At the beginning of October, my mother called.
I had just finished a warehouse shift and was walking toward the station.
"Are you free this Sunday?"
"Yeah."
"Then come over around noon."
"Why?"
She didn't answer right away.
"There's someone I want you to meet."
I stopped walking.
The light in front of the station turned red.
"Who?"
"The daughter of someone I know."
"What is this?"
"Just meet her once."
"A setup?"
"It's nothing that formal."
"So it is a setup."
My mother laughed.
"You're thirty-eight. Just meet her once."
The light changed.
I started walking with everyone else.
"How old is she?"
"Your age."
"Thirty-eight?"
"Yes."
I didn't think anything of asking her age first.
"Do you have a picture?"
"I do."
"Send it first."
"That's why I told you to come Sunday."
We hung up.
I found an empty seat on the train.
Thirty-eight.
Same age as me.
I'd assumed she'd introduce me to someone a little younger.
I had close to fifty million yen, no debt, and nearly twenty years of work behind me. Now that I'd quit, I didn't have to report somewhere at the same time every morning.
Someone in her late twenties didn't seem out of the question.
I opened my brokerage account.
It was up about 130,000 yen from the day before.
I closed it.
On Sunday, there was a white envelope on the table at my parents' house.
The photo showed a woman by herself, her hair a little past her shoulders. She looked about thirty-eight.
"What do you think?"
"She looks normal."
"Listen to you."
My mother took the picture back.
"She does office work. She's nice."
"Has she ever been married?"
"You can ask her that yourself."
My father kept watching television.
"Don't start interviewing her before you've even met."
On the train home, I checked my brokerage account. The balance was a little over fifty million yen.
I hadn't told my mother the exact amount, and I wasn't planning to tell the woman either.
Meeting someone who already knew I had money felt wrong.
The following Sunday, I went to a café in a hotel near the station.
We were meeting at two.
I'd assumed my mother would come too, but she'd said, "You two can talk on your own," and left it at that.
I arrived about ten minutes early.
A server showed me to a table by the window.
Coffee was nine hundred yen.
I thought that was expensive and closed the menu.
A little while later, the woman arrived.
She looked like her picture. Dark skirt, light beige jacket.
"Sorry to keep you waiting."
"Not at all."
I stood, we introduced ourselves, and she sat across from me.
We ordered drinks first.
"I've never done anything like this before," she said.
"Me neither."
"What are we supposed to talk about?"
She was easier to talk to than I'd expected.
We started with our mothers.
Apparently they had once taken the same class together. I hadn't known that.
"Your mother said you like traveling."
"I wouldn't say I like it that much."
"Didn't you just go away for about a week?"
"Six days."
"That's long enough."
"I had the time."
"By yourself?"
"Yeah."
"That's impressive. I've never traveled alone."
"It's easy. You only go where you want."
"Did you like it?"
"Yeah. It was fun."
"Would you go again?"
"Maybe. I've been kind of busy lately."
"You ate by yourself too?"
"Yeah."
"I don't think I could do that."
"You get used to it."
As soon as I said it, I remembered I hadn't traveled alone often enough to be used to anything.
"Did you take pictures?" she asked.
"Quite a few."
"Can I see?"
I opened the photos on my phone.
I showed her the river, an old ryokan, the mountains, and something I'd eaten for lunch. She swiped to the next picture.
"That's pretty."
"The weather was good."
"What's this?"
"A temple, I think."
"You think?"
She laughed.
"I wasn't exactly keeping track."
After a few more pictures, she handed the phone back.
She was the first person I'd shown them to.
"Now I want to go somewhere too."
"Then go."
"You say that like it's easy."
"Take some time off."
"I have a job."
She said it lightly, and we both laughed.
The tea and coffee arrived.
A little later, she asked about work.
"What do you do now?"
"Day jobs. Warehouses, event setup, things like that."
"Are you between jobs?"
"Not really. Not right now."
She set her cup down.
"Are you planning to keep living like this?"
"Probably. I don't really plan on going back to a regular full-time job."
"I want to keep working even if I get married. But if we had a child, I might not be able to work the same way I do now."
If it were just me, the money would last a long time.
With a child, I'd have to think differently about rent, school, maybe even a car.
"We could figure that out when it happens."
She looked at me.
"I see."
Her tone was gentle.
"At our age, I think you have to look a little further ahead."
Thirty-eight.
When I'd seen her picture, I'd thought she looked her age. I'd also thought someone in her late twenties wasn't impossible for me.
"What about buying a home?" she asked.
"I don't plan to right now."
"You don't seem like you'd be into a mortgage."
"Thirty-five years is too long."
She laughed.
"I agree with you there."
After that, we talked about movies and food.
She watched a lot of shows from overseas. There was one I'd seen too, and we talked about it for a while.
We left after about an hour and a half.
At the hotel entrance, she gave a small bow.
"Thank you for today."
"Thank you too."
"I liked the travel pictures."
"Next time I'll remember where I went."
She laughed.
"Well, then."
"Yeah."
We were headed in different directions.
I didn't look back after we parted.
She'd been easier to talk to than she'd seemed in the photo.
While we were together, I hadn't thought much about her being thirty-eight.
At home, I took off my shirt.
I opened my brokerage account.
It was up about seventy thousand yen from the day before.
Still above fifty million.
I thought back over the conversation.
What would happen if there were two of us? What if we had a child?
It would have been easier if I'd told her I had fifty million yen.
I was glad I hadn't.
I didn't want to find out that knowing the number changed the way she acted.
If we met again, I could tell her later.
I closed the app.
Three evenings later, my mother called.
I hadn't taken a job that day.
"What?"
"About the woman you met."
"Yeah."
My mother's voice was slower than usual.
"She doesn't think it's going to work."
I turned down the television.
"What doesn't?"
"You know. She said no."
"She did?"
I asked again.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I didn't get all the details."
"You didn't ask?"
"Of course I asked."
"What did she say?"
My mother went quiet for a moment.
"She couldn't really see what your life was going to look like."
"My life?"
"You quit your job."
"I told her I'm doing day work."
"I don't think that's what she meant."
"Then what?"
"She probably couldn't tell what you were planning to do after you got married."
"I'm not having trouble paying for anything."
"Right now."
It sounded a lot like what the woman had asked me at the café.
"It's not like I'd expect her to support me."
"Nobody said that."
My mother's voice got sharper.
"Did she actually say that?"
"Enough. You only met her once."
"I know."
"Don't start blaming her."
"I didn't say anything."
"I can hear it in your voice."
I was getting irritated.
"I hadn't decided anything either."
"Decided what?"
"Whether I wanted to marry her."
"Neither had she."
I had nothing to say to that.
My mother said goodbye and hung up.
I put the phone on the table.
After a while, I opened my brokerage account.
The balance was still over fifty million yen.
I hadn't asked the woman what she earned or how much she had saved.
If I'd told her at the beginning that I had fifty million yen, would her answer have been different?
I closed the app.
A few minutes later, I opened it again.
The number had barely moved.
I heard my mother's voice again.
Neither had she.
"At thirty-eight, you're supposed to think that far ahead?"
I said it out loud.
I took a can of beer from the refrigerator.
My finger was on the tab when it occurred to me that I was thirty-eight too.
I opened the can.
The next day, I opened the day-work app.
There was an event setup job.
Start time: 7:00 a.m.
Before, I would have closed the listing as soon as I saw the time.
The shift was on the first Saturday in November.
I applied.