'Saturday: 26th November: Shift 2'

Saturday

26th November

2nd shift

“Hi there, ma’am,”

It hadn’t taken much. Hana had closed a little earlier the night before, organised the shop so that everything was ready to go with the flip of a sign.

She didn’t know how long her plans would keep her out last night, after all.

She brought on a smile, standing fast behind the counter.

The windows were wide and transparent, and it was no time flat before one of the figures outside shuffled in.

The bell at the front jangled. The door sent a in shaft of cool sunlight to die, as the halogen closed in.

“Do you have those bits I asked for, last week?”

The woman who drew up to the counter first made no delay raising a slim, aged chin in what might have passed for as curiosity. She gazed down the stunted barrel of a nose at the bedraggled Hana as she began slipping off a puffy jacket, in a way that made it clear she had no intention to wait until she was warm to finish business.

“Last week?” Hana smiled, with just a hint of hesitation.

The reply practically cracked the air.

“—You should bloody well know, it was you I asked. Don’t you remember?”

Her smile sank.

Hana did remember. She contemplated for a moment, withdrawing as if she’d been smacked.

Christmas fondant collection. She recalled. Banoffee pudding taster box. A family pack hot chocolate kit, and three boxes of mini-classics. Two of them dark, one of them white.

She happened to remember this customer behaving like a sea urchin of a person last week too.

“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am. Could you please remind me?” She said.

“I— I told you perfectly well last week!” The woman said. “Why should I have to keep track of every little thing?—"

In what felt like flourish as much as frustration, she pulled her bag aside, throwing her jacket back up around her shoulders.

“—Ugh!” She drew out her phone, almost like she was threatening Hana with it. “Are you going to make me scroll all the way through my messages to find it?”

Hana was no stranger to profuse apologies. Half of her life was customer service, after all. But today, strangely, she felt…
Numb was the wrong word for it. For a change, at least.
Even if she didn’t know why, today she felt a little more invulnerable than usual.

Enough to maintain a smile. “If that’s what you need to do, ma’am.”

It remained a mystery to Hana that people could act this far out. Whatever was going on in her life—

Nope. It was her business.

Hana didn’t want to know, or care, for that matter. She almost had to remind herself.

It was still pathetic to watch. More insulting than the slap it felt like she’d received, was its feebleness.

The woman huffed. “Now, look. I just want—”

“—Here it is.”

Hana was already over it.
She brought up a set of boxes from behind the glass counter, sleekly contained in ribbons and glossy-smooth card. She passed them one-by-one into a trendy paper bag, and held it above the counter for her.

The woman quietly took her chocolates.

Ah, great.

It was the bad kind of quiet. Not like settled water, or the inane lull of Wan’s Desserts whenever Kajima had it in him to avoid rustling around the shop looking for imminent disasters to make out of the day-to-day.

This was a time bomb, in classy Roppongi residential guise.
Only she couldn't hear the ticking.

It took everything Hana had not to preemptively bow her head.
She’d dug her heels in too deep. Turned a momentary, if unpleasant, transaction into an exercise in mammalian politics.

What had been the point? The woman standing in front of her now was probably the secretary for some bigwig CEO who barely had enough time to come out and shop for Christmas, let along spend it with whatever extended family she was buying these for.
Lord knew she probably didn’t have the time to raise a family of her own.

Every second of silent countdown brought Hana closer to bowing her head, and she wondered why she was even resisting.

She couldn’t know what was going on inside the other woman’s head.
But the real problem, the thing making her hands clam up and her neck sweat, was the mystery inside hers.

If she were smart, this customer would have Hana all figured out. And who knew, she’d probably find a way to make time in her boss’s schedule to come back and wreak havoc through whoever in HR was in-need enough of entertainment to relay the complaints to her manager.

It wasn't Hana's peace that'd be at stake. That was long gone already. She needed to start thinking about locating a paddle, since it wouldn't be long before she was booted overboard, back into the inky, unrelenting waves of the job market.

So much for handling ‘whatever’ came her way.

She could burn those bridges when she got to them. For now, the only thing she could do, the only thing that was at all her style, was strain to keep a smile on her face.

“Will that be all, ma’am?”

The time came for the woman to slip a gold credit card out of her pocket. She did so at a distance, gripping it between her fingers against a folded arm. It wasn’t an offer of payment, and certainly not one of peace.

“That’s my line, I think.” Finally, the woman asked, her voice silky smooth. “Are we done playing games?”

Hana assumed from her tone that they weren’t. And it was the woman’s hand to play.

Here we go.

She felt the wad of notes she’d tucked into a pocket in her waistband press tight against her skin, as she pulled on her uniform under the till.

“I’ve had to make a complaint about this location’s customer service before.” Miss Roppongi tilted her face up just a slight.
“I imagine your marketers already know plenty about the situation, because they’ve been sending me offers and discounts and all sorts of incessant bloody bundles ever since. I imagine to make up for it. —How do you think things will go for you if I go ahead and lodge another one?”

Hana followed, crystal clear, three steps ahead from what the woman was saying.

But it didn’t help much to have the premonition of an incoming train wreck when she was contractually bound to the tracks.

It explained why the only part-timer who’d returned was the kid outside, still staring at his video feed. The others must’ve gotten sick of getting chewed out via invasive messaging apps they were supposed to monitor every waking hour, not that they’d lasted long to begin with.

“Are you dissatisfied with the service you’ve received, ma’am?”

Still.

For some pointless reason, Hana would not bow her head.

The game went on. Her latest move had been the most underhanded yet, as she raised her voice just enough to be natural. She raised her voice just enough to catch the attention of two women who were already chatting as they browsed, the two other customers who had entered upon opening.

Their conversation barely shifted, but they looked over. And Hana knew that Miss Roppongi had noticed as well. Their clash had suddenly opened to spectators.

More than deciding to be a raging headache for just the service staff, now, the woman risked looking petty in front of a pair who were dressed just as classily as she was.

Heck, maybe they knew each other.

Hana didn’t care. She just wanted Miss Roppongi to know she was going to be served the way Hana wanted to serve her.

Why?

It was so stupid. The girl derived no pleasure from watching her customer squirm and boil and wrap a perfect, plastic, padded coat around herself like the plumage of a wounded pidgeon.

Because I have 100,000 in my pocket?

Split up. Fragmented around her waist, her leg, her—

Everywhere. Hidden in ways you wouldn’t think to search, even if you found one little piece of the trove. A chunk of it scattered paranoid throughout her little one-bedroom rental.

The facts were hardly a trophy she could take any pride in, let alone enough sanctimony to try and retaliate against the first sea urchin of a customer who decided to roll up a little too prickly.

Even now, Hana smiled into her eyes, watching the woman carefully wording the vicious email she was going to send later in her mind.

All for a little bit of sass.

“Service?” The woman’s eye twitched. “Are you calling what I’ve just received a ‘service’?”

Sure, in the final analysis, this smart, classy lady was pretty stupid. Pretty pitiful. Pretty obnoxious, despite obviously being unoblivious.

But if she was analysing anyway, Hana was coming out of this matchup far worse off.

“—What?”

All of a sudden, the sound of the doorbell cracked their oystershell exchange open a little wider. The kid part-timer had finally decided to stop texting, to straighten up his uniform and come inside, and was now watching the veins pop out of Miss Roppongi’s temple, dumbfounded.

“What da hell?”

He asked again, making not much more progress than his entering line.

“—Auntie?”

Hana felt like her spine, held taut by the hormones of pride and prejudice, suddenly collapsed. Someone had been stringing her out like a set of toy blocks on some elastic, until that moment.
Not that the mysterious ‘someone’ wasn’t just her, herself.

…Auntie.

She wasn’t going to question it, at this point. She could almost see the resemblance, if not for the fact that one set of eyes was sleepily detached from reality, and the other looked as though they were about to burn a gate to hell through the HR servers the moment she got in front of a keyboard.

The part-timer nudged, practically shoved Hana out of the way.

Tch.

She was glad to leave the woman’s immediate field of view, she supposed, in an attempt not to explode.

“Auntie, lemme give you my staff discount!” The kid leant over the till. “You shoulda’ told me you were comin’.”

“—Ohhhhh!”

Suddenly, Auntie Roppongi’s bloodlust dissolved.

“—Riku! I’m so glad you’re working today, how are you, little lovely?”

She set the bag down and the card short after, grasping the teen’s cheeks.

“Ohhhh, I wish my face was as soft as yours, boy.”

“Heh-heh-heh… Auntie, are you coming over this Chrimas?”

“Ohhh, well, actually…”

Little lovely Riku hadn’t actually stepped all the way over to the till, so Hana typed up the order from the side while the two of them talked along, staff discount included.

Her cheeks burned. She needed to find some way to at least feel occupied. Somehow she doubted he was in a state to remember to apply it, anyway—

And, there he went, tapping the till menu without checking, putting it on again.

In a funny, jittery feeling of denouement as she recovered from her lapse of judgement, Hana didn’t have a problem with Auntie Roppongi paying quarter-price on the bag of goods.
At premiums like these, the order would probably still turn a profit. Not that she really cared.

“It’s a lovely little shop, Riku.” The newborn wonder in the woman’s gaze found purchase on seemingly every spot except the one where Hana was standing. “Though I hope you’re dealing with these coworkers of yours alright.”

“Yeah, some of them are pretty bad.” Whether he thought he was being subtle, or if he was trying an actual dig, the kid glanced back. “Maybe I better give ‘em some extra training, huh Auntie?”

While they laughed about it, Hana quietly leant over, and cancelled the second staff discount.

It was company policy, after all. You couldn’t just give away free chocolate. 50% off would have to be enough.

“Anyway… So that’ll be, um… 4,500 yen, Auntie.” Riku resumed his post at the till.

“—Lovely.” The woman beamed. “Thank goodness for that discount of yours eh, little lovely?”

“Thanks, Auntie!”

And the two of them were all smiles.

Even though she could feel her eyes glazing over, Hana had to admit, she felt a little relieved.

As Auntie Roppongi departed, Riku floated away from the counter, his eyes drawing a slow spiral back towards his phone.

Hana smiled at the two women who were approaching, focusing on getting ready to do it all again.

Just, a little more peacefully this time.

Hana only wondered whose side her own thoughts were on.

Please?