If You Follow Me Read Free Page A

her cigarette out the window.
    â€œYou are?” I say. This is a first. “Why?”
    â€œIt’s been hard enough. I don’t want to stand out more than we already do.” She pulls off her boots, plants her heels on the edge of her seat and wraps her arms around her knees, looking out at the rice fields. I look out my own window, at the ocean pounding the cliff s. There is no guardrail here. It would be so easy to miss a turn, tumble over the rocks and into the water below. All you’d have to do is close your eyes. I don’t want to think these thoughts. These are not my thoughts. But I can’t help but see the world as full of traps. Tempting, if you lean that way.
    Â 
    â€œJust look at this place.” Carolyn shudders as I park in front of our house. A slumped and rusting storage area made of corrugated aluminum surrounds it, blocking all of the windows on the ground floor. This storage area is filled with the possessions left behind by decades of tenants, in boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. When she’s bored, Carolyn likes to go shopping in storage. She has rescued a poster of the human skeleton with every bone labeled in Japanese, a set of lacquered nesting bowls, and two china bulldogs joined at the throat by a chain. She has a great eye for finding treasures in trash. She always gets to these things first, and then I wonder why I didn’t notice them.
    The cat climbs out of the drainage ditch, greeting us with a meow that sounds like a newborn baby’s cry. Carolyn scoops her up, burying her face in the scruff of her neck. From the beginning, loyalties have been clear. We both love Amana but she belongs to Carolyn, who knows just how to pet her, how to play with her, when to pick her up, and when to leave her alone. She honors her feline whims and is rewarded with canine loyalty. Amana follows us whenever we go on walks, running in the bushes and then stalling until we catch up. Once we came out of the supermarket and found her waiting in the basket of a stranger’s bicycle. She likes to sleep right in between us, the middle spoon.
    â€œThe gomi froze,” Carolyn says, as she sets the cat down and peers into the garbage can in front of our house. Sure enough, water has dripped from the roof and filled the can, melted and frozen solid, forming a giant cube of ice sealing in the garbage. She pushes the can onto its side and the cube slides heavily to the pavement. The setting sun, faint as a headlight pushing through fog, illuminates the cylinder of yellow-veined ice. Like scraps of insects trapped in amber, I see a wine bottle, a milk carton, kibble, and cigarette butts.
    â€œIt’s a trashsicle,” I say.
    â€œAn unsorted trashsicle,” she says, looking at me from beneath one arched brow.
    â€œAt least Ogawa-san won’t be able to get at it with his tongs,” I point out.
    â€œWe can’t let him see it,” she says, looking around almost furtively. “Bring it inside and put it in the bathtub. After it thaws, you can sort through the melted trash.”
    â€œWhy is this my job?” I ask. “We both ate that stuff.”
    â€œBut you didn’t sort the trash before you threw it away. You never sort the trash.” She’s right. She bought a special sectioned garbage can, but it’s hard to remember what goes in what compartment. There are so many rules to keep straight. When I make this argument, she rolls her eyes and says, “It’s really not that hard. You just have to listen.”
    â€œI listen,” I protest.
    â€œWell we wouldn’t be stuck in this house, dealing with the gomi police every day, if you’d listened to me in the first place.”
    I can’t argue with that.

CHAPTER TWO
    gomi: ( N .) garbage; trash; waste
    T he original gomi sin was not my fault.
    Four months ago, we arrived in Shika on a hot and moonless night, after having spent five days at a training seminar in