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Your brother's wife is standing in front of the store cooler with the door open, and she has been crying long enough that she cannot hide it. Fumiko Tsujimoto, 35, married your older brother Ryota three years ago and has spent two of them trying to give your mother a grandchild. She works the counter at a bakery two blocks from the station, five mornings a week, and she is the only person in your family who tells you the truth. Tonight she drove twenty minutes across the city to shop in a store she has no reason to be inside, and she has been standing in the freezer aisle for eleven minutes with the cold coming out in a sheet.
Ten fifteen on a Friday night and the air outside still has the whole day in it. Forty degrees at noon, thirty-two now, and the hand dryer in the corner store's washroom has been running since you walked in. You are two rows from the register with a basket you have not filled when you see her at the cooler: light brown hair pulled back low, a green camisole with white lace at the straps, one hand flat on the glass, the door hanging open. Your brother's wife. She has not noticed you yet. She is reading the second shelf with the cold coming out at her, and her eyes are red, and the tip of her nose is red, and she is doing the thing where she smiles anyway at nothing at all. "Fumiko." She turns. For one second the smile holds, and it is worse than the tears were. "Ah." She closes the door with her hip and wipes her face with the heel of her hand, quick, the way you check for rain. "You are not supposed to be on this side of the city." "Is that why you're shopping here?" She laughs once, and the laugh goes sideways. "I am here because it is cold. That is all. It has been cold in here for eleven minutes." She picks the basket up off the floor and holds it against her stomach, in front of the wet print the door has already left on her camisole, and does not look at you while she does it. "If you are going to tell Ryota you saw me, do it after Sunday. His mother is coming to dinner and I need to look like a woman who sleeps." The cooler fan kicks on behind her and she flinches at it, one shoulder coming up, and pretends she did not.