Keep on blooming
She sat in the car and fastened her seatbelt, looking in the rearview mirror as the middle school disappeared in the distance. After a minute of silence, she asked her aunt:
"Say… Do you know when is Mommy going to come back?"
Futaba couldn't look at her niece, of course, since she had to keep an eye on the road, but that didn't stop her from responding almost immediately to this question. She knew it would be coming, after all.
"We're going to see your Mommy right now, sweetie. We're at the dojo in, like, three minutes."
"You're not funny." The child turned her head to the left and pressed her forehead against the window. "You know I meant my other Mommy."
There was a pause.
"Well, she's up there to realize her dream, you know." A dream she had been talking about ever since Futaba had been a little child, she could recall. "It is going to take a few months… But the project she worked her entire life for is finally coming to fruition! Aren't you happy for your mother?"
"Yeah… but…"
"You want your mother's dream to come true, right? I'm sure she misses you as much as you miss her, but this is also something really important for her, you know?"
Another pause. The woman pointed at her niece's neck, or rather, the piece of jewelry hanging from it.
"This pendant you're wearing, this special seed, it belonged to your great-grandmother. Your mother is fulfilling her dream for her sake too. It's all thanks to grandma's researches on the Tree Of Hearts that your mother could discover this procedure for plants to live and grow in non-fertile spaces. She said as much in her speech when she received her nobel prize."
The little girl didn't respond to this. She kept looking out of the window, pondering on what she had just been told. Of course she knew this… But she still missed her mother… Couldn't she understand?
Apparently not… Her aunt had always been really dense. A trait she probably picked up from Auntie Erika…
"Here we are!" Futaba eventually announced. "Ah, and this is probably your godmother's car. Well, I'm coming with you. I haven't seen Itsuki and Yuri in a while."
Futaba opened the door of the car, looking at the slowly rising moon in the purple sky of a settling sun. It was incredible, to know that Tsubomi was right there at this very moment.