After school ended around noon, I stopped by the supermarket to buy some things Mom had requested—vegetables and seasonings mostly. After that, I headed straight home.
That evening, our family would be having a combined Christmas-birthday party, and Mom had taken the day off to make dinner. I wanted to get home as soon as I could to help out.
I opened the now-familiar door to our apartment and took off my loafers.
“I’m home!”
“You’re back early. Welcome home.”
It was only a little past noon, and Mom was already in the kitchen.
“I’ll help,” I said.
“Oh? I can manage on my own. You relax and get some rest.”
I can’t let you do all the household chores by yourself, Mom. But I kept that thought to myself. Instead, I said, “It’s fine. I’m not tired. Here’s the stuff from the supermarket,” and placed the items I’d bought on the dining table.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll go get changed first. Be right back.”
“So stubborn. I wonder who you take after.”
You, of course. I didn’t say that, either, and dashed off to my room.
Once I was ready, I ran back to the kitchen.
“What are you preparing? What’s the menu for tonight?”
“It’s Christmas, and we’re also celebrating Yuuta’s and your birthday, so it’s a little extravagant. We’re having rice, miso soup, and meat.”
Isn’t that what we usually have?
“Look. Can you believe it? This is the meat!” She opened the fridge triumphantly.
Whoa! That thigh meat is huge! Chunks of it were stuffed into a vacuum-sealed plastic container.
“That isn’t chicken…is it?”
“It’s turkey.”
“Where did you get it?”
Some supermarkets sold duck meat, but turkey was a rarity outside a certain famous theme park. And here it was, giant chunks of it, in our refrigerator.
“Is this precooked?” I asked.
“It would be hard to cook this much meat from scratch. I have recipes for roasting it whole, but that would still take a lot of time and effort… I’d have to thaw it for three days, prepare for it in advance, stuff it, truss it… It’s delicious, but it takes a lot of effort. If I was making it for our customers, I could do the preparations at work, but finding that much time at home would be tough.”
“Y-yeah, that does sound like a hassle.”
“So that’s why we got it preroasted. Taichi bought it online, and it just arrived. We only need to heat it, and we’re all set,” Mom said as she closed the refrigerator door.
“Then we can save the meat for last. Okay… What else?”
“Rice, salad, and miso soup.”
“What? You’re starting now? Isn’t it a little early?”
“No, silly.”
Then what are you doing in the kitchen?
“Hi, Ayase. I see you’re back.”
At the sound of another voice, I turned around to find Asamura coming out of his room.
“Oh, hi.”
“Akiko, you’re up. You’re already starting dinner?”
“Well, I was thinking of cleaning the kitchen first.” She turned to Asamura and pointed at the kitchen.
Oh, right, it’s time for the end-of-the-year cleaning.
“I’ll help,” Asamura said.
I joined in immediately. “I’ll help, too.”
“Oh my. You really don’t need to, but if you insist. Thank you.”
Mom laughed, but I know how tough it can be to clean a kitchen. Stains from oil and grease are difficult to remove once they’ve settled into a surface.
“Oh, but this kitchen’s actually pretty clean,” I muttered as I looked at the walls.
“Well, Dad and I hardly ever used it before you two moved in.”
“Cooking oil was the first thing I bought after we moved in,” Mom said. “You didn’t even have any.”
Of course. You didn’t get grease stains if you didn’t cook with oil. And now that I thought about it, Asamura always looked anxious when I made tempura. He must have never fried anything at home before.
“I was thinking of cleaning the exhaust fan today,” said Akiko. “I think it’ll be a piece of cake this time.”
“It’s usually a lot of work,” I said, thinking back.
Asamura flashed us a wry smile. “I never imagined you could make stuff like tempura at home.”
“Oh, Asamura…of course you can.”
“I know that now.” He chuckled and said he’d like to try it sometime. It could be dangerous for a beginner, though, so I resolved to keep an eye on him.
I guess Mom’s right… It won’t be so bad this year.
We usually had to take out the filter and soak it in the bathtub in detergent, then soak paper towels in cleaning solution and plaster them all over the tiles around the stovetop. Maybe we wouldn’t need to do any of that this year. That would make things easier.
“You see?” said Mom. “It won’t be that hard at all.”
“But if all three of us work together, it’ll be done even faster,” I protested.
Mom sighed. “Okay, let’s get it over quickly so we can start preparing dinner.”
I nodded, and so did Asamura.
We finished cleaning the kitchen in a couple of hours.
After taking a snack break, Mom and I began preparing dinner. She turned down Asamura’s offer to help, saying it had been a while since she’d cooked with me. After that, he reluctantly went back to his room.
About two hours later, we finished making the miso soup and salad.
It wasn’t particularly seasonal, and I thought it seemed rather light. But Mom told me that Dad was buying a Christmas cake on his way home.
A cake after dinner?! I’m definitely gonna gain a few pounds… In that case, a light meal made sense.
After that, Mom grabbed the cabbage and cucumbers I’d gotten from the store. She sliced them up, put them in a plastic bag, and began shaking it. It looked like she was pickling them.
Isn’t today Christmas? I guess it’s also a birthday celebration… Still, a pickled side dish for a birthday party? Isn’t that a little strange?
“What’s the matter, Saki? Your face looks all weird.”
“I must have inherited it from you.”
“Then maybe you’ll meet a cool guy like Taichi one day, just like I did.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
After divorcing my birth father, Mom had been reluctant to get married again. Maybe she had just been more cautious. Things were different now, but I didn’t remember her ever talking about men or dating at home when I was growing up. Maybe she’d stopped dating entirely.
She’d had a bad experience with my birth father, and she must have seen a lot of sloppy, drunken men at work. Maybe she’d become more distrustful of men.
After she decided to get remarried, she’d only brought up my birth father once. We’d been reflecting on the past, when she finally said, “It’s hard to get along with other people.”
She’d taken off work and was drinking at home. I recalled thinking it was very unusual for her as I silently watched her swish around the liquid, making the ice clink against the glass.
“It didn’t work out between the two of us. But maybe there’s someone out there who really needs him.”
“You think so?”
“That’s life. Nobody is a perfect match for everyone. You know what young people say about liking different teen idols, right?”
I’d never heard that before.
“So this, uh…Mr. Asamura, was it? Are you sure you’ll get along with him?” I asked.
“I think so. For now, at least.”
“For now…? Are you really sure you want to marry him, then?”
“I’m not confident enough to say we’ll be fine forever. I thought it’d be fine last time, and it wasn’t. But I think it will last at least until you get married and join some young man’s family or he joins ours.”
What was she going to do if neither of those things happened?
“What made you decide to get married again?”
“Maybe because he and I have experienced the same pain.”
“Oh… So it’s Mr. Asamura’s second marriage, too?”
“Yep. At the very least, I don’t think the same thing will happen again, though that might be wishful thinking. But if you want to change your life, even a little, you have to keep moving forward, even if it isn’t clear what lies ahead.”
Is that how life is? I wondered. It felt like we were talking about other people’s lives, not our own.
What was marriage about anyway? I had never seriously thought about it, and since I’d never experienced it, I certainly couldn’t see it from Mom’s perspective.