My face has earned me free coffee, a discounted textbook, and exactly zero yen toward my father’s debt.
I was thinking about that at 6:31 on a rainy Thursday evening, standing under the north exit awning of Ogikubo Station. I was holding a cram-school envelope with ¥6,200 in it, which was one hour of teaching math to a ten-year-old who wanted to be a YouTuber. In my left pocket was a letter I hadn’t opened. It was from the same collections company as the last four, and I knew what it said. FINAL NOTICE. It said that every time.
¥4,380,000. That was the number my father had left us when he walked out three years ago. He took the car and a suitcase, and he left us a name that debt collectors liked to say slowly.
My reflection stared back at me from the glass of a vending machine: tall, a bit thin, dark hair that wouldn’t behave in the rain, and the kind of expression girls on campus called mysterious and my best friend called constipated.
“You look like a sad shampoo ad,” Takumi had told me that morning.
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
My phone buzzed.
Takumi: bro are u alive
Takumi: u skipped lunch again. i saw. the guy at the stall saw. the stall cat saw
Me: I ate
Takumi: u ate air
Takumi: i’m paying for ramen sat. no arguments. it’s a sacred friendship tax
I smiled despite myself. I didn’t answer. If I answered, he’d win.
The phone buzzed again.
Yui: onii-chan
Yui: don’t be mad ww
Yui: mom made you a bento and she’s bringing it to the station. she said you’d say no so she didn’t ask
Yui: she’s wearing the yellow raincoat. you can’t miss her lol
I closed my eyes.
My mother worked eleven hours a day at a bento shop and then, apparently, cooked more food for me. She had a bad back and a worse sense of boundaries. I’d told her at least ten times that I was fine, that I was eating, that she should go home and rest.
Me: I told her not to
Yui: she said “tell Ren it’s not for him, it’s for my peace of mind”
Yui: she’s so annoying. i love her
Yui: you love her too. admit it
I didn’t admit it. I didn’t have to. We both knew.
My mother’s name was Hoshina Kaori. She was forty-six, five-foot-one, and wore the same yellow raincoat I’d bought her with my first tutoring paycheck. It had cost ¥3,900, which at the time was most of a week’s food money. She’d cried when she opened the box and then spent twenty minutes telling me I was wasteful. She hadn’t taken it off on a rainy day since.
I looked across the intersection.
There she was.
A small yellow figure on the far curb in the rain, holding something wrapped in a blue furoshiki cloth in both hands, like it was an offering. She saw me and lit up like I’d just won the Olympics. She raised the bento over her head and waved it side to side.
Mom.
Half the people at the crossing turned to look. A salaryman smiled. A schoolgirl hid a laugh behind her hand.
My face went hot. My chest went hotter.
My phone buzzed.
Mom: REN!!! I CAN SEE YOU!!!
Mom: WAVE!!!!
I typed, I told you not to come.
I deleted it.
I typed, Mom, it’s raining, you didn’t have to.
I deleted that too.
What I sent in the end was just:
Me: thanks, mom
And I waved.
It was a small, stiff, embarrassed wave, the kind a nineteen-year-old gives his mother in public. But she saw it, and she laughed, and even from across the street I could see her whole face scrunch up in happiness. I’d remember that later. I’d remember it a lot.
The pedestrian light across the street was red. Cars hissed past on the wet asphalt, headlights smearing across the puddles. The clock above the station read 18:41. In my pocket, the letter sat like a stone. Tomorrow I’d deal with it. Tomorrow I’d pick up another tutoring shift and another part-time job, and I’d do the math on how many years of my life it would take.
But right now, my mother was holding my dinner in the rain and waving at me like I was the best thing she’d ever made.
Okay, I thought. Okay. Maybe I’ll let her.
The light turned green.
My mother stepped off the curb.
She was smiling. She was looking at me, not the road. She raised the bento again, as if to say look, I got here, I brought it.
I heard the engine before I saw it.
It wasn’t loud. That’s the strange part. It was just a low, wrong sound, a delivery van coming down the cross street too fast on the wet road, the driver’s face lit blue by the phone in his hand. Everything in me understood what was going to happen two full seconds before it happened.
“Mom!”
I don’t know if I actually said it. I don’t know if I moved. I think I did. I think my legs started running, but the world had gone thick and slow like I was pushing through water, and the rain hung in the air in silver threads, and I could see the exact moment her smile turned into something else.
She turned.
The van’s brakes screamed.
There was a sound I’m not going to describe.
Then there was nothing but rain.
The bento rolled across the crosswalk, its blue cloth coming loose, and stopped against the curb. Someone started screaming. Someone else was shouting for an ambulance. A woman put her hand over her mouth. The salaryman who’d smiled earlier was running toward the road.
I was on my knees. I didn’t remember falling.
The yellow raincoat was in the middle of the crosswalk, small, so small.
“Mom,” I said. It came out as a whisper. “Mom. Mom.”
She didn’t answer.
My hands were shaking so badly that when my phone lit up against my palm, I almost didn’t see it. I thought it was Yui. I thought it was the hospital, which was impossible, which was stupid, because nobody had called anyone yet. I looked down only because the light was so bright against the dark.
It wasn’t a message.
It was the Notes app.
I don’t use the Notes app. I’d never even opened it. But there it was, filling the screen, a single document with a title in plain white letters on a black background:
THE LAST RESET
Under it was a time stamp.
Today · 18:42:07
And under that, one line of text that blinked on the screen like a cursor waiting for me to answer:
Edit this moment?
I stared at it.
The rain kept falling. The screaming went on. Somewhere very far away, a siren started up.
Below the question, in smaller, thinner letters, something else was typing itself out, one character at a time:
Cost: one memory.
Not yours to choose.
My thumb hovered over the glowing button at the bottom of the screen. It said just one word.
RESET