Nancy left before the food came, claimed she had another engagement to go to. “My son just bought a new house—very stylish, many bedrooms, a patio—and is having people over. He needs me there to help set the table and choose the right wine.” She kissed Mom on both cheeks. “You’ll like my gift. It’s a shower radio. I’ll see you in a week for your appointment.”
We watched her walk out of the restaurant in silence. The food came and we ate intensely, eyes down on our plates, stuffing more food into our mouths before we finished chewing. When our plates were empty, I could feel the panic, the three of us unsure what to do. “I’m going to open my gifts,” Mom said.
Mom opened the shower radio from Nancy, a Snuggie from Billy. “I know you get cold when you’re watching Jeopardy! reruns late at night.” Then Mom picked up my gift and looked at me for the first time that night. I wish that she would’ve looked angry, that her eyes would’ve been piercing and fiery, that she would have been directing all her years of disappointment at me. But her eyes were soft and full of warmth and forgiveness, she looked like she wanted to reach across the table and hold me against her. I reached for my water glass and drank from it even though it was empty.
Mom was thirty-seven tonight. For the first time, I thought about how she was closer to Jenny’s age than my own. I tried picturing the two of them standing next to each other. Their differences went beyond the obvious—height and weight, hair and eye color, the way their faces changed and the lines that deepened when they smiled—Jenny was more of a person to me than Mom had ever been.
I thought about how Mom’s first name was Choon-Hee, although, the minute she stepped off that plane and her feet first touched American soil, she told everyone to call her Kayla. I knew that those were still her names, but I’d never thought of her as anyone other than Mom. I couldn’t imagine her talking the way Jenny did. To me, her vocabulary was limited to a small selection of words and phrases—Hi, Good morning, How was your day, Are you hungry, I can make you something, Your dad always loved, Good night, Sleep well, How is the baby—I couldn’t imagine her with her hair long, tied back into a ponytail, creating shitty paintings, lying all day on a couch dipping Hot Cheetos into a tub of cream cheese. It must be true that, like Jenny, she had so much life ahead of her, so many things she could do. But I could only picture her going gray in that Kmart uniform. It made me ache to think of Billy and me moving out of the house one day; I couldn’t imagine her bringing another man into her bed, a man who would only know her as Kayla, who’d whisper that name as he closed his eyes and pressed his lips against hers. I’d never seen her kiss Dad on any place other than the cheek and forehead when he’d passed out drunk on the couch.
Mom peeled open the wrapping paper of my gift. Underneath, there was a framed photo of her, Dad, and me, when I was just a baby. They looked young and beautiful and their smiles were wide and open-mouthed. They held me between them like I was the answer to all their problems. Mom stared at the photo and began tearing up, held the picture to her chest. “This is lovely. Where did you find this?”
Billy saved me. “She’s been looking at a lot of your old photo albums. That’s her favorite photo.”
Mom cried quietly for a few more minutes, until her birthday apple pie was brought out by a waitress. Mom hated cake—frosting made her teeth hurt. As she blew out her candles, I made eye contact with Billy and mouthed, “Thank you.” He nodded back, and his eyes were also soft and warm, and I couldn’t stare back for more than a few seconds. I was too full to eat any pie.
* * *
—
ONCE A MONTH, we stayed late at Eddie’s and held a competition for who could fold a hundred pizza boxes the fastest. The winner didn’t actually win anything. Folding pizza boxes was part of our job, we just wanted to make it fun.
“Sixty-two,” Darryl said. “Where are you at?”
“Fifty-five,” I said.
“I’m at seventy-six,” Willie shouted.
Darryl gave me a look and turned his shoulder an inch away from Willie. “So—Carl and I are really done this time.”
It was my turn to give Darryl a look. “No, no,” he said, “I really mean it. I just can’t take it anymore.”
“What can’t you take anymore?”
“Loving someone more than they love me.”
We stopped talking and focused on the folding. I wasn’t very good at folding quickly, but I secretly didn’t mind this part of the job. “Oh,” Darryl said, “did you hear about what happened with that couple you like?”
An image quickly popped into my head—Rita and Louie Booker standing in their doorway, barely clothed bodies, arms never not around each other. “The Bookers,” I said. “What’s up?”
“So my buddy Marv lives in the apartment next to them and apparently the husband—”
“Louie.”
“He was beating the shit out of his wife.”
“Rita.”
“I guess he had a thing for punching her in the stomach, so that no one could see the bruises. Last night, the cops were called. The EMT said he was beating on her so hard that she started vomiting blood.”
I was having trouble folding the box in front of me. My hands were too shaky. “That can’t be true,” I said.
“Afraid so. Marv looked out of his apartment and saw the wife being loaded into an ambulance, the husband being shoved into a police car.” Darryl sighed, shook his head. “I really did like them. They were always polite over the phone.”
“I liked them too.”
I played back every time I had ever delivered to them in my head. I pushed my mind to re-create every last detail: What was the color of Rita’s shirt, why did Louie scratch his nose like that, what did Rita mean when she opened the door, smiled, and asked me, “Hey, girl, how’s it going?” Was she trying to send me a message, trying secretly to say, “Hey, girl, how’s it going? Help me, I’m scared and I don’t know what to do, I’m dying here, every day I’m dying, and I don’t know what to do or who will save me, can you save me?” I remembered this one time delivering to them, about a month ago, and she complained of a sore back. The last time I saw her, there had been a cast on her left arm.
I stopped folding boxes and braced my hands on the table. I saw them kissing and laughing and loving each other in my head, and then I remembered that the beer in Dad’s shed was nearly gone, five cans left.
“Hey, Willie,” I said, “can you go up front and get me a big cup of Diet Coke? I’d go myself, but I’m really behind you guys on my boxes.”