CHAPTER 13
Naomi
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The rice was a little burnt at the bottom of the pot, and I didn't tell Riko, because she already knew, and because the burnt part was the part I liked best. I scraped it loose with the wooden paddle while she stood at my elbow correcting my grip, then, in the very next breath, telling me I was already better at this than I gave myself credit for.
Her Kansai vowels rounded soft around every word, as they always did when she was pleased with me.
A week ago I'd have needed her to slow down and repeat half of it.
I didn't need that anymore. Somewhere in these last few days, on instinct, I'd started thinking in this kitchen instead of translating it.
Kenji came in a little after nine, in the gray henley he'd slept in, and went straight for the tea instead of sitting down to eat, which was how I'd learned to read his mornings by now.
Tea first meant his mind was somewhere else already, some meeting or some ledger or some problem he wasn't going to bring to this counter.
He set the kettle on before he even looked at me.
“I called your father back last night,” he said. “After you gave me the phone. I told him what you asked me to tell him.”
My stomach went tight and cold, the way it did lately at the word father, no matter how carefully I braced for it. “And?”
“He heard it.” That was all. No description of the shouting I was fairly sure had happened on the other end of that call.
I could see it anyway, in the careful stillness that had settled over his jaw, the particular blankness he wore only when he was holding something back on purpose, keeping it off my plate the way Riko kept the burnt rice off the top of the bowl.
He didn't hand me the mess. He handed me the outcome, folded small and finished, the only part of it he thought I needed to carry.
“He will not call this number again unless I permit it.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it enough to say it twice. “Thank you.”
He nodded once, poured the tea, and that, apparently, was the whole of the conversation about my father he intended to have that day. I let him keep it that way. Some mornings the kindest thing I could do was not ask for more than he was offering.
The rest of Saturday took on the soft ordinariness our days had begun to share.
I helped Riko fold gyoza at the counter, my pleats lopsided beside her identical rows, and she laughed without unkindness, delighted by the hand that had made them.
Kenji worked at the low table with his study door open—an invitation neither of us named.
Passing behind him with a tray, I caught him watching me instead of his papers.
When I touched my cheek self-consciously, he brushed away a smear of flour with his thumb, giving that tiny act his full attention.
Neither of us mentioned it. I thought about his thumb for an embarrassing stretch of the afternoon.
By the time the light went gold through the kitchen windows, Riko had gone home to her own apartment, and it was just the two of us and the quiet, comfortable the way a held breath is comfortable once you've stopped noticing you're holding it.
We didn't talk about tomorrow, or Yumi, or anything that mattered.
We talked about nothing. It was one of the best conversations I'd had in years.
Sunday came with a doorbell.
I heard Kenji cross the entry hall faster than I'd ever heard him move for anyone, and then a woman's voice filled the whole apartment before she'd even gotten her shoes off, bright and quick and entirely unafraid of taking up space.
It was a voice that didn't ask permission to be heard.
I liked it before I'd even seen the face that went with it.
She was tall for a Japanese woman, nearly Kenji's height even out of her low heels, dressed in a pale linen jumpsuit that looked effortless and almost certainly wasn't, small pearls at her ears, a sharp dark bob that swung when she turned her head.
She stepped out of her shoes at the genkan without breaking stride and hugged her brother hard enough that he actually rocked back on his heels, laughing, a real laugh, unguarded, the kind I'd heard out of him maybe twice since I'd come to this house.
Then she turned to me, and I felt her curiosity land on me like warm light through a window I hadn't known was open.
“So you're her,” she said, in English, looking me over the way you'd look at a painting you'd heard described for years and never actually seen. “Naomi. I'm Yumi. He didn't tell me you were pretty. He never tells me anything useful.”
“Yumi.” Kenji said it like a warning, though there wasn't a trace of heat in it.
“I'm allowed. I'm the sister.” She grinned at him, then at me, and took both my hands in hers like we'd already agreed, somewhere before this moment, to like each other.
Her hands were warm and sure and a little rough at the fingertips, a builder's hands under the polish.
“Come. Sit with me. Tell me everything he won't.”
We had tea in the room with the low black table and the single red cushion, Kenji folded into the corner with a folder he wasn't really reading, Yumi cross-legged across from me like we'd known each other for years instead of minutes.
I poured from the pot into the same chipped bowl I'd noticed my very first night in this apartment, the one mended with a crooked seam of gold running through its side like a scar somebody had decided to be proud of instead of hide.
Yumi's eyes caught on it before I'd even finished pouring, and something in her face went quiet.
“That was our mother's,” she said.
“I know. He told me once. Whose it was.”
“He doesn't tell people things.” She looked at me a beat too long, measuring something. “He told you.”
I didn't have an answer ready for that, so I let it sit between us instead of reaching for one, and Yumi let it go as easily as she'd raised it, and asked me instead about my work.
I told her: pediatric cardiology mostly, sometimes oncology, consent forms and trial data, the particular quiet terror of a document written so carelessly that a frightened parent could sign something they didn't fully understand.
“That's the least glamorous job I've ever heard described,” Yumi said, “and also possibly the most important one in this room. I like it. I like you already, and you haven't even told me the sad part yet.”
“What sad part?”
“There's always a sad part.” She said it like something she'd made peace with a long time ago. “Kenji told me your mother passed. When you were young.”
“Twelve.” I turned my mother's ring once around my finger before I made myself stop.
“Her name was Aiko. She was from Yokohama.
She used to make tea in a bowl just like that one and hum while she did it, off-key, and I didn't understand why until I got older.
I think it was the only way she had left of coming home, some days.
Just the sound of it. Just her hands doing something her mother's hands used to do.”
Yumi's face did something soft and unguarded.
“I was six when ours died,” she said. “I don't remember as much as he does.
I remember she used to sing while she cooked, terribly, off pitch, worse than yours I bet, and it used to embarrass him so much he'd leave the room rather than be seen enjoying it.” She smiled, small and sad at the corners.
“I think now he'd give almost anything to hear it again. Even badly. Especially badly.”
“Is that why you build things?” I asked. “Because you can't get the sound back, so you make something that lasts instead?”
Yumi paused, tea halfway to her mouth. “Nobody's ever put it to me like that before.” She set the cup down without drinking from it. “Maybe. I never thought of it as sad until just now. Thank you for that, I think.”
“I didn't mean to make it sad.”
“Everything true is a little sad,” she said, waving a hand like she was brushing the mood off the table between us. “That's not a complaint. Now, tell me something happy. Tell me what he's like when nobody else is watching.”
I looked past her, once, at Kenji, who hadn't turned a page of that folder in a good ten minutes and was pretending, not very well, that he wasn't listening to every word we said.
His phone buzzed on the table not long after, and he excused himself to the study, the door easing shut behind him.
Yumi waited exactly as long as it took for the latch to click before she stood, gathered our empty cups, and pulled me into the kitchen with her like we had unfinished business. It turned out we did.
She set the cups in the sink and didn't turn the water on right away.
“He's very changed,” she said. “You know that. I hope you know that.”
“Changed how?”
“Softer at the corners.” She said it like a fact. It landed like a compliment anyway. “He watches you eat. He's never watched anyone eat before, not once, not even our mother, and she used to try so hard to get him to notice things.”
I dried a cup that was already dry to keep my hands occupied. “I don't want to hurt him.”
“Good.” Yumi took the cup out of my hands, set it down on the counter, and squeezed my fingers instead, once, hard, like sealing something shut. “Neither do I. I like you.”
She left a little after two. At the genkan, one shoe already on, she looked past me to her brother, all teasing gone from her voice. “Nii-san, kono hito o hanashicha dame.” Brother, don't let her go.
Kenji didn't answer in words. He looked at me instead, not as though Yumi had granted him possession, but as though her warning named the choice he most wanted and refused to make for me.
Before we dressed for Meguro, Kenji asked me to come to the study. On his desk lay my passport, my phone, an envelope of yen and dollars beside a prepaid travel card, and a slim brass elevator card I had never seen before.