Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Page B

Meta turned her back on Yuka’s door. She had a hand on the knob of her own door when the one behind her opened.
    It was Kazuhiro, Yuka’s seventeen-year-old son. Kazu looked much more relaxed and confident than he usually did. He was taking some time off school. This was his final year to prepare for university entrance. A solid A student for most of high school, he had brought back his report card in January with the news that he’d failed everything.
    Yuka had called the school for an explanation, and discovered that Kazuhiro had done well all term, handed in assignments, listened attentively to lectures, and taken notes. He’d shown up for every exam at the end of the term and left every exam paper blank. He had not even put his name on the papers. Teachers had guessed which had been his through a process of elimination.
    Kazuhiro’s father, Yuka’s late husband, had been a highly placed salaryman in a Japanese pharmaceutical company. He’d barely been in their apartment while the boy was awake, his own life had been so subsumed in the company, but he’d died several years ago from what the doctors at the time had called a heartattack, but everyone at his workplace had recognized as
karoshi
, death from overwork. The father had been a graduate of Todai, Tokyo University, perhaps the most distinguished, highly ranked university in the country. Kazuhiro idolized the memory of his father, and he so wanted to pass the Todai entrance exams himself that he had paralyzed himself with anxiety over his studies.
    He was home now on the advice of the family doctor, who’d prescribed two weeks of rest for him, completely away from school. No books, no studies allowed.
    Kazuhiro stood in the doorway, his eyes dark. His mother was having an affair with a gaijin, a Caucasian British man who, in his late twenties according to Yuka, must have been ten years younger than she. Meta had never met him, and Yuka had taken great care to keep the affair a secret from her son, who had been terribly affected by the death of his father. But people find things out that they’re not supposed to know, and in Kazuhiro’s blank gaze, Meta always felt accused, somehow partially responsible in a racial or genetic way for the frustration of all that remained unspoken in the apartment across the hall.
    “Mama-san wa?” she said simply.
    “Imasen.” No offer of explanation. No apology.
    “Imasen desu ka?” a stupid repetition of what the boy had just said.
    “Eh,” the boy replied. He closed the door.
    It was too late now. She couldn’t cancel right at five o’clock when Yuka showed up on time. In her kitchen, she ran water into a kettle and sparked a gas burner to life beneath it. She sat at the table and looked out the window to the narrow street below. Behind the translucent glass of the little print shop across the way, she could see the computerized equipment flipping, waving,and jerking. The people who worked there flashed between and around the machines, adding paper, making adjustments, replacing small components. Seven days a week, sixteen or eighteen hours a day, they went at it back there.
    The boys who’d been playing catch a short while ago had vacated the street, leaving it looking empty and cold.
    At a little past five, the kettle whistled. It wasn’t like Yuka to be late. On the street below, the son of the old couple who owned the noodle shop at the corner went past on his motor scooter, a spring-mounted tray loaded with big bowls of soup swinging to and fro from a gooseneck hook at the back of the bike. Meta’s mouth watered. She should have eaten.
    The electronic doorbell buzzed angrily. Meta looked at her watch. Twelve minutes after. When she opened the door, Yuka began apologizing from the corner of a swollen mouth.
    “Oh, Yuka,” Meta said. She put a hand on Yuka’s shoulder. Yuka winced away from her touch.
    “Sorry to be late,” she said.
    Meta looked over Yuka’s shoulder to her apartment door. “You’d