Post Office on the Tokaido by Greta Gorsuch

Post Office on the Tokaido by Greta Gorsuch

Author:Greta Gorsuch [Gorsuch, Greta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gemma Open Door
Published: 2019-06-08T12:26:55+00:00


Chapter Ten

On Sunday morning Siya slept in a little later. She had spent all Saturday afternoon unpacking her boxes. Now she had her computer set up. She hung all of her clothes in her small closet. She had found her warm slippers. Now that the weather had turned cold again she was glad to have warm feet. She had found her reading lamp and plugged it in next to her bed. Her father had sent a large box with a rice cooker, a few glasses, some plates, and a pan for warming soup in. This morning Siya needed to buy some food for her tiny kitchen.

She knew there was a supermarket nearby. She had seen it on the way to work. It was just beyond Tokiwa Park, where she turned left on Shindori. Siya put on her coat and boots. Then she walked fifteen minutes to the supermarket. She thought about taking the tall and noisy black bicycle. But she wasn’t sure she could ride on it with heavy bags from the supermarket. It didn’t have a basket. It was a boy’s high school bicycle.

Now that the rainy weather was gone it was clear, cold, and windy. The late morning sun was bright. Siya could clearly see the high green mountains to the south, to the west, and to the north of the city. The Pacific Ocean was to the east. The sky was blue and empty there.

In the supermarket she found a small bag of rice, some oil, some soy sauce, and some other small things. She found some apples on sale and some vegetables for making salads. By the time she was done she had three heavy bags. She carried them home and made some lunch. When her mother lived in Fukuoka City, she had made many different kinds of food. She made Indian food, which Siya loved. She had started to make Japanese food when Siya started junior high school. She made a box lunch for Siya nearly every morning. After Prema left Japan, Siya and her father learned to cook together. Some of their meals were pretty terrible. They burned the fish or overcooked the vegetables. Their scrambled eggs were like pencil erasers. But after Siya found a cookbook at a used bookstore, their meals started to taste better.

At 1:00 p.m., Mrs. Nakano knocked on Siya’s door. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Is the kitchen all right?”

“It seems OK,” said Siya. She pointed to the dishes she had just washed.

“Well,” said Mrs. Nakano, “are you ready to find a bicycle for yourself?”

Siya was, indeed. She didn’t want to ride around on a boy’s high school bicycle. People turned around and looked because it was so noisy. So the two women walked ten minutes away. There, Mrs. Nakano pointed out two bicycle shops. They were right across the street from each other. “They’re owned by two brothers,” said Mrs. Nakano. “They had some kind of fight years ago. Over the bicycle shop their father left them. And then they opened their own shops.



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