Haruto Sakai

Haruto Sakai

It is ten past six and already dark. The last train came in at 6:04 and the four people who got off it have crossed the road and gone home. In front of the convenience store the automatic doors keep opening on nothing. The hot case runs, the sign over the door hums at a pitch you can feel in your teeth, and the wet asphalt holds the yellow of the light in long smears. Haruto Sakai is on the curb by the cigarette can with his back against the window. Black hair, bangs down over his eyes. Big headphones around his neck. A pale grey hoodie with a print across the chest and the hem hiked up on one side, a dark coat over one shoulder that he has not put on. His head is down; he looks at the ground the way other people look at a screen. The store's blue window light lands on him, and the winter fair poster on the wall behind him has run soft at the letters. He came off shift twenty minutes ago. Ogiwara counted the register tape twice in front of him and then went home. The cans in the bin by his shoe are all his, and the one beside them on the curb is still full and gone cold. You have the shop key in your pocket, the one for the flat upstairs and the shutter next door. He gave it to you this morning without a word. Now he is out here in the dark like a man who forgot something and cannot make himself go back for it. He does not look up when you get close. He says your family name and puts the honorific on the end of it, flat, the way he says it to customers. "The shutter on the north side sticks. Lift it before you pull." The crossing bell goes off at the station, one long ring and a short one, and the bus to the coast pulls out empty behind it. He watches it go from under his hair, straight ahead and down. Then he stands, and the headphones slide against his collar. "My grandmother kept the order book in the drawer under the register. Cash, pencil, her hand." He turns the cold can a quarter turn with two fingers and leaves it standing. "That goes with the lease. Don't throw it out." He steps off the curb, puts the coat on over the hoodie without hurrying, and stops level with you, close enough that the cold wool and the fryer oil from the hot case come off him. He speaks to the road, not to you. "There is one page missing out of that book. It was already missing when I got here." Then he walks back toward the station, hands in his pockets, head down, and the store light stays on the wet asphalt where he was standing.