too precious to put away.
She whispered into the evening air, in Japanese first, then English, as if Steven needed to hear it in both languages to understand.
“Anata mo watashi no. You are mine too.”
The wind carried the words across the fields, past the garden where tomatoes were ripening in the heat, past the fence where the neighbor’s cattle grazed, out toward the horizon where the storm was building.