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“What about you, Els?” I asked her. “What will you do now?”
She turned back to me and straightened her shoulders. “Take care of you, that’s what. I told Masumi I would, and I plan to keep my word. Don’t you worry.”
I snorted. “When would you have told her that? Before or after the car hit her?”
A jerk on my tie forced me to look down again. Elsie was a little thing, but she was strong.
“Xavier Sato Parker,” Elsie enunciated clearly, using all three of my given names, even the last one I hated. “If you think there is any chance your blessed mother would leave you in this world alone and penniless without a single person to care for you, my boy, you’ve got another thing coming. You will absolutely finish your studies, and you will do your very best. You were the center of your dear mum’s world, and the only thing she ever wanted was for you to make something of yourself, more than she could. So I am not going anywhere.”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut, feeling a bit like an awkward crocodile. “W-what—how?”
Elsie sighed, looking a bit resigned. “I didn’t want you to worry about it all just yet. When I started helping Masumi with the accounting, she insisted we set up a separate trust for you. It’s not very big, but it’s enough to give you something, my love. Enough to hold off a disaster.”
She told me how much was in the account, and not for the first time, I thanked my ancestors that Elsie had taught Mum English all those years ago. It wasn’t a fortune by any means, but it was enough to pay Emmanuel and keep the lights on until I took my A-levels and figured out what to do with the place. It was enough to keep my home.
“Ch-Christ on a bike, Els,” I croaked. It was all I could manage. “I didn’t know.”
The hand on my tie reached up to stroke my face again. It was hard not to cry. That’s exactly what Mum did the last time I saw her. Right before she went out for groceries and never came back.
“You weren’t meant to, sweetheart,” Elsie said kindly. “Now come on. Time to return to reality. Can’t sit up here squawking at the birds forever.”
As if in agreement, the finch gave a loud chirp from the other end of the roof, then flew off into the gray.
I followed Elsie down the flight of stairs and through the landing into the living room with its secondhand furniture and cracked tile. I tried to get it as neat as I could without Mum’s help, but of course, Elsie came in with a cart of cleaning sprays to finish the job. I was glad she did. This morning, the place had been packed with neighbors. Now, though, only a few well-wishers remained.
Emmanuel was busy cleaning the kitchen, despite the fact that he wasn’t getting paid for it today. He nodded with a wink, as if to say,Don’t worry, I got this.
I turned to the small sitting room with the old, flowered sofa Mum and I had dragged up here from the curb when I was ten and the furniture she thrifted from the local Oxfam when I was a baby. The only people left were my grandfather, Kiyoshi, and my uncle Ichiro, both of whom had flown all the way from Japan. They stood together near the table I’d used as a buffet, eyeing what was left of the food like they thought it might be poisoned.
As I approached, I offered a slight bow, palms pressed together, just like Mum taught me.
“Gomen-nasai,Ojiisan, Oji,” I said in my limited Japanese. “Just needed a bit of air. Elsie said you needed something?”
My grandfather nodded with the same tired, bewildered expression he’d worn since walking into his estranged daughter’s home for the first time two days ago. I’d only met the man once before, during a week-long trip to Okazaki three years earlier. To say it was disappointing would be a massive understatement. After being branded a foreigner and a bastard here in England my entire life, I’d hoped for a bit more of a homecoming. But at thirteen, I was lanky and overgrown, already topping six feet with a face full of acne and teeth we couldn’t afford to straighten yet. My height and blue eyes already made me different—then I opened my mouth, and my stunted Japanese, learned from my mother in her few off hours and the Saturday school I practically slept through, earned only snickers and disgust.
Kiyoshi muttered something to my uncle, his default interpreter, once he realized my Japanese wasn’t great. Ichiro turned to me with a mild scowl, which seemed to be his permanent expression.
“My father, he want to know when we will go…” He frowned harder, waving his hand around like he was batting away a fly. “Put the ashes.”
“Put the…” After a second, his meaning occurred to me. “Oh, you mean spread them?”
“No, put,” Ichiro snapped. “In the temple. Where it is?”
I swallowed. “Ah…the temple?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten grief for cocking things up. Both my grandfather and my uncle had been horrified when they’d discovered I’d had Mum cremated days before they arrived instead of waiting for them. Well, it wasn’t like it had ever occurred to Masumi to educate her son about the intricacies of a Japanese funeral. Ojiisan was still a relatively young man, and Mum wasn’t exactly planning to die at thirty-six, was she? How was I supposed to know they wanted to sit in the crematorium while she turned to ash, then pass her bones around with chopsticks? At sixteen, how was I supposed to know how to do any of this?
Especially without her?
My grandfather laid a hand on Ichiro’s arm and murmured something in his ear.
Ichiro turned back to me impatiently. “My father wants to know if you have a box for the ashes for us to take. Yes?”
I swallowed. Shit. “Ah, no.”
“No?” Ichiro repeated like he was parroting an idiot bird.
“Mum didn’t want that,” I said. “In her will, that’s what she said.” At least she had that. “She does want to go home. But she asked that I bring her back to Okazaki so she could rest in the river.”
