Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Ten

“Sorry, could you cover the difference?”
“I suppose…”
The Western confectionery shop on the main road that Kai had led me to was one I walked past every day but had never once been inside.
Perhaps that was why.
Why I was sitting outside with her, pudding soft serve in hand.
“Soft serve is surprisingly expensive, isn’t it.”
“You came up to someone with two hundred yen and still had the nerve to…”
I nearly said pick them up, and looked away.
“To invite someone out when you have no money.”
“That’s not what you were going to say.”
I adjusted the position of my grocery bag beside the bench so it wouldn’t topple over.
Then I turned to face the pudding soft serve.
A waffle cone wrapped in yellow wax paper, soft serve the faint colour of pudding with caramel drizzled over it, and something biscotti-like stuck in alongside. I was rather taken with it.
“I’ll pay you back somehow next time we meet.”
“Don’t worry about it, it’s my treat.”
Pay me back somehow… it was five hundred yen. What kind of allowance situation was she working with. Her house was a mansion that no number of bakas could adequately describe, though perhaps it was precisely because of that kind of old money that they were strict about such things.
Part of why I’d agreed to come was curiosity about Kai’s home. My husband hadn’t gone into specifics, but from Kai herself, I remembered her saying before that there was no one in that house worth calling decent. What they had in common was the complete absence of anything positive. It sounded like a world I couldn’t picture.
Facing the main road, there was nothing much to see beyond the constant stream of people and cars passing in both directions.
“So why are you in your uniform?”
I deliberately asked the thing she’d said was too much effort to explain. Kai stared at her soft serve and told another lie.
“I like wearing it.”
“So you have no intention of telling me the truth.”
“All right, the real reason is that I don’t have any other clothes.”
She said it so evenly that at first I couldn’t process everything that was wrong with what I’d just heard.
“What do you mean?”
“They were burned. The clothes I used to wear to primary school, they were still perfectly wearable.”
“Burned… wait, who burned them?”
“Who indeed.”
Kai tilted her head as if to deflect the question, and licked her soft serve.
“It’s sweet.”
She let that straightforward observation fall from her face with no expression whatsoever.
“Mmm, so goood, ohhohohoh.”
Perhaps feeling obliged after I’d paid, she performed a hollow, perfunctory show of delight in my direction. But more to the point.
“…That wasn’t a joke, was it.”
“What… of course it was a lie, something like that.”
Pinching her biscotti, Kai looked over at me with wide eyes.
I looked into those eyes and felt something shake the foundations of my soul, or nearly did, but setting that aside.
Hmm, I thought, and felt a flicker of annoyance. She had lied again.
“Fine. I’m going home as soon as I finish this.”
I worked through the soft serve in determined bites. The cold was starting to sting my teeth. It was delicious, and each time that refined sweetness slid down my throat my cheeks threatened to loosen, and I held them firm.
“You’ll waste it if you don’t savour it.”
“Be quiet.”
Focusing entirely on getting the soft serve into my mouth gave its coldness something to do, settling me down.
I had been thinking that what she said might not have been a lie. That she had called the truth a lie. If it wasn’t a lie, then it made no sense, but. Burned… having your clothes burned, what did that mean. Some kind of ritual. As harassment it was wildly extreme. And who would do something so cruel in the first place.
Someone in the house, which meant… parents? Siblings? Whoever it was, they fit none of my definitions of family. Of course my definitions weren’t the world’s. But a family that burned clothes… that wasn’t something the majority of people could claim to know.
I stole glances at Kai and bit into the cone. The soft serve had melted just enough to mix in, the contrast in textures making it a satisfying kind of delicious.
Come to think of it, when had I last eaten soft serve outside like this.
“Young mum.”
Kai said it suddenly, directed at me.
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought that’s how we might look, sitting side by side.”
“…Well, being taken for young is no bad thing.”
“Oneé-san, where do you live?”
“You know perfectly well.”
Oh, that’s right, she murmured with a straight face, and I laughed despite myself.
Eating soft serve and chatting with my daughter’s friend… there was nothing about this situation that didn’t feel strange.
“What’s your name?”
Kai asked the question while gnawing at the cone with her front teeth.
“Isn’t this a persistent chat-up.”
“I was taught by the person who raised me that you keep pressing forward until you see the corner of their eye twitch.”
“Whoever taught you that has a very precise sense of when to quit.”
The person who raised me. The phrasing snagged at me. Did she perhaps come from a home without parents. My questions about the Chitaira household and the girl who lived in it, far from being resolved, were swelling like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering more of my attention as they went. But what was certain was that there was a middle school girl eating soft serve in front of me right now. And that second-year middle schooler had eyes unlike anyone else’s, one of a kind, absolute.
“Oh, I’m Chitaira Kai, by the way.”
“I know that.”
An unsolicited self-introduction, offered as a prompt. And you are?
It wasn’t a name worth hiding or making a performance of withholding, but something about giving it to her freely felt like resistance. She had a way of pushing into your space, this girl. Unknown quantity, or perhaps… the feeling of her pressing into my life.
With the unsettled feeling of two celestial bodies drawing closer together than was wise, I said my name.
“Amamiya. Setsu.”
“Setsu?”
“Written with the character for snow. Setsu.”
Someone had once told me it was an old-fashioned sound to a name. I thought so myself.
“Yuki… snow.”
Kai murmured it and turned her free hand palm-up.
A gesture like catching imaginary snow that wasn’t falling.
“People must often read it wrong.”
“…They do.”
That was all she had to say about my name, and Kai dropped her eyes back to the soft serve.
“This soft serve is good, isn’t it.”
“It is.”
With Kai’s small mouth, the soft serve looked likely to melt before she could finish it.
I finished first, and for some reason waited beside her in silence while she ate hers. With no clear idea of why I was waiting, the lingering pleasure of the soft serve lending the moment a gentle ease, I found myself in a mood that was, strangely, not bad at all. The air on the main road with its stream of cars was rarely something I’d call refreshing, but right now it was, quite agreeably, cool.
The lightness of having set down something I’d been carrying, just for a moment, felt good.
A member of staff kindly came out to collect the wax paper when we were done. Wiping the melted soft serve from my fingers, I looked at Kai. In the end I hadn’t managed to ask directly about her home. All I’d learned was what the soft serve tasted like.
Next time the family went out, it might be nice to come here together.
“Well then, goodbye.”
“Thank you, Yuki-san.”
“Hmm… pardon?”
I’d been about to part with a light farewell when something unexpected attached itself to it and my head snapped back up mid-bow. Kai walked away toward the station still smiling, without correcting herself even once.
Deliberately mispronouncing someone’s name and laughing about it.
“Well. How about that. Well.”
With each word I said aloud, I had the illusion of steam escaping from my ears. The corner of my eye was not twitching, it was entirely my imagination. Bearing in mind that she was fourteen, I responded as the adult in the situation.
“Rotten little brat.”
I promptly revised the assessment I’d given my husband, and went home.

---

My husband had called me clever. He’d said the same thing years ago.
Looking back at my husband’s affection, there was no deception in it, which meant I might genuinely have been a sharp-minded person. Perhaps that was what had drawn him to me. Perhaps that had been the appeal.
And if that was true of my husband, then perhaps if I became a fool, I would stop being someone he found worth looking at.
The answer to that would need a little more time to reveal itself.