The drawer always stuck in the same place, two fingers’ width from closing, as though it refused to accept that anyone was finished with it.
Mizuki pulled it out again, braced her palm beneath the wood to take the weight, and tried holding it at a slight angle. A row of screws rolled toward the back. The smallest escaped, bounced on the tatami, and disappeared under the sideboard.
“There,” her mother said. “Your father’s getting his revenge.”
“He would’ve used a Phillips-head screw. That one’s a flathead.”
Fumiko looked up from her box without quite smiling. At sixty-nine, she still had a way of making it clear that a joke did not require anyone to stop what they were doing. She folded an old dish towel, set it in the box marked GIVE AWAY, and went back to sorting.
The house smelled of cold wood, roasted tea, and disturbed dust. Outside, a delivery truck had just gotten stuck in the narrow street. The driver was talking to someone in a patient voice, then a less patient one. A bicycle bell rang twice. In the room, objects changed hands by the pile: keep, give away, throw out, ask Yui.
Mizuki hated the fourth pile.
“Ask Yui,” she repeated, reading the label. “We might as well have one that says ‘ask the emperor.’”
“The emperor would answer sooner.”
This time, Fumiko smiled.
The little six-drawer cabinet had always stood by the window. In this house, at least. The varnish had turned white around the handles, and the second drawer bore a round burn left by a soldering iron. Hiroshi Senda kept things in it for repairing what a reasonable person would have thrown away: buttons, springs, wires, scraps of leather, unmatched hinges, dried-out tubes of glue he swore were still good.
In the other life Mizuki remembered, there had been seven drawers.
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