Everybody in the family knew the story <<\/span> This Poem<\/a><\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n The Master of Loss<\/a> ><\/span><\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n Kay Everybody in the family knew the story of how Henry’s war bride got out of the car in the yard dressed up in a kimono and bowing. Their father was so surprised he dropped his pail of feed. None of them ever wondered about the shock she must have felt to find her new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7698,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"\n
\nof how Henry’s war bride got out of the car
\nin the yard dressed up in a kimono
\nand bowing. Their father was so surprised
\nhe dropped his pail of feed. None of them
\never wondered about the shock she
\nmust have felt to find her new father-in-low
\namong a gang of hogs in the Ozarks
\nwearing bib overalls and a straw hat.
\nShe being a foreigner, it was her<\/em> job
\nto understand him<\/em>. “Over there,” Henry said,
\nthey eat fish raw,” and he had his older
\nsister show her how to make biscuits
\nand pork gravy. In the end, sorrow opened them
\nto her. After just seven years, Henry,
\nwho’d been drinking, drove his truck over
\nan embankment and died in the accident,
\nleaving her with two young girls, and hardly able
\nto speak English. Henry’s brother got her a job
\nas a waitress at the local restaurant, and his sisters
\ntook turns babysitting. “You could eat right
\noff her floors,” one of them told a friend,
\nand later, when the restaurant’s owner
\npromoted her to bookkeeper, they bragged
\nabout how fast her fingers moved on the abacus
\nshe’d brought from Japan. There, no one
\nwould have understood how her first daughter,
\nwho looked like Henry except for her black hair
\nand her eyes, could have been so wild
\nas to jump on a motorcycle at fifteen behind
\nher new boyfriend, and her mother couldn’t make
\nherself understand it, either. “Oh, Kay,”
\nthe women said at the funeral, holding her,
\nfor by then she was part of the family.
\nNone of them ever wondered about her real
\nname, or knew how pleased she was long before
\nto have this one, which Henry gave her
\non the way to America, where she would spend
\nthe rest of her life discovering who Kay was.\n