I was happy to finally get a reprieve from Nakatomi Junichi at the end of the day. The walk to the bus stop seemed ridiculously long. The bus ride itself was interminable. I just wanted to flop down and do nothing. Maybe play my guitar.

But when I got home there was a note from my dad, along with a stack of cash. “Hate to do this… groceries?”

Mr. Nishimura, the building manager, had been kind enough to give us directions to the nearest grocery store. I’d been there once already with my dad, which was where we had purchased the unfortunate bread. The only other choice was thick-sliced white bread. But that was infinitely better.

I fumed the entire way to the grocery store, pissed at Ohara for setting up the tutoring. Pissed at my dad for agreeing. Pissed at myself for being so bad at Japanese. Pissed at the fact that I needed to go on an errand instead of sulking in my room.

I was not in the mood to talk to anyone, so I was glad I didn’t run into any foreigners at the store. Foreigners—Americans in particular—gravitated towards one another. That was the expectation anyway. They wanted to know all this crap. How long had I been here? How long did I plan to stay? Where else had I traveled in Japan? For some idiotic reason they wanted to know everything about me. And I never wanted to know a damn thing about them.

I loaded up on bread (not the molasses stuff this time), sandwich meat, pasta, cheese… I even splurged on some produce. Sticker shock had been pretty extreme the first time we’d filled our tiny shopping cart. I couldn’t see taking out a loan in order to buy Hokkaido apples that were exactly the perfect shape, wrapped in individual packages. Even if they were nearly the size of my head they couldn’t possibly be worth their weight in gold. Instead, I grabbed a yellow watermelon and several kinds of citrus fruit.

The trip back to the apartment seemed twice as long lugging the heavy bags of groceries up the hill. Mr. Nishimura had offered us an old bicycle. I saw a lot of people taking their groceries home that way, bags looped over the handlebars. Maybe I’d take him up on that in the future.

Once I got home I sat around in the living room and watched anime for a while because I couldn’t be bothered to do anything besides putting away the perishable goods. When my stomach growled I figured it was time to start on dinner.

I decided to have some of my specialty mac and cheese ready for my dad when he came home from work. But my dad didn’t make it home in time for dinner. I waited on him for a little while, but decided to eat on my own before the food cooled to an inedible temperature. He would just have to deal with reheated noodles.

After a while it became clear that he was not coming home for dinner at all. He stumbled in after nine. Drunk. Or at least slightly inebriated.

“Where the hell have you been?” I scowled at him.

“Sorry I’m late. My supervisor insisted on taking us out again.”

“Right. Can’t buck that system.”

My dad rubbed his hand over the stubble on his chin. “Oliver, don’t start. It’s late.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m not even mad about that. It’s… you agreed to this thing at school?”

“What? The tutoring. Your teacher called me,” he said.

“Yeah. I figured. So tell me about this fantastic plan for me to stay stuck in that crap school for even longer than I’m already there? You know I already have to join some fucking club.”

My dad winced. I felt a little bit guilty that I was bad mouthing the school that his company paid tuition for.

“Ms. Ohara contacted me at work and said that without significant help you would fail Japanese. We’re going to be here for a while. And it would help if at least one of us could navigate the grocery aisles and read a train schedule...”

“Why don’t you stay for tutoring then?”

“Can we have this discussion later, please?” He rubbed his face.

“The kid she found to help me is an ass.”

My dad closed his eyes. “Well, maybe that’s the basis for a beautiful friendship. Something you have in common.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. My dad often called me on my shit, but usually stopped short of calling me a jackass.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Yeah. It’s okay. When you get a few beers in you it’s hard to dish out the polite lies. And I am being an ass. It’s fine. If you’re hungry, there’s mac and cheese in the fridge. Go to bed soon. You look like hell.”

I turned my back on him and marched into my tiny room, closing the door quite firmly behind me. I took my guitar out of the case and set up my practice charts. I played through the few chords I knew, and then proceeded to try out some new ones as well. My hand looked like a deformed claw. I tried to relax my fingers.

I strummed very softly. My dad had been right: the walls were very thin. There were no secrets here. I always knew when the kid who lived there hadn’t finished his homework before his dad came home because that involved a lot of yelling and sometimes crying. His room was right next to mine.

Once the fingers on my left hand seemed like they were about to bleed, I stopped practicing, and crawled into bed.

I heard my dad pacing back and forth long after I thought he’d be asleep. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about his drinking. Maybe I should have shut up about the tutoring. He wasn’t having an easy time of it either.

We were stuck here together. Him with his unasked-for drinking buddies, and me with my unpleasant desk partner.