Nan-Core (15 page)

“Lost some more weight, I think. But she’s doing better than I expected. And she got through most of dinner.”

“You did good. I’ll make sure to visit her soon.”

“Me, too. Best to go as many times as possible, while we
still can. So, back to what I was saying. Do you remember Gran ever calling Mom by a strange name?”

I was momentarily lost as to what he was asking, but I soon remembered something that had happened a year earlier.

“Actually, I do. Something like that happened one time I was visiting her with Mom. I think it was … Emiko? Gran was crying and then she said, ‘Emiko, is that you? Emiko, are you here?’ ”

“Right, that’s it, just the same as when I was there. Mom looked really bothered and she tried to tell Gran her name was Misako, but Gran clung to her hand, crying and saying ‘Emiko’ over and over. There were other times like that.”

“So, what you’re saying is …”

“That Emiko might be the name of Mom’s sister.”

It seemed highly probable. Gran was always getting me and Yohei mixed up. Once again I found myself in awe of my brother’s perceptiveness.

Just then, I had my own flash of insight. “This mistress you were talking about, Mom X. Do you think it’s possible she could have been Mom’s sister?”

“S-Stop looking so scary, okay? I’ll say it again: it’s just a theory. Hypothesis, conjecture, don’t forget that. As a hypothesis though? Sure, it’s possible. If anything, it seems pretty damn likely.”

The next day, a Monday, we were fortunate to have bright, pleasant weather. On days like this there was always a tendency for the dog run to get too densely-packed with dogs, so I made an effort to pull myself together and focus on work. But each time I remembered how far off next Sunday was I grew irritable and felt like snapping at the dogs prowling around me.

It was bearable only because Yohei was due to visit Maebashi City Hall the next day to pick up a copy of our old, closed family register. Checking the registers was the only way to answer the questions I had about the baby in the notebooks, the existence of the author’s sister, and about whether Dad—unlikely as it seemed—had ever been divorced. It would take too long to order the copies by post and there was a chance they wouldn’t arrive by Sunday, when I was planning to continue reading the notebooks. I needed the information before then.

Luckily Yohei liked to do odd things and had jumped at the chance to help. The cost was nothing to sneeze at—transportation, including a bullet-train ticket, meal expenses, plus payment for his labor—but at this point that seemed unavoidable.

With all these thoughts racing through my mind I kept snapping back to reality only to find that I had stopped working, which set me on edge, fearing the sharp-eyed Ms. Hosoya might question me. She approached me before lunch, when the store had quieted down a little, and said there was something she wanted to talk to me about after we’d closed up for the day.

I had a bad feeling. I wondered if she might be planning to quit. It seemed inevitable. Her pay was low, and everyone got her to do work they considered unpleasant or difficult. It wasn’t that Nachi, myself, or the rest of the staff were particularly lazy, just that she always managed to take out the garbage or clean the bathrooms before anyone else even noticed, and now everyone took such things for granted.

It had been the same when, half a year earlier, a medium-sized dog had been left, wounded, outside the cafe. The animal had likely been hit by a car. It was lying in a cardboard box, still breathing, even though its head was cracked open and one of its front legs was mangled from the shoulder down. I panicked and a part-time girl had to crouch down to keep herself from fainting. It was Nachi’s day off, and I doubt he would have been much use even if he’d been there. Ms. Hosoya, on the other hand, had picked up the blood-soaked box, put it in the cafe’s van, and driven away. I could have stopped her and done it myself but just looked on helplessly, standing rooted to the spot. I apologized when she got back, but she just smiled her usual smile, and washing her hands told me it was no problem. I never asked how she’d dealt with it. As her boss, as a man, I felt terribly ashamed for being so gutless.

In any case, her leaving would mean the end for the cafe. Of that I was certain.

It was a long afternoon. The dog run was packed and the cafe was almost at capacity, making it difficult to navigate between the tables without stepping on one of the tails lying here and there across the floor. And of course, Nachi had chosen today of all days to ask Ms. Hosoya to wash dog vomit off his work apron. I pulled him aside to quietly scold him. I told him he needed to wash his own things, asking what he’d do if Ms. Hosoya up and quit because he’d pushed his luck too far.

“She won’t quit, trust me,” he replied nonchalantly.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because she’s got a crush on you.”

“What?”

“She was quick to land that kiss on your cheek, in the middle of that chaos when Cujo knocked her over. You’ve gotta hand it to her, she’s good.”

It was an odd thing to say, though it made me briefly recall her exposed chest and the sensation of her lips landing for mere seconds on my cheek after I helped her up.

“That was just from the momentum.”

“She did it on purpose,” he said with finality, folding his arms as if to tell me to give it up. Anyone looking on would have had a hard time telling who was scolding whom.

I was too scandalized to think of a response and could only stare fixedly at Nachi’s face—a face I should have long since become familiar with. Staring at him with such intensity I noticed that he resembled a cat. His jaw was small considering his large frame, his eyebrows were thin, and his gently slanted eyes were admittedly lovely. Perhaps those eyes (or
maybe the fact everyone assumed he was the cafe owner) were the reason why he was more popular with our customers than myself or Ms. Hosoya. As far as Shaggy Head was concerned, it was clear that he was indispensable. I wondered if that meant that I was the least prominent and the most worthless of us.

Just as my thoughts were turning masochistic a thin voice called out, “Here we are!” I caught sight of a silver-haired elderly lady tottering into the cafe. She had a cane in one hand and the other held a black pug that resembled a shoddily-made purse. It was Clutch.

Practically racing over to the old lady, Nachi guided her to a table, took her cane, set it against a table, and pulled out a chair; he then proceeded to give her shoulders a light massage. It was his usual routine yet I couldn’t help but be impressed. He would give the best male escort a run for his money, and he was entirely guileless about it. The elderly lady came in almost every other day, bringing this dog that could hardly walk, and even as she said, “He’s just happy to see the other dogs,” I knew she was really here for Nachi.

He knelt on the floor and tapped Clutch on the nose, and the dog rolled his eyes around to look at him. The dog pushed out a surprisingly long, red tongue, licking the tip of his nose where Nachi’s finger had been, but still appeared to be disinterested in nibbling the finger of anyone but his mistress. Nachi looked disappointed.

“Do you want to try holding him?” the old lady asked.

“What? Can I? Really?”

“I’m sure he won’t mind, if it’s you.”

After this back-and-forth went on for a while longer the
little pug sat snugly within Nachi’s hands held clasped before his chest. The dog, which must have weighed less than a pound, looked so tiny in Nachi’s hands that it seemed like a miracle that it was alive, that its heart and lungs were working. Nachi’s expression was one of earnest concentration, a look I’d never seen on him before. Even though Ms. Hosoya was out back still hard at work cleaning vomit from his apron, I couldn’t help but smile as I watched him with the dog.

On the other hand there was a reckless part of me that didn’t mind if someone quit, or if we lost customers, or even if the cafe went belly-up; a part of me that would accept it as inevitable. It felt like there was almost nothing left of the drive I’d once had to keep the cafe going no matter how hard I had to toil for it.

Contrary to my fears, Ms. Hosoya began to speak of something entirely out of left field. Half the lights in the cafe were shut off, and we sat facing each other on opposing sides of one of the tables.

“I want you to stay calm when you hear this. It’s about Chie.”

It came without warning. She had caught me totally off-guard. All I could do was stare.

“I think I’ve worked out most of what happened.”

I continued to stare stupidly.

“To tell the truth, I’ve been visiting Okayama on my days off, several times now. I met up with Chie’s parents.”

“But … the address wasn’t on her resume.”

“No, it wasn’t. The first thing I did was try the technical school she said she graduated from.”

Knowing the office wouldn’t give out their graduates’ personal information, she had loitered around the main entrance and called out to students walking by. She was ignored by several but managed to catch the attention of a kind-looking girl. She gave the girl Chie’s full name, telling her Chie had been engaged to her son but was now missing, and that he was trying to find her. She said she wanted to know if Chie had really graduated from that school seven years ago and asked the girl for her help. The girl had promptly taken an interest and made a number of calls to her seniors, their friends, and their circle of friends beyond that, and had finally managed to confirm that a girl with Chie’s name was indeed on the list of graduates for that year. She even managed to get Chie’s address from that time.

“I still couldn’t be sure that the girl in the graduate list was really Chie. It was possible she had been using someone else’s name. When I went to the address, though, it was clear the couple there was Chie’s parents. I showed them my business card from the cafe, hoping to get them to relax, and introduced myself as a colleague of Chie’s. I told them I’d borrowed a large sum of money from Chie and was looking for her so I could repay her. It was a weak excuse but they believed it. They didn’t seem suspicious at all.”

At that point my head was crammed so full of questions that I felt I was on the verge of losing control. “Wh-Why …” I didn’t know where to start.

“It would appear that she has gone back to her husband.”

“Husband?”

“She was already married. I didn’t believe it at first, but her parents showed me photos from the wedding. Her husband
owns the construction company she worked for right after graduation. Her parents said he had just taken over the business from his father, that he was young but already doing quite well for himself by the time they were engaged. It didn’t last long, though. It turned out he hid the fact that the business was starting to fail. He also had a gambling addiction and bet on anything from bike races to horses. Of course, Chie didn’t know any of this when they wed.”

“Where is she now?”

“Her husband rents an apartment in Osaka. She’s with him.”

“Where in Osaka?”

“They wouldn’t say. They wanted me to leave her be. They said they’d take the money for her if I really wanted to pay her back.”

“This is ridiculous. I have to see her, talk to her, for any of this to make sense. Why did she hide all this? Why did she suddenly go back to him?”

“I asked the same of her parents. They refused to tell me on the grounds that it’s a family matter. I persisted in asking why, but they only said that the situation couldn’t be helped and that an outsider wouldn’t understand the circumstances anyways.”

We fell silent, with nothing to do but look at each other. The shock was so great it didn’t register as real.

“Ms. Hosoya, why did you—”

“I’m sorry for being so meddlesome.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“The cafe’s in trouble if you don’t get back the money you gave her, right? If that’s the case then I had to do something.
I don’t want to lose my job here. This job suits me, and surely you know how hard it is to get a new one at my age.”

I found it hard to believe she’d tracked down Chie’s family merely for her own selfish reasons, but I chose not to argue the point. I wasn’t the only one suffering due to Chie’s disappearance. That realization came as a great comfort.

On the day I’d put up a help wanted poster before Shaggy Head opened, Ms. Hosoya had been the only one to respond right away. She and Chie had seemed to get along famously right from the time the three of us had sat down for an informal interview. A divorcée, the way Ms. Hosoya handled herself gave the impression that she’d overcome hardships during the course of her life. I imagined she might have a daughter, possibly around Chie’s age. I didn’t know if she had died or they’d become estranged, but I had wondered if Ms. Hosoya hadn’t projected her feelings for her daughter onto Chie.

There was one event in particular that happened a few months before Chie vanished that led me to suspect Ms. Hosoya’s maternal feelings. Chie had bent over a table to deliver some drinks only to have a man grope her jeans-clad backside. The offender was a middle-aged man with a Shih Tzu. I had come out to loudly protest his actions when Ms. Hosoya appeared with a bucket of water and, without a word, without even a twitch of her eyebrows, dumped it over his head. I had been genuinely surprised. Yet her attachment to Chie was evident even without such a demonstration. It was evident in casual everyday gestures like the way she would redo Chie’s hair when it came loose, or rub anti-itch cream on her hands and feet when she had insect bites.

“Thank you. Really. You did well in finding them.” My head dipped in a heartfelt bow. I felt wretched for having merely wallowed in my grief, for not having come up with a well-laid plan of action like she had.

“But the most important bit, Chie’s whereabouts—”

“I’ll go and talk to her parents.” I had to convince them to tell me where Chie was, whatever it took. If possible, I wanted to rush to Okayama right there and then.

“That’s a bad idea.” The rebuff came without pause. She must have anticipated I’d say something like that. “Boss, you have to think. Think how upsetting it would be for them if another man turned up now. It would just toughen their resolve not to speak.”