Strong Like the Sea, стр. 38

“Good, huh? Maybe so.” She wraps her warm arms around me, gives me a squeeze, and turns to Uncle. “I have to finish one project for work, but we need some things. You like go store?”

Uncle slides his fingers through hers. “For you? Anything.” He curls their clasped hands up and kisses the back of her hand.

She lets me go and playfully taps his chest. “What, you think sweet talk gon’ get you out of trouble? Don’t forget, I know you too well.”

“I’m counting on it.” He touches her cheek and bows his head to rest his forehead against hers.

I drop my gaze to Sarge and give him a good scratch. It’s not like Auntie and Uncle were smooching or anything, but the way they radiate love—tender but solid—feels way too private for me to be standing there gawking at them like a crane.

Uncle clears his throat. “I can run to the store, but let me put samples away first.”

Together we pull the kayak far onto the shore, and I help lift and carry it to the yard.

We set it down by the shed, and Auntie brushes sand from her hands. “Alex, can you get the car keys while I help Matthew gather the samples?”

“Sure.” I skip past the sitting logs and Uncle’s boat to the screen door under the blossoming plumeria tree and slip inside. The scent of flowers follows me inside, but as I venture deeper into the house across the linoleum floor, the aroma of steamed rice mingles with a savory BBQ dish that makes me drool almost as much as Sarge.

In the living room, an aquarium with coral anemones and bright colored fish stands along the wall behind the couch with a whole school of colors. You’d think he’d get enough fish-time with an entire ocean in his backyard without bringing some ocean inside too, but I guess not.

Beside the lanai side door, Auntie’s key rack perches like a cuckoo clock on the wall with a triple stacked roof on top. On the front, a carved map of Japan decorates the Barbie-sized double doors that hide the rows of key hooks inside.

Key fobs make it easy to tell which keys are for cars, but other keys hang beside them. Little silver keys for filing cabinets, a short key for a mower, house or office keys, and a brass key attached to a ring with a turtle. I pluck the car key fob off the hook and close the door.

On the way past the fish tank, I kneel on the couch to watch an orange-striped clown fish and electric blue damselfish dart around the anemones and coral in a game of tag. Above them, a blue-striped emperor angelfish swims regal laps around the tank. I’m pretty sure it’s a baby ’cause the white spaces between the blue lines turn yellow when they grow up.

A statue of a Japanese building with a tiered roof like Auntie’s fancy key holder rests in the center of the tank with little silver fish darting in and out of the doors.

Once upon a time, when Dad was still in the military and Mom was working one of her first overseas jobs in Japan, my parents first met by a Japanese temple that looked a lot like that. There’s a picture of it in their bedroom. A pagoda, I think that’s what it’s called.

I push off the couch to head outside, but freeze when my brain replays the words from the lemon juice clue in Dad’s classroom: In the place where we met, a turtle holds the key.

Glancing over my shoulder at the temple-shaped key holder, I shake my head. “No way.” But when I open the door and slip the turtle keychain from the hook, it’s perfect. It fits the clue right down to the turtle keychain holding the key. And Mom made sure I’d help Uncle, didn’t she? She knew I’d be here. It’s got to be right.

With car keys in one hand and the turtle key in the other, I run out to Uncle and pass him the car fob before spinning to Auntie. “Look what I found! Do you know what it goes to?”

She turns the turtle keychain over while Sarge sniffs the back of her hand as if to see what the fuss is about. “Isn’t this yours, Matthew? I noticed it a while ago but forgot to ask about it.”

“Not mine.” Uncle shakes his head. Beside him, Sarge sneezes, flinging slobber drops all over our legs.

“I think it’s Mom’s next clue.” Too excited to care about the drool, I hold up the key to read the numbers stamped into the face. “It says, three one four. Oh! It’s pi again. The first numbers of pi are 3.1415. But what’s it go to?”

“Looks like it’s small enough to be a key to a post office box,” Uncle says.

“See?” Auntie shoos us to the car like this was the plan all along. “It’s on the way. First post office, then Foodland. Same parking lot. No problem.”

“Yeah, yeah, we go,” Uncle grumbles. “Is five minutes rest too much to ask?”

“Today, yes. Post office, then groceries. Rest after.”

We pile into the car and stop by my house to get a spare pair of glasses, which means I get to choose between black, bejeweled cat-eye glasses and blue swim goggles with yellow-tinted lenses. Dad found the sparkly cat-eye pair on sale once and thought I’d like them—he was wrong. Come to think of it, he’s the one that bought the new swim goggles too, thinking I’d use them next time I swam with him, but a layer of dust covers their original packaging on my shelf.

It stinks that I have to wear glasses when most of my friends don’t need them at all. How’s that fair? Reluctantly, I put the cat-eye pair on and look in the mirror. If I had been born a long time ago, I’d probably think they were