The moon is rising on the other end of the boulevard, leaving an aisle of its glow across the street that mingles with the car brake lights and the store windows and people’s phone screens with the brightness turned all the way up until it’s one loud, messy blur up ahead. She presses her thumb against the surface of her own phone and then holds it up to her ear. The dial tone is shrill enough to cut through the sounds of people laughing and shouting, of cars honking and radios playing and skateboards scuffing the sidewalk.
“Alex.”
A stupid, giddy smile winds its way across her mouth when she hears her name on what is unmistakably Masako’s voice.
“Hey. How’s it going?”
“As usual.”
The scrape of plastic on plastic reaches Alex’s ears, red chopsticks against the black lunchbox that Masako packs every day with tofu and vegetables and brown rice, already halfway through tomorrow’s day when the sun’s fingers are slowly peeling from the horizon here. But this is the only time (times?) of day they can talk, the only near-hour when they can both find time to spare often enough. Masako gets up at an ungodly hour and goes to work every day, and by the time she gets home Alex is already almost always asleep (and even if she weren’t, the times she’s managed to stay up and call Masako at three in the morning Los Angeles time Masako’s always given her an earful about taking care of herself and she’s fallen asleep still on the line). So the tail of her lunch hour and Alex’s late evening are all that remain, and even if it were every day it still wouldn’t be enough.
But it’ll have to make do for now.
“How are the kids?”
There’s a muffled sound over the phone line, and Alex can almost imagine Masako doing one of those little half-sighs she does (and she only halves them so she can act annoyed twice as much) and leaning one elbow on her desk, pinning the fabric of her jacket sleeve to the surface and exposing the firm expanse of her wrist.
“Most of them are trying. Some of them just aren’t, and…I don’t know.”
Alex frowns. This isn’t a problem she has to deal with; all of her kids are there because they want to be and not because she’s teaching a required subject at a school. And if she were, there’s no way she’d know how to deal with that—she can try and get a kid interested in basketball but it’s not always going to work.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s like this every year,” says Masako, through a mouthful of food. “How are your kids?”
“Mike’s hitting all his free throws,” Alex says, a note of definite pride coloring her voice.
“Wasn’t he the one who kept fidgeting and airballing?”
“Yup,” says Alex. “But he figured it out. One day it just started clicking, and now he’s tearing up the middle school leagues.”
Masako laughs. “Good for him.”
Alex inhales; the sharp smoke and rancid sweat and garbage fill her lungs as she pushes forward through the crowd. They’re all headed downtown, toward the almost-pyrotechnic neon that’s already drowning out the remainder of the sun’s rusty glow. They’re still loud, from nothing in particular, only their mass and movement magnifying the sound waves; she presses the phone closer to her ear until she can feel it nearly crack.
She’s nearly home now, fumbling in her pocket for her keys.
“Do you know any blocking drills?” says Masako.
“Blocking? No. Why?”
She can almost hear Masako pursing her lips in the silence.
“I want to change it up. The team’s already doing well with the ones I have them do, and at this point doing it more won’t have as much of an effect on the way they do it in a game.”
She turns the key in the lock—as a guard, her coach never had her do the same defensive drills that the forwards did; she wasn’t expected to be near the basket as much and she wasn’t exactly a two-way player. When she plays streetball she is—but that’s just instinct, in—the-moment modifications of all her other moves and training, and she’s still not a great blocker.
“I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I was just asking.”
She throws her bag on the couch and turns on the air conditioner; it starts to make noise but the room is still hot, hotter than it had been outside even among the insulation of all those people. She lifts the hair off her neck with her free hand, pulling it up and off her back, shifting its weight and its substance away.
“I miss you,” says Masako.
Alex’s grip slackens; her hair fans out around her neck and sticks to her sweaty skin, and for a second she forgets how to even move her fingers back into position because her heart feels as if it’s about to collapse in on itself like a cheap cardboard box under just the wrong pressure. It’s even more unfair when Masako’s 16 hours ahead, across the ocean rather than just across the table in front of her; all she wants to do right now is screw responsibility and caution and planning and rush into Masako’s arms and stay there.
“I want to catch the next flight out.”
“I wish you could.”
Theoretically, she could. Theoretically Alex could drop everything and run to the airport and spend a few days with Masako, but it would never work. She’d be on a different sleep schedule and Masako would be working and she’d have to make some kind of last-minute arrangements with her own job and neither of them would enjoy it as much as they should, and for all kinds of practical reasons this is a shitty idea. But she’s had worse, and even like that it would be worth it to see Masako, to hear her voice undiluted, without the miles between the radio towers distorting and warping it; it would be worth it to have her within physical reach, to walk through a crowd and have Masako there with her, for the people and the space not to close in around her alone.
“Don’t do it,” says Masako, quick and harsh and did she really expect Alex to seriously consider it?
Maybe she just wants it that much herself. Alex tightens her grip on the phone.
“I won’t. Five weeks, I remember.”
Five weeks, dubiously bearable, until she goes to Akita for more than her fair share of the sliver of Masako’s summer that’s not already clutched in the throttling hands of her job. Alex stares out the window; the bottom of the moon scrapes the glass high rises, finally escaping their weight.
“I should let you go.”
Masako murmurs an assent; it’s nearly drowned out by the shuffle of papers in the background, practice schedules and scouting reports and lesson plans no doubt.
“I hope the kids aren’t too unruly.”
“They always are,” says Masako.
Alex laughs.
“Goodnight, Alex,” says Masako.
(As always, she wishes she could say it in return.)
“Goodbye, Masako. Take care.”
“You, too.”
On the other end of the line, a bell rings. And then it goes dead, but Alex stays with the phone pressed to her cheek a little bit longer. The next five weeks can’t pass quickly enough.