It was late, after midnight. Four of us, all married, all students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, were playing hearts at an apartment in Victory Village where we lived when someone opened the door and came in.
It was Chiko, Yoshihiro Tamai’s wife, our next door neighbors.
In those days, that was something a wife just didn’t do — interrupt her husband while he was playing hearts. Not unless their apartment was on fire. And a wife absolutely, positively, wouldn’t interrupt a game to tell her husband to come home.
Chiko said something in Japanese. Yoshihiro replied. She said something else and then she left, without a saying word to anyone else. I didn’t know what they had said, of course, and, from her tone and his, I couldn’t even guess.
We were about to resumed play — we were in the middle of a hand — when Yoshihiro laid his cards, face down, on the table, stood up, and said to the three of us, “Goodnight, gentlemen.” Then he left.
And the question is, what could she have possibly said that would have cause him to leave in the middle of a hand?
What, indeed.
Coming Friday: A Good Buy