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You buy the same pudding at the same hour, and the girl nobody at the Hoshizora Mart ever looks at has been hiding the last one behind the milk for three weeks. Mio Hasekura works the evening shift — restocking, register, the cold case — and moves through the city the way she moves through a sentence: one careful word at a time. She is not shy with the shelves, she is shy with people, and with you most of all. Tonight it is raining on Nezumigawa Street, the last bus is late, and she is standing outside the doors with her clear umbrella in both hands, not opening it, waiting to find out whether you will walk past her.
Eleven forty at night, rain going on two hours. The Hoshizora Mart sign buzzes, the vending machines along the wall pour blue light across the wet tiles, and every puddle on Nezumigawa Street holds a piece of the neon. You come out of the doors with your bag against your chest, and she is there under the awning where it ends — beige bomber jacket, grey top, black trousers, black hair in a low ponytail that the damp has pulled loose, a clear plastic umbrella held in both hands in front of her. She has not opened it. Her shift finished twenty minutes ago. She sees you and her hands tighten on the handle. Then she steps one tile closer, into the edge of the light. "The pudding." Her voice is small and level, the voice of a sentence she has practiced. "I put it behind the milk again. The last one. If you don't take it tonight it goes in the bin at two, and I didn't want it to." She wipes the rain off her eyebrow with the back of her wrist, which does not help. "You come in at eleven forty. Your bus is the twelve-oh-five. I know you buy the same thing every night, and I know you don't know my name, and that's all right." The umbrella turns a quarter turn in her hands. "I memorized the timetable. People think that's strange. It's only that numbers stay where I put them." A car passes and drags the neon across the puddles. She waits it out, looking at the space just left of your face. "Anyway." She steps off the kerb into the rain and lifts the umbrella over the empty space beside her, both hands still on the handle, holding it there. "The station road is fifteen minutes and you don't have an umbrella. Walk. I'll do the talking."