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Mother’s Day no longer feels awkward and ill-fitting to Maki, and she supposes she should take that as an improvement. It’s long since stopped making her feel sour or melancholy or (worst) reflective. Rather than a reminder of all she isn’t, doesn’t have, and can’t be, it simply is, and is, at very worst, simply ignored. It doesn’t upset her when it’s allowed to pass without acknowledgement.
Other people don’t seem to like that.
She gets the same comment nearly every year, something about how she deserves to be celebrated, and ought to want to be. Even people who really know her insist it’s not natural to let a holiday dedicated to a role that she plays pass by without insisting that people applaud her for it. But Maki, who has even now only slipped into a shaky symbiosis with the concept of Mother’s Day in the past few years, doesn’t think that’s necessary, wouldn’t want to even if it was. It’s just a day. She has no mother of her own. Her children can do what they want, but it isn’t their job to flatter her with gifts.
Still, it’s a little annoying to be taken from the quiet late-morning breakfast that was her single indulgence for the day by the sound of somebody spamming the doorbell.
“Shin-chan,” she shouts. “Could you get that?”
No answer, though. Odd. Shinsuke always does those things when she asks.
“Shinsuke,” she tries again. “Shiiiiin.”
Seriously? How can a person sleep through that?
“Yuuta,” she tries next. “Can you-“
Whoever is at the door begins jiggling the doorknob to make extra noise. She hates that sound—makes her want to snap a chopstick in half. Isn’t sure whether to get up and put herself out of her misery or refuse to reward such impatience by answering. But the former wins soon enough.
“People,” Maki scoffs, thoroughly put-out, and then opens the door.
“Wow, I’m ‘people’ now?”
That was the last voice Maki thought she would hear, the last face Maki thought she would see, and it doesn’t look too pleased with her.
“Tsun...?”
Tsugumi’s face softens in a way that tells Maki nobody at college ever calls her by that name, no one anywhere except her mother, but she has too much of Maki in her to admit that, so her arms stay crossed, her expression scathing. She doesn’t even have an overnight bag, only her backpack, and she looks exhausted, bare-faced and puffy-eyed.
She said she was up at five and it’s just now eleven. She must’ve taken the train, then. It must’ve cost an arm and a leg. She must’ve-
“What?” Tsugumi asks. “Are you just gonna stand there?”
No manners, this one. Just like her mother. And she’s been away for much too long.
“Tsun,” Maki whispers, choked-up, pulling her daughter into an embrace that could probably crush concrete. Tsugumi, who can handle this only because her own embraces are just as crushing, pats Maki’s back.
“It’s Mother’s Day,” she says. “I had to come see my mama.”
(She barely even gets a chance to figure out how to respond to those words that make her throat feel so tight before Shinsuke swoops in to steal her.
Her fault, Maki supposes, for having twins.)
**
“Anyway, the conclusion I have to come to at the end of all of this is that the man is a psychopath.”
Maki nods solemnly. “The man is a psychopath.”
“Right?”
This, of course, in reference to Tsugumi’s Torts professor assigning an essay that’s due at the end of Golden Week based on prompts that won’t be released until the weekend before, at which time Tsugumi intends to be on a plane to Yakushima to go camping with her best friend from gymnastics whom she hasn’t seen since moving to Fukuoka for university, and during which time she will most certainly not have an internet connection, something she regards as an unforgivable injustice. Maki is in such a mood as to be inclined to agree.
“Submit it the day it comes out,” Maki advises. “Doesn’t matter how bad it is, it’ll be over with.”
“...in one night?”
“Well, yeah, then you won’t have to do it on your trip, right?”
Tsugumi eyes Maki suspiciously. “But it’ll suck.”
“So does he.”
“If I wanna get into law school-“
“It’s one class!”
“You wouldn’t know,” Tsugumi says loftily.
“Yeah, ‘cause I was smart enough to get a high school diploma and get out.” She pokes Tsugumi’s arm with her chopstick. “Work smarter, not harder.”
“I neglect my education, get up at five, sit on the shinkansen for five hours, and show up here just to be told to work smarter, not harder?”
“Neglect, huh.” Maki doesn’t mean it, knows she’s kidding, but it still almost stings to say. “No one’s making you come all the way out here, y’know.”
But Tsugumi picks up her slack. She always does.
“You think I have no filial piety, huh? You think I’m just gonna leave my mom alone with a bunch of boys on Mother’s Day?”
“Boys who are nicer than you,” Maki says flatly, even though her heart could burst.
“You’re so mean, Kaa-chan, why can’t you just admit you like me better?”
It’s nothing to cut her remaining omelette in half, deposit the other on Tsugumi’s plate. Even so, she keeps an edge about her reply: “because your brother is sensitive and I don’t want to crush his dreams.”
“Nah, he already knows.”
Shinsuke, who is very politely sitting on the couch and giving his mother space to absorb the requisite dose of her daughter before she goes back to school, looks up to ask, “sorry, what?”
“That Kaa-chan likes me better than you?”
His expression doesn’t change even slightly. “Oh, yeah, ‘course.”
“I never said that,” Maki grumbles.
“No, but it’s obvious,” Shinsuke says cheerfully. “I don’t mind.”
Now it is Maki’s turn to pout. “I very obviously love both of you.”
“Yeah, but you love me more.”
Tsugumi doesn’t really think that, but it’s a familiar exercise by now, and Maki takes comfort in it—that Tsugumi can come home from university and slip into old habits without missing a beat. She used to worry endlessly that she’d leave home and change beyond recognition. If anything, she’s even more familiar than before. All the things that were Maki about her are even more pronounced with the distance: her restlessness, her reluctance to admit to her gentler feelings, her scowl. She has Yuuta’s eyes and cheekbones more like Mai’s than Maki’s, but it is undeniable who she resembles most. And the resemblance only seems stronger when she’s home after a long time away.
Sometimes it makes Maki’s chest hurt that a girl so much like herself is so easy to love.
**
“Honey...?”
Wrestling is the only thing on television at this hour that’s worth watching, but Yuuta has never gotten used to it. Makes him wince, seeing people take a beating. He doesn’t seem to understand what the appeal could be to someone like Tsugumi, who hasn’t had to make a career out of killing things, or why Maki would choose to watch it on a rare occasion when Tsugumi came home. But when he tries to ask if they are all right, or need anything, or if there’s a particular reason Maki wanted to spend Mother’s Day watching men beat each other up with her daughter, neither gives any more specific answer than shouting at the television for the wrestler who’s currently in worse shape to tap out.
“So violent,” Shinsuke murmurs, then goes back to reading his book.
If nothing else, Yuuta’s family is an interesting one.
**
To eat outside, where there is no need for the antiquated notions like keeping crumbs to a minimum or appearing graceful that sadly prove inescapable when eating with most people, is one of Maki’s greatest pleasures. To eat hamburgers outside is even more pleasant. And to do it on an unseasonably warm May night with Tsugumi, sitting out in Yoyogi Park on faded beach towels that don’t make the knobby grass any more comfortable, is the only thing she had wanted for this day that is supposed to celebrate her but still feels, after nineteen years, like it belongs to someone else.
“Mama.”
Maki steals an onion ring from Tsugumi’s order and swipes it through an unidentifiable dipping sauce, giving herself a moment to think. She never wants to reply too quickly when Tsugumi says things that make her feel vulnerable, pricked under the skin in places where the soft things she conceals are apt to leak out.
She only calls Maki Mama anymore when she’s done something stupid or she’s missed her.
“Mmhm?”
“You don’t really like Mother’s Day, do you?”
“Nope.”
“I thought so.”
Maki takes a fry (also Tsugumi’s) and eats it glumly. “What gave it away?”
“I mean...it’s obvious.”
“Huh.”
“Plus the whole...your mom sucked thing.”
The understatement of the decade, and a typical example of Tsugumi’s unique flavor of tact: it doesn’t even occur to her to bring up the who-you-killed-shaped elephant in the room. It probably isn’t the elephant in the room to her.
“I guess it was just...pretty irrelevant.” After Tsugumi bats her hand away from the onion rings, Maki reluctantly dips into her own supply. “Until I had you, I guess. And then why would I need to be patted on the back?”
“For managing to keep me alive for twenty years? Better than you do with your plants.”
“Okkotsu Tsugumi-“
“What? You know I’m right.”
So one time Shinsuke’s plants died while he was on a trip with his friends because he foolishly trusted Maki to take care of them. So he was devastated, inconsolable, and probably a little bit traumatized. What’s that have to do with child-rearing? She already apologized.
“You really don’t have any respect, bringing that up on Mother’s Day.”
“A holiday you wouldn’t even celebrate if I didn’t take the totally unprompted initiative to get my butt on a train at six in the morning to come see you?”
Maki drapes her arm around Tsugumi’s shoulders, pulls her towards her to kiss the crown of her head. It’s better if these kind of things aren’t answered in words.
“Anyway.”
“Anyway.”
“You didn’t ask for anything, and you never do, so...I guess...”
That this—hamburgers in the deserted park at twilight with her daughter—would do just fine. She has good instincts; it had.
“I don’t really need the attention.”
Tsugumi looks at her for a long few seconds. Her eyes, so dark they only register as blue in the sunshine, are hard to read in the dim twilight.
“At uni,” she says, “my roommate, Hanako. Do you remember Hanako?”
Does she ever. The girl never shuts up. Hadn’t for a single minute of their move-in slot at the beginning of the year, doesn’t when Tsugumi is calling her family and needs the quiet. “The loudmouth?”
“She’s not that bad.”
“She’s that bad, Tsun.”
“Her mom left her when she was six to go join an art commune in Venezuela and it really messed her up.”
“...that sounds made-up.”
“Well, yeah, probably, but there’s gotta be something with her mom if she would make up something like that.”
Fair enough. “Still, Venezuela?”
“My point is that I guess I’m pretty lucky.”
“That I didn’t run off to Venezuela?”
Tsugumi tucks her knees into her chest and rests her chin between them. “That I had a good mom, is all.”
“You think so?”
“Otherwise I’d be the loudmouth making up insane stories about my fake parents for sympathy.”
Well, whatever becomes of Tsugumi now, at least there’s that.
“Uh...thanks, Tsun.”
“Mama?”
“Yeah?”
“Can we get more fries?”
“...what?”
“You ate, like, half of mine.”
“So? It’s Mother’s Day.”
“The appropriate thing to do would be to ask me to buy you fries, not eat all of mine.”
“Oh? There’s protocol now?”
“Mama...”
She concedes.
A milkshake sounds nice, anyway. And it’s what she deserves (so maybe she feels a little puffed-up after all of that, what of it?) for gifting the world with a copy of herself (unnecessary but fun) and a copy of her husband (very necessary indeed). For working smarter and not harder with both at once, for not traumatizing them by running off to an artists’ commune in Venezuela or whatever actually happened to Hanako’s mother, for making them feel so secure that not even Shinsuke is bothered anymore when Tsugumi insists she’s the favorite. Tsugumi has a way of making her feel full of herself like that.
Tsugumi gets up just before Maki’s milkshake is delivered, in-store this time, and returns with an extra straw. Her only response to the dirty look that Maki gives her is a much-too-innocent smile.
“Happy Mother’s Day,” she says sweetly. “This is what you get.”
But Maki can’t say she really minds.