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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