Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [24]
Wataru dismissed the idea as soon as he had it. Yutaro was a good kid, but would he be fun to hang out with? If he could find someone as well respected as Yutaro, and as fun as Katchan, that would be perfect.
Yutaro and Mitsuru.
Katchan and Wataru.
As he sat there in a daydream, the phone rang again. It had to be their silent caller this time for sure. Wataru snatched up the receiver.
“Mitani speaking!”
“Wataru?” It was his father.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“‘Oh, it’s you’? We need to talk about your phone manners.”
“We’ve been getting more silent calls. Mom’s getting scared.”
There was a pause. “Today?”
“Yeah, three times this afternoon already.”
Kuniko walked over and Wataru handed her the phone. He went back to sit at the table. Dinner was all laid out. He would be eating alone with his mother again tonight.
Kuniko talked for a while. He heard her agreeing to something, saying, “Very well, I’ll get it ready,” and then she ended the call with her customary, “Keep up the good work, dear.” Wataru had grown used to this habit of hers, and never given it a second thought until one day about a year ago, when a visitor came to their apartment while Wataru and his mother were there alone.
The woman was a sales lady for a cosmetics retailer. She had been in the same class as his mother in college and this was a social call—an opportunity to gossip and push some cosmetics. She was pretty enough, but she smelled too strongly of perfume, and it made Wataru’s nose wrinkle just to be in the same room. He had made some perfunctory greeting and then shut himself in his room to play video games.
His father had called that day while his mother and the sales lady were talking away. His mother had ended the phone call with her usual words of encouragement, and the sales lady had been astonished. Wataru heard her loud voice clearly through the door.
“I just don’t believe it. That was your husband, was it not? Heavens! You shouldn’t act so obsequious. We aren’t living in the Middle Ages, dear.”
“Obsequious”? Wataru had leafed through his dictionary. “Full of or exhibiting servile compliance; fawning,” it said. Now he was only slightly less confused. He heard the sales lady go on, trying to persuade his mother of this and that. He listened closely, hoping he would figure out what she had meant with her opening remarks.
“Oh, it’s good to be traditional,” she was saying, “but you can’t pamper your husband too much, or he’ll just take advantage of you. Once he’s married, it’s his duty to work and support his wife and children while you run a household. It’s a fifty-fifty partnership. There’s no need for you to act like an underling.”
His mother had laughed and said she wasn’t pampering anyone and she was pretty sure she wasn’t being taken advantage of.
“Well, you never know what he’s doing once he’s out that front door,” the sales lady replied, chuckling deep in her throat. “My husband and I, we’re very laissez-faire. I don’t interfere with his goings-on and he doesn’t interfere with mine. Why, if we didn’t have children, I’m sure we’d have split up long ago. The bonds that tie, the gags that choke, am I right?”
Wataru had the strange feeling that the more the woman spoke, the dirtier the air in the room became. It was as though her words themselves clung to the walls and the floor and the furniture that his mother had spent years polishing and made them all somehow unclean. This woman had barged in, declared the Mitani household to be a mess, and, quite uninvited, begun buffing things with her own filthy rag.
The sales lady never came back. Wataru was relieved that, apparently, his mother hadn’t liked her either.
He finished dinner and called Katchan back. This time he could hear the sound of a television blaring in the background.
“Think you could turn that down?”
“Oops, sorry.” The sound of the television faded.
“So, what’s up?”
It turned out that Katchan had run into none other than Mr. Daimatsu on his way home from school