Chapter 8: My Mother's Question

Kaname opened the door of 4101 in shirtsleeves, with a kitchen towel over one shoulder.

There was smoke behind him.

A thin grey ribbon of it drifted across a living room.

Chiaki's mother looked at the smoke, then at him, then at her daughter.

"This is Kaname Tsukishiro," Chiaki said. "Kaname, my mother."

He bowed. Properly, deeply, the towel sliding off his shoulder.

"Thank you for coming all this way. I'm afraid I've burnt the fish."

"Have you," her mother said.

She walked past him into the kitchen without taking off her coat.

Chiaki heard the grill drawer slide open, a pause, and then her mother's voice, very calm.

"Young man. Was this mackerel?"

"It was."

"It isn't anymore."

He stood in his own hallway looking at Chiaki with an expression she had never seen on him at the negotiating table.

Pure fear.

"You told me you could cook," she whispered.

"I said I could follow a recipe. The recipe was wrong."

"The recipe was wrong?"

"It said medium heat. It didn't say whose medium."

Her mother took her coat off at last, folded it over a dining chair, and rolled up her sleeves.

"Potatoes," she said. "Onions. Is there beef?"

There was beef, and there was everything else.

His refrigerator was full of beautiful ingredients still in their hotel-kitchen wrapping, labelled by date.

"Who stocks this?" Chiaki said.

"Room service. On Mondays." He paused. "I mostly eat the monaka."

Her mother put a knife in his hand and a potato in the other.

"Peel," she said. "Then cut it in four. Not three. Four."

Chiaki sat at the counter and watched the Ice Wall peel potatoes under her mother's eye.

He did it with terrible precision.

Each quarter came out exactly the same size.