she has been sneaking off to meet him.

Hearing her mom's story, either from teenage selfishness or trying to redirect the focus, she asks about her "brother," not about her mother's feelings.

Rosie's mother grabs her by the wrists really hard. Rosie is shocked, as her thoughts had already started to drift off to Jesus. Her mother demands that she promise never to marry, and Rosie does. Then, after a pause, her mother touches and hugs her.

Rosie is still enough of a child to think first of herself and her imagined sibling first and to want to get her mother off her by agreeing to anything. But of course her mother is seeing her own path anticipated in Rosie's nascent sexuality. "Marriage" means settling for someone you don't love because of impossible love and a lost baby. This she does not wish on Rosie, who cannot imagine this scenario could be hers. Knowing that Rosie is lying— she could already have slept with the boy—her mother waits a few seconds before giving her a hug.

After Rosie's father burns the prize painting her mother has just won for her haiku poetry, Rosie's mother bitterly reveals her past - her hurts and pains - to Rosie.  Rosie learns that her mother loved another man but could not marry him because she was from a poor family, that her mother gave birth to a stillborn son (the son of the man she loved), that her family was ashamed of her, that she had no hope for a life of happiness in Japan, and that as a result of all this, she turned to her aunt to arrange a marriage for her in America so that she could find a life outside Japan.

In America, she found a husband who, for the most part, has been good to her and provided a stable life for her and Rosie, but it is not the life she dreamed of, and he is not a man she has deeply loved or who has made her truly happy.  Discovering her talent for haiku has brought her the first true happiness she has experienced in a long time - but it has come at the expense of time with her family and her husband's comfort, and that leads him to the injurious action he takes.

When she sees her prize - as well as her future joy in writing haiku - destroyed, she feels nothing but bitterness toward her husband.  She urges Rosie to promise never to marry.  When Rosie doesn't immediately agree, but instead looks away, thinking of Jesus - the young man for whom she has recently developed an affection - her mother turns away with a mixture of helplessness and frustration.  She wants to save her daughter from the pain and unhappiness of a "repressed" life, but her daughter is not ready or willing to listen to her advice.  Rosie does not see wisdom in her mother's words, only an unfair and burdensome request, and her mother feels disregarded as a result.

When Rosie tries to smooth things over to win back her mother's affection, she gets a delayed response - "the embrace and consoling hand come much later than she expected" - and she sees that her mother is disappointed in her.  This shows that her mother's unhappiness and disappointments through the years have caused her to create barriers to protect herself from too much personal intimacy, and that while she will always ultimately be there for Rosie, even with her daughter a kind of barrier exists to true communion. 

Tome has just won first prize in a competition for a haiku she submitted to a Japanese newspaper in San Francisco. The editor of the paper drops by her house and presents her with a landscape portrait. Insanely jealous of his wife’s success, Tome’s husband drives the editor out of his house and, when he’s gone, angrily burns and destroys the portrait. This is just the latest example of abusive behavior that Tome’s had to endure.

Tome’s marriage has seldom been a very happy one, largely because it was an arranged marriage, not a love match. The marriage took place when Tome was emotionally vulnerable, not long after Tome had been betrayed by her lover in Japan. Not surprisingly, Tome’s experiences have inculcated in her a deep distrust of men, which she hopes to instill in her daughter. Though there’s nothing much she can do to change her past, she can at least try to make sure that her daughter Rosie has a much brighter future ahead of her.

As Tome doesn’t want Rosie to end up in an abusive marriage like hers, she literally gets down on her hands and knees and begs her not to get married. Rosie can see how desperate her mother is and goes along with her, uttering her familiar glib agreement. But it’s not as simple as that; Rosie can’t forget Jesus Carrasco that easily. Tome can almost certainly sense the lack of conviction in Rosie’s voice, which would explain why her embrace and consoling hand come much later than expected.