Colorful by Eto Mori

Author:Eto Mori
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094437
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Mom

It was a really long letter.

But for all its length, the crucial bit about the flamenco teacher was still ambiguous. You couldn’t exactly call this an absolutely honest confession. I also thought she was just pushing her own selfish excuses on me. She wrote eight pages of this stuff, but was she actually sorry for anything? It didn’t really feel like it to me.

Hey, Makoto. Are you satisfied with this? I asked my stomach, head hanging, but Makoto’s body didn’t respond. It was too late. It was even later than the mother thought, much too late to put anything back the way it was.

I bit Makoto’s lip. The thin skin ruptured and I tasted his blood. Makoto’s hand didn’t want to put the mother’s letter in the garbage can, so I left it inside a desk drawer. But that didn’t put an end to my irritation.

“So is this what you’re trying to say, then?” I promptly started running my mouth off, the second I saw her face when she came to clear away the supper dishes two hours later. I knew the words that jumped out of my mouth without any real thought weren’t going to be pretty. “Basically, you wanted something special, so you went looking for it. And you searched and searched and searched and landed on the most ordinary special thing ever, a married woman having an affair?”

The mother closed her eyes briefly and thought a moment. “I’m done with that role,” she said, finally. “Now I’m taking a hard look at the role of mother one more time.”

“Mother. The most ordinary of ordinary.”

“Extraordinary joy and sadness can come out of the ordinary every day. You let me experience both of these. I was so happy, so, so happy when you started breathing again in the hospital after you died for those ten minutes. I’ll never be able to thank those doctors and nurses enough. And I’m grateful to your father, too, from the bottom of my heart for holding me up like that when I was on the verge of madness with grief and fear.” Tears sprang up in her eyes.

“Huh.” I poured cold water on her little moment. “That selfish man?”

“Selfish?” She frowned.

“Don’t play innocent with me. You went looking for an affair because you finally got fed up with his enormous ego, right? He’s a hypocrite, only good on the outside; inside, he’s devious, unscrupulous. You were sick of him and all of this, so you went chasing after his polar opposite, that Latin guy.”

“Now, hold on a minute here. What do you mean?” The mother appeared to have absolutely zero clue what I was talking about. Her face grew serious as she argued back. “Your father is not selfish or hypocritical. He’s a good person. He’s so good, in fact, I get frustrated with him sometimes.”

“Whatever.” I wasn’t interested in a serious discussion. “I guess that’s it for your honest confession, huh?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the door. “Can you just go already?”

“Wait, Makoto.

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