“I heard that you quit after getting sick. Have you not recovered completely yet?”
When he asked that, Uneta smiled. His voice gradually got less tense and turned into a deep sigh. “No pulling the wool over your eyes, huh, Kajiwara?”
“I thought something was wrong the moment I saw your back bar.”
Uneta’s specialty was cocktails, yet he didn’t have liqueurs.
“The truth is, I’ve still got a little numbness in my right hand from the stroke two years ago,” the man explained as he set Keiichi’s gin and tonic in front of him, opening and closing both of his hands. It wasn’t something you’d notice from looking. “Thanks to my rehab, it doesn’t have any effect on my day-to-day life. Dunno what’ll happen next time I go down, though. That’s why my bar’s name is @TEN. Ten years left.”
“Not really something to joke about.”
“It’s not how long I have left to live but how long I can keep running the bar. I might be fine now, but if something else happens and the paralysis worsens, then that’ll be the end. Even now, I don’t think I can shake like I used to.”
The simpler the cocktail, the bigger difference that skill made. You’d know by the tiniest change. Even prepping the ice required making fine adjustments to match the customer’s tastes and the climate that day. It was because Uneta had honed his craft so much that he couldn’t get over the fact that his sensation not coming back meant he couldn’t control his movements like he used to.
“Sure, I might be able to manage one or two drinks, but I can’t make cocktails for a living as I am now.”
“Gonna have to start from scratch, then,” Keiichi joked, though his face was serious.
Uneta let out a loud laugh. “Looks like you can talk back properly now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it always looked like you never asserted yourself, and just lived letting everything roll right off of you. Maybe there was no helping it working in an environment like that.”
When Keiichi’s glass was empty, Uneta asked what he wanted next. Keiichi asked for his recommendation, and the other man pulled out a bottle of Talisker with no hesitation.
Back when Keiichi had first been assigned to the main bar, Uneta had asked him what his favorite whiskey was. Keiichi had answered “Talisker” without ever having tasted it before, because it had been the preferred drink of a famous author—that and it was the only name he knew.
He remembered something I said years ago?
Sliding a glass of Talisker cut with the same amount of mineral water in front of Keiichi, Uneta made himself a drink. Then, he walked out from behind the bar and put the “closed” sign on the door.
“So, what brought you here today? We weren’t close enough for you to want to have a chat, and you probably weren’t worried for my health. I opened my own bar, so you must’ve known I was living in my own way,” Uneta asked, sitting down beside him.
Keiichi didn’t think it was because he’d heard that Uneta had opened his own bar from Haruka. He wouldn’t have come just because of that.
“Someone I met today said I must like people.”
“I see,” Uneta said, playing with his glass.
“I meant to go to my bar, but my feet brought me here.”
“So you had something on your mind.”
Their eyes met.
If you kept people at a distance, you could live safely. Good things wouldn’t happen, but on the flip side, bad things wouldn’t happen either. If you looked down at everything, then whatever happened, whatever anyone said to you, you would stay unmoved. It was the only way Keiichi could protect his heart.
One sentence from Uneta made him start reading books differently. He’d been such an influence, and yet Keiichi hadn’t faced him. But the book impressions that he’d written had connected him to Sayaka, and he’d been led here. Why was that?
“I’d always wanted to ask: Were you the reason I could never get moved away from the main bar?”
Not only was the food and beverage department always understaffed, but being a bartender required specialist knowledge and skills. Keiichi had resigned himself to the fact that it wasn’t that simple to move positions, but he was still stuck there for a long time.
Uneta didn’t deny it, just gave him a wry smile back. “I thought you should keep on being a bartender.”
“Why?”
When Keiichi had told him that he was quitting, he hadn’t told him what he was doing next, but Uneta hadn’t tried to stop him. On his last day, they’d given each other an empty “good job” and had never spoken to one another from the heart.
“You said you wanted to cook, and I didn’t know where you’d go in the future, but whatever you did, I believed you’d need what you learned from working as a bartender,” Uneta explained. “The most important thing when dealing with people isn’t matching their mood or humoring them with clever words. It’s just facing them sincerely and wanting to know them. I didn’t want you to forget that. You were a quick learner, and everyone piled praise on you.”
“You thought I’d let that go to my head?”
“I didn’t, but I wasn’t sure. I don’t remember how long you’d been working the counter then, but do you remember when someone said, ‘Kajiwara-kun makes better cocktails, so I’ll come on the days Uneta is off’?”
“Uh, it was Okuhara-san.”
That was one of Uneta’s regulars, who would stay at the hotel at the beginning of every month because of work. Keiichi hadn’t done anything special, but Okuhara had taken a liking to him immediately.
“I told him not to compliment you yet. That’s the only advantage youth gives you, making up for what you don’t have. Once you hit a certain age, it becomes obvious that you’ll have skills. I didn’t want you to abandon what was really important.”
“Then why didn’t you just tell me that?”
“Because you’d think I was jealous of you.”
So you went ahead with the option that would leave me with a scratch on my heart? Couldn’t you have done it in another way? Keiichi wasn’t satisfied with his explanation, but it was possible that since he’d developed a habit of seeing the bigger picture, the words might not have gotten through to him.
“You told me that I wasn’t suited for this job if I wasn’t interested in people, didn’t you? I just couldn’t let that go, and I kept on thinking about it as I worked,” Keiichi said.