Key to the Bins

We’d finished making dinner, and the cake was in the oven. I was cleaning my hands thoroughly in the sink. I breathed a contented sigh, and dried my hands on a towel. It felt coarse, just like it always has.

“I hope it turns out as good as it looks,” my mum said. “Do you want to watch a show after we’re done?”

I thought for a few seconds, tapping my shoe on the wooden floor. “I think I’ll go to my room after this.”

My mum nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably quite tired after today. But before you lock yourself in your room, I just wanted to let you know that your father gave me a call earlier. He’s going to be back in Japan, if you want to see him.”

“Is he working in Japan now or something?”

“He told me he was looking forward to seeing you,” my mum replied.

I think that was my mum’s diplomatic way of saying that the real reason he was coming over was for some work project rather than to see me. In times like these, I never point out that she isn’t answering the question. Sometimes it’s better to be grateful that people are trying to make an effort at all rather than telling them you can see through what they’re saying.

After the cake was done, we sat down and ate it together while it was still hot. It wasn’t as fluffy as I’d expected, but it was pretty tasty either way. At any rate, it would probably blow the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Shimizu, although you could probably do that with anything that wasn’t two weeks old and scraped off a supermarket’s storeroom. After eating, I went back to my room and loaded up my PC to play a little before bed. I’d forgotten that being seen by people - let alone talking to them - could be so tiring. It was a good kind of tired, though, and at the very least it meant that I was able to sleep at a reasonable time for once.

The next morning, I packed three slices of the cake into a container, then placed it in my bag and went on my route to school. I walked past Shimizu Hideki on the way there, though I don’t think he paid much attention to me. I think he’d somehow managed to find a girlfriend. Everyone thought he was lying to look cool when he insisted about it two days ago, which is why the fact a woman seemed to be talking to him voluntarily was so surprising. At any rate, I’m sure someone will end up telling her one of the many cringeworthy things he’s done over the years: if there’s anything boys in my class want more than a girlfriend, it’s to make sure their friends look like complete idiots in front of women. Part of me feels sorry for Hideki, although it is incredibly funny, so I will watch nature take its course from the sidelines.

School was fairly uneventful, except for our science teacher going on a twenty-minute tangent about how the leather on his old watch rotted during his trip to Vietnam in the 90s. His rant was so long and pointless that for the first time, I think the class wanted to discuss organic chemistry rather than a senile old man’s half-hour response to the phrase “it’s rather hot outside, isn’t it?”

After school, I planned to make my way back to the cafe, but when I saw Shimizu Hideki yet again, my curiosity as to why he didn’t work at his own parents' business took hold of me. He looked slightly baffled that I would think to approach him, but to his credit he did respond to me when I called out his name.

“Shimizu, hey. How come you don’t work at your parent’s cafe? It looks like you're going home in that direction anyway.”

“Oh, call me Hideki, please,” he said, still looking a little perplexed. “I had a part time job before their place started bleeding staff, and Una can do everything that I can. Besides, my current job pays a fair bit better than they do”

“And who is this Una girl? A relative?”

He shrugged. “I think she’s a cousin. Or a second cousin. I don’t really know. Anyway, I need to get going, so goodbye”.

I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret the mixed signals of being allowed to use his first name contrasted with him giving curt answers and running off, so I decided to put my headphones on instead of overworking my precious brain cells. I eventually reached the front of the cafe, where Una was talking to some customers by the front door. Her eyes shot a glance at me, and the polite smile she gave to the customers fizzled away before my eyes.

“Yamasaki. Use the staff entrance to come to work, not the front entrance”, she said to me in a clearly irritated tone.

“I was never shown where the staff entrance was,” I replied. “Perhaps I could have asked Mr. Shimizu where it was, but I’d need to actually enter the building to do that,” I replied.

I was expecting her to respond to my snarky comment with an equally annoyed response, but her tone actually shifted quite notably. Her expression was as if she realised she was annoyed with me for following a script I had never been given.

“Right, right, how thoughtless of me,” she said, her tone softening considerably. “Follow me”.

She took me across the side to an area with multiple large bins and a back door. She reached into her apron pocket and gave me a strange metal cylinder.

“That’s the key to the dumpsters. You can tell which are ours because they have stickers on them. Don’t leave them unlocked, because Mr. Shimizu gets really annoyed when you do that. The back door is just there, and the clipboard to clock in and out is right next to the entrance”, she explained calmly. It was only in moments like these where she was acting more like an actual person when I realised that perhaps she wasn’t such a strange and unreasonable person. Still, her moods seemed entirely erratic, and I was pretty used to the sort of people who liked to take out their frustrations on me, so I wasn’t going to take the bait unless she acted like this more often.

“Thank you, Una,” I replied, taking the key and approaching the door. Before placing it in my pocket, I turned around.

“Hey, don’t you need a key for the bins too? Shouldn’t you get a spare?”

She was already walking back to the front by the time I asked, and I’m not sure if she heard me, so with a shrug I opened the door and looked at the clock. I wrote my time in on the clipboard and put on my uniform, before going out to Mr. and Mrs. Shimizu with my container of cake slices.

“Hi there,” I said, placing the container on the table. “I’ll get you some plates and a fork so you can try a slice, I wanted to make sure you were able to try my stuff before I actually suggested serving it here.”

Mrs. Shimizu, cheerful as always, smiled widely. “What a nice young man!”

They were thoroughly impressed with my cake, even though it was certainly far from my best work. But then again, if I were to lead with my best work, that means I’d have to actually put my best effort in every time. Can you imagine actually putting work in when you’re doing your job?!

I had actually brought in three slices, but Una seemed rather busy, so I left the last plate for her at the front until things were less busy. There were more customers than usual today, but I only found out two hours into my shift that it was because there was some sort of discount on hot drinks if you ordered two. I asked Mr. Shimizu why he hadn’t told me about it, at which point he politely reminded me it was the second thing he said during my induction. Oops.

Once my shift was over, I made my way back to the counter, and saw that the last slice of cake was still there. Puzzled, I turned to Mr. Shimizu.

“Did she not want to have it?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s time for you to go back, isn’t it? Well, I haven’t seen her for the past few minutes. I think she might have just gone home quietly? Ah well, it’s not unlike her after all.”

I picked up the fork and started eating the cake. It wasn’t as good as the day before, but it was still pretty tasty.

Mr Shimizu continued. “I’d be happy for you to make stuff so that we can put it on display. You can just run the recipes past me, not that I know the slightest thing about all this stuff! And go treat yourself, you’ve done really well for a new starter!”

I thanked him as I finished the last piece of cake and took the plate to the back room, hand-washing it at the sink. I heard a flush from the staff toilets, and Una came out from inside.

She looked at the plate I was washing. “Yamasaki, I was just going to try your cake now that the customers had left. Where did you put it again?”

“Ah,” I replied.