Interlude: Days of the Lonely-Hearted

"...Head chef! Head chef!"

"...Huh?"

After I don't know how many calls, the head chef finally reacted and turned to me with a blank face, like someone waking from a dream. Where had his usual stern look gone? In the hands of the dazed head chef sat a mountain of cake.

This looks like about twenty servings...

I sighed and took the cake from his hands.

"Honestly, you've gone and made this much again? Milady's away on her trip, so who's going to eat all this..."

Muttering away, I caught myself right after I said it.

Uh-oh, I went too far. I'd reminded him.

I nervously looked at the head chef, and his face had gone gloomy, his eyes faintly wet.

"...Ugh. ......An old fellow's teary eyes are rough to look at..."

"......!"

My inner voice had leaked right out. Watching the head chef dash off somewhere like a maiden who had been jilted, I let out another sigh.

When I glanced at the plate in my hands, there it was, a glossy berry cake loaded with fresh cream and jam. Milady's favorite, needless to say. In berry season we harvest a lot, store them in the ice house, and make jam at the same time. It is milady's lifeline until strawberry season comes in spring.

"...Tasty."

I licked off the fresh cream that had stuck to my finger when I took the plate.

"Ha ha ha! ...Haaah..."

"Bob. Bob. Come back to your senses. At this rate there'll be no pine tree left."

"...Huh?"

I had come out to the garden with a slice cut from the giant cake, and I called to Bob, who was single-mindedly lopping branches off the pine. Bob turned to me blankly, shook his head hard, and spread out his afro, which had grown big lately, scattering snow everywhere.

"Gah! Cut it out!"

"Ha ha! Soooorry. Haaah. The pine's near naked now."

The afro, its snow knocked off, drooped and wilted, all the life gone out of it. What is with that hair.

When I glanced at the pine, the tips of its winding, jutting branches had been cut into a strange shape, and by who knows what technique it had come to look like a creature from the underworld. The topiary beyond the pine looking like some bizarre monster was just my imagination too, probably. I saw nothing. Right.

"The head chef made cake, so I brought some."

"Thaaanks! Haaah... I wonder if the matsutake will grow. I've got a feeling that if the matsutake grow, milady will come home."

"...I hope they grow."

The pine looming large in milady's hobby garden, the karesansui that grows bigger every year, was planted by milady, who wanted a mushroom called matsutake. In the end, years after the pine was planted, there is still no sign of any matsutake growing.

Are matsutake really that tasty...

Remembering the sparkling look on milady's face when she talked about matsutake, I felt a little bit lonely.