Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [36]
When he first saw the price tag, he gave up hope of ever owning it. Less than two months after Saga III came out? No way could he save up that much money. Maybe Katchan could swing it. He might be able to save enough from his allowance in two months to buy the game. His parents were always busy with work, and they gave him a big allowance in an attempt to make up for the time that they couldn’t spend with him. They were never overly vigilant about the content of the games that he bought either.
But there was one major hurdle to overcome. Katchan hated action games. RPGs were all he ever played.
“Bionic Road? Never heard of it. The hero’s a cyborg? You gotta fight alien invaders and save passengers stranded in a colony ship?” Katchan made it sound like a chore. Wataru had tried his best to sell his friend on the game, but it was like talking to a wall. “What, you can’t even use magic?” Katchan had asked, incredulously. When Wataru had admitted that, yes, you couldn’t, the discussion was over. As far as Katchan was concerned, a game without magic was like peanut butter without jelly. Wataru’s plot to convince Katsumi Komura to buy Bionic Road and let him borrow it or play it at his house seemed dead from the start.
I really need to get some money, Wataru had brooded. It was just then that his uncle made him the offer: “Do you want to come here for all of August? If you can do some work, I can pay you for it.”
“Work? I can work!”
Wataru immediately launched a campaign to convince his parents to let him go. At first Akira and Kuniko had strong reservations about letting their son be away from home for so long. “A couple of weeks, maybe, but a whole month? I don’t know,” his father had said.
“Out of the question!” his mother chimed in. “If you spent your entire vacation playing at your grandmother’s, you’d never finish your summer homework.”
“I’ll finish all of my homework in July! It’s just a bunch of worksheets. And a journal, and an essay—but I can do those in Chiba.”
“What about growing those morning glories for your science class?”
“That’s even easier to do in Chiba! Mom, you said yourself that you don’t want them on our balcony ’cause of the caterpillars!”
That one gave her pause. Kuniko did hate caterpillars. In her mind, they were already creeping up the morning glory vines and shuffling over to the laundry that she would be hanging out on the balcony (because they didn’t have a dryer), leaving tiny caterpillar footprints wherever they went. Every summer that Wataru had to raise morning glories for science class there would be at least one incident in which his mother, having found one of the little critters getting comfortable in her sheets and pillowcases, would shriek loud enough to earn a few raised eyebrows from their neighbors.
His father was a tougher nut to crack.
“Even if it’s for family, I still think you’re too young to be working. You’re in elementary school! You need to wait…at least until middle school.”
“But Uncle Lou said I could!”
“And your father is saying you can’t. You’re still just a child and shouldn’t be working for money.”
It looked like a hopeless case. No matter what he said, no matter how much he begged, the answer was always the same. You’re too young. Wataru almost gave up hope. Each and every day, all he thought about was how to change his father’s mind, and what he might possibly say to help the situation. He even lost sleep obsessing over it.
And then, during a late-morning breakfast on the last Sunday in June, from behind his father’s newspaper came the answer he wanted: “Wataru, you can spend your summer vacation with your grandmother and uncle if you want.” Out of the blue, just like that. Not the bitter denouement of weeks of haggling and pleading, but a casual comment, as though he were asking Wataru to pass the salt. Wataru