Queen of Love

“She’s from Singapore, but has a place in Taipei.”

“They can’t do gay marriage in Singapore?”

“No. Quite the opposite. You could get in big trouble for being publicly ‘in the gay.’”

“I want to be in the gay when I grow up,” Hisa quipped.

Aya patted her niece’s leg. “You’re already halfway there with my terrible influence.”

“Either that or she’ll break at least a hundred boys’ hearts by college,” Mari said. “Girl like Hisa-chan doesn’t hold back, huh?”

Hisa showed her mother her empty plate. “I want more pizza.”

Aya pulled the last piece off the big plate and landed it on Hisa’s. As the girl happily splotched herself with more grease, Mari asked if Aya had wanted it for herself – after all, she hadn’t eaten much since getting there. Aya shook her head. Her phone buzzed.

“Mmhmm. You sure you’re not running to meet your girl after this?”

Mari had pointed to Aya’s phone, sporting a new message from Genevieve. “Let me have my after-work flirtations.”

“From the sound of things, you’ve done more than flirt already.”

Although Mari lowered her voice to say that, her son still latched on to it with scandal already outlining his mouth.

“Like you know what that means,” Aya said to him.

Her nephew made a kissy face. A very sloppy one.

“What kind of hooligans have you raised, again? Whatever happened to ’Good Wife, Wise Mother?” Aya quoted an old slogan of the Meiji Restoration when women were expected to get their butts back in the home and raise the next great generation of Japanese people. Ask me how that’s gone over for me. “Your kids watch too much Western TV.”

“You’re the one corrupting them. When even Mom is going on about you in front of them, they pick things up.”

“How open-minded of everyone involved.”

“Enough about my damn kids! You going out with this girl again or not?”

“This ‘girl’ is basically Singaporean royalty. You don’t ‘date’ a woman like that. Not seriously.”

“Then who do you date ‘seriously’?”

Aya glanced at the waitress hustling by, her hair up in a pristine bun and her hips sashaying with the click-clack of her shoes.

“You’re a cad,” Mari said.

“I’m a red-blooded woman who has needs,” Aya mouthed to her sister. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re married.”

“Oh, you mean because my needs are satisfied daily?”

“Uso. You lie like a cat with a rat in its mouth.”

“Would you get married already? You’re forty. You’re embarrassing us. Even my kids.”

“I’m not having kids, so why do you care?”

“Because I’m technically your older sister and therefore the person after Mom and Dad who is most concerned with the state of your bedroom.”

“At least you admit it. Mom is out there right now trying to find the girliest man she knows to marry me.”

“There are sexy young men in the magazines these days. Maybe she’ll get you one.”