"Kicchan, did you even taste that?" Uncle Seta teased.
Kichirou looked down guiltily at his plate. He'd reasoned that the faster he ate, the faster he could play, so he'd kind of inhaled the omelette.
"Your dad cooked that for you, Kicchan," Uncle Seta added.
Kichirou was surprised. Normally Dad only made toast or miso soup with rice for breakfast—something quick before he went to work. An egg dish was completely new.
Uncle Seta nodded. "If you liked it, you should thank him later. He'd be glad to hear it."
The boy promised that he would. Uncle Seta took the empty plate away from him and put it into the sink. Kichirou waited somewhat impatiently at the table for him to finish cleaning the morning dishes.
"What should you be doing right now, Kicchan?" Uncle Seta murmured without turning away from the sink.
His uncle must have sensed his restless fidgeting. He stopped immediately and emitted an overdrawn sigh. He didn't want to do his summer homework.
"Just one section of your workbook. That's all I want you to do." Uncle Seta turned halfway from the sink to turn his eye on him. "Can you do that for me?"
"All right," Kichirou said. After a short detour to the bathroom to brush his teeth, he reluctantly went into his room and sat at his desk. His workbook was already laid out before him. They'd looked it over yesterday, gauging how much work there was to do. A section a day, his uncle had decided, would be best to ensure that he'd finish it all before the summer break was over.
He finished the first page, a set of 'complete the sentence' exercises, and then he counted how many pages he had remaining to do today. Too many. He shifted restlessly in the desk chair. Why did his teachers give so much homework? He was never going to get to play.
He furtively glanced at his open door. Uncle Seta was away in another room. He took out his cell phone and sent a text message to his best friend and soon received a reply. Ah, Hiroshi had already completed this section! A few minutes later and Kichirou had all the answers.
With a triumphant smile, Kichirou closed his workbook. He went ahead and turned on his game console. While the game was starting up, he poked his head out of the doorway and called for his uncle to come play with him. Then he plopped down on his futon, picked up the controller, and got comfortable by setting a pillow under his back.
Soon Uncle Seta was in the doorway. "You're done already?" He was carrying a purple feather duster in his hand; he'd likely been cleaning.
"Well, yeah!" said Kichirou. "Let's race, Uncle Seta!"
"Let me check your workbook first," he said. He set the feather duster down on a nearby shelf and then walked in front of the TV and over to the desk. His back was to Kichirou while he looked over the work.
"Umm... okay." Kichirou picked up the second controller. "Who do you want to play as?"
Busy turning over pages in the workbook, Uncle Seta didn't answer. The man hummed in contemplation. "Kicchan, you didn't show any work for the math section."
"I did it all in my head," Kichirou lied.
"Your teacher is going to want to see some work. And I think..."
Uncle Seta turned away from the desk and gave him a hard look. Kichirou couldn't help it. He squirmed with guilt, squeezing the controller in his hands tightly.
Then Kichirou's cell phone on the desk buzzed with another message presumably from Hiroshi. Uncle Seta glanced over at it and read the message on the screen out loud to himself. "'Do you also need the answers to...'" The man gasped. "You cheated! Kicchan!"
"Uncle Seta!" the boy wailed. "I'll do the work later... I just wanna play!"
Uncle Seta set the workbook down and proceeded to wipe his face. "I thought you'd completed it too fast. Kichirou-kun, I really didn't expect this from you."
Kichirou bit his lower lip and tried not to cry, because the man's tone dripped with disappointment, and he'd never heard it from his uncle before, and it really hurt.
Uncle Seta moved over to him and knelt down until they were meeting eye to eye. "Kicchan," he said softly. "Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. But you should always put all your effort into it."
"I just w-wanted to play... with you..."
Uncle Seta patted his shoulder affectionately. "I know. And I promise we'll play later." He went back to the desk and pocketed Kichirou's cell phone. "But now I want you to do the next section—on your own!"
Kichirou swallowed noisily. "Y-yeah..."
"Good." Uncle Seta then gave him a hug, and Kichirou fell into it, his eyes starting to water. "It's all right," he said gently. "I'm not mad at you, Kicchan. I'm just a little sad. I understand why you did that, but that doesn't make it right."
"I won't... I won't do it again," Kichirou promised. Uncle Seta smiled down at him, then gently steered him to the desk.
While his uncle continued to do some cleaning around the house, Kichirou stared down at his workbook. He should've known better than to try and cheat like that. His mom wouldn't have let him get away with it, so why did he think Uncle Seta would?
He sighed and tried to focus. Thinking about his mom only made him sad. Uncle Seta didn't know why his mom was gone. He'd already tried asking...
He began to doodle in the margin of the workbook: a bunch of happy little animals, including a dog that might look like a certain space dog.
At this rate, he wasn't going to get any of the work done, and he'd disappoint Uncle Seta again. An idea occurred to him. He picked up the workbook and his pencil and walked into the living room. Uncle Seta was dusting out the computer cabinet. "Yes, Kicchan?" the man asked when he noticed him standing there.
"C-can I work on it in here with you?" he asked shyly.
The man blinked at him for a moment before smiling. "Of course!"
Kichirou set up at the tea table. He watched his uncle clean for a little while before finally settling down to do his own work. He solved a page of fill-in-the-blank vocabulary problems before arriving at a set of sentence comprehension questions.
"Uncle Seta? What does 'gregarious' mean?"
"Huh? Hmm... I forget." Uncle Seta's voice was muffled because he was cleaning behind the cabinet.
"The girl in the sentence has lots of friends because she's 'gregarious.' I guess it means she's friendly?"
Uncle Seta got out from behind the cabinet. His normally-clean shirt was streaked with dust. "This sounds like a job for Shinkai-san!" he declared. He began to search through the books on the bookshelf. "Now where did I put it...?"
Kichirou giggled, though he didn't mean to. Uncle Seta probably couldn't find the book he was looking for among all the others because he kept rearranging them. He could be really silly sometimes.
"Ah, there!" Uncle Seta pulled a red book down from the shelf. He moved to the tea table and sat right next to him. "Do you know how to use a dictionary, Kicchan?"
He didn't, so Uncle Seta showed him how. Once Kichirou had found what he needed, the man excused himself back to cleaning. Kichirou heard the sound of a squeeze-pump bottle as he sprayed cleaner on something.
With that done, Kichirou moved to the next section of the workbook: reader response. He had to read the story on the page and answer questions about it. Impulsively, Kichirou asked if Uncle Seta could read the story to him. It was his dad's job to read to him at bed time, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't want his uncle to read to him sometimes, too!
"Hmm, well." Uncle Seta's voice came from under the computer desk. "I need to get this done, but... why don't you read it aloud to me, hmm? I'm listening!"
Kichirou felt his face get all warm. He stuttered out the first sentence but grew more confident as he kept speaking. The story was about a woman who walked through a spider web and got scared that the spider might be on her. "She's silly," Kichirou remarked at the end. "We learned a few weeks ago that most spiders don't even bite."
"Good," Uncle Seta approved. "Now answer the questions."
Kichirou obediently filled out his responses, reading aloud his answers as he did so. After that came the math section, but it was easy stuff, just adding and subtracting different sets of four-digit numbers. It wasn't any different from two-digit numbers, really.
"I finished it!" he cried when he filled out the answer to the last problem on the page. He looked up at Uncle Seta, who had joined him at the tea table to take a break from cleaning. "Aren't you proud of me, Uncle Seta?"
Uncle Seta patted his back. "Yes, but more importantly, aren't you proud of yourself? You did the work! Look." He took out a paper clip from his pocket and proceeded to clip the finished pages in the workbook. He flapped the now-bound pages. "There's still a lot left, I'll admit that, but look how much progress you've made in one day. Aren't you happy about that?"
"Y-yeah," Kichirou admitted, smiling timidly at him.
"We'll do a little bit more tomorrow, and well, it'll all be done before you know it. And do you know the best part, Kicchan?"
"N-no," he answered.
"We still have all afternoon to play!"
