The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,58

the Professor.

The day of the party was approaching. I saw nothing wrong with looking for an alternative present, but Root wouldn't hear of it. He was determined to find a card.

"We can't give up now!" he insisted.

I have no doubt that his primary concern was to make the Professor happy, but it was also true that he had taken a fancy to the whole idea of card collecting, and he had begun to think of himself as a hunter in search of that one elusive card somewhere out there in the great wide world.

The Professor also seemed to be planning for the party in his own way. He had taken to checking the calendar whenever he was in the kitchen. Occasionally, he would go over and trace the circle I'd drawn to mark the eleventh, fingering the note on his chest the whole time. He was remembering the party, but he had no doubt long ago forgotten about the little matter of the Janaruobu.

The Professor never found out that we had looked in his cookie tin. I had been momentarily mesmerized by the inscription on the thesis—For N, with my eternal love. Never forget. The handwriting definitely belonged to the Professor, for whom "eternal" meant something more than it did to the rest of us, eternal in the way a mathematical theorem was eternal....

It was Root who brought me back from my daydream.

"Mama, slide the ruler under so I can put it back in." He took the thesis out of my hand and returned it to the bottom of the tin, careful not to disturb or dishonor the Professor's secret.

A moment later, all the cards were back in place, and there was no sign that the collection had ever been touched. The tin itself was undamaged, and the edges of the cards were neatly aligned. Still, something was different. Now that I knew about the thesis and its dedication, the tin was no longer a simple container for baseball cards. It had become a tomb for the Professor's memories. I set it carefully back on the bookshelf.

I hadn't really thought anything would come of the last shopkeeper's suggestion, but somehow I was disappointed when he failed to call. Root made some final efforts, sending off a postcard to the readers' exchange in the magazine and asking around among his friends and their older brothers. Not wanting to be caught without a present, I had quietly arranged a backup. It hadn't been easy to figure out what to buy. I'd thought of pencils and notebooks, clips and note cards, even a new shirt. There were very few things the Professor really needed. The fact that I couldn't discuss the choice with Root made it all the more difficult.

I decided on shoes. He needed a new pair, ones that he could wear anytime, anywhere—mold-free. I bought them and hid them away in the back of the closet, just as I had with Root's presents when he was little. If we did find the card in time, I would slip them into the Professor's shoe cupboard without saying anything.

In the end, a ray of hope came from an unexpected place. I had gone to pick up my paycheck at the Akebono Housekeeping Agency and was talking with some of the other housekeepers. As the Director was listening, I had avoided mentioning the Professor, and just said that my son had been wanting baseball cards and I'd had no luck finding good ones. Then, out of the blue, one of them mentioned that her mother used to run a little store, and she remembered seeing some leftover cards that had been included with candy in a shed where her mother stored old stock.

The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that her mother had retired and closed up the shop in 1985. She had ordered some candy to take on a trip her seniors group was planning, and the chocolates with the cards had been included in the shipment. Thinking the old folks would have no use for them, her mother had peeled off the little black prize envelopes stuck to the back of each box. She'd been planning to give them to a children's club, but had gone into the hospital later in the year and then closed the shop for good. This was how nearly a hundred mint-condition baseball cards had been stored in a shed all this time.

We went straight from the agency to her house, and I headed