Chapter 19: Tetsu's Grandfather Answers One Question

The care home was forty minutes north of Shiokaze by bicycle, which meant Tetsu had forty minutes of flat coastal road to change his mind.

He didn't change his mind. But he thought about it in detail, the way you think about a window you could jump through while you're choosing to use the door.

The facility was called Kaede-no-ie — Maple House — a name designed to suggest warmth and autumn color, though it sat in a treeless lot off Route 42 with a parking area of cracked concrete and a small garden of wind-resistant shrubs that had never been any color at all. Tetsu had been here eleven times in the past two years, always on the third Sunday of the month because that was the arrangement his mother had made when his grandfather could still communicate the arrangement. Now it was a Tuesday in August, three weeks past the third Sunday, and he was carrying the documents in a plastic grocery bag from the bait shop because he had not wanted them loose in his bicycle basket.