The Billionaire's Embrace (The Silver Cross Club) (14 page)

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

JP grunted. “Tell your mom I’ll be back later, for the wake.”

I got out of the car and hauled my suitcase from the trunk. The wheels bumped noisily over the uneven sidewalk. The house looked just the way I remembered: the stunted avocado tree, the dog tied to the fence, the yard with a few clumps of grass struggling out of the packed dirt. When I opened the gate, the dog opened one eye and looked at me, but didn’t move. It was a new dog, one I didn’t recognize. I wondered what happened to the old one. She had only been a couple of years old when I left.

I stepped onto the porch.

The front door creaked open.

My mother stepped out, haloed by the lights in the living room.

I swallowed hard. I didn’t know what to say to her, or how. “Hi, mom.”

She looked me up and down. “So. You’re here.” She crossed her arms across her chest. She looked just the same, and despite the distance and the years, all the horrible things we’d said to each other, my crummy childhood, her refusal to leave my father, I wanted to hug her so badly that my arms ached with it.

I wanted her to say,
My daughter, how I’ve missed you
, and we would hug each other and cry, and everything would be forgiven.

But she just said, “You had better come inside,” and held the door for me to enter.

My grandmother died on Saturday; I had missed the first two days of the wake, but there were three more to go before the funeral. The house was filled with relatives and friends, smoking and playing mah jong, gossiping, eating the food my mother prepared. None of them had seen me in six years, and all of them were intensely curious about what I had been doing.

It was, basically, my worst nightmare.

“Regan, you live in New York?” my aunt asked. “What part? You don’t live in the Bronx, do you? I hear it’s very dangerous there.”

“She wouldn’t live in the Bronx, she’s not that stupid,” my other aunt said. “Tell her you don’t live in the Bronx, Regan.”

“I live in Brooklyn,” I said.

“See, Brooklyn! That’s a good place. With all of those hipsters.” My aunts nodded at each other wisely. “Timo, you know those hipsters?”

My cousin Timo exhaled a cloud of smoke and rolled his eyes. “Ma, you don’t know a thing about hipsters. They don’t exist east of Claremont.”

My aunt gasped indignantly. “That’s not true! I saw one just the other day, near that Starbucks.”

“That was a drag queen,” Timo said.

It had been years since I’d spoken Tagalog, but it was my first language, the one I still spoke in my dreams, and it made even my relatives’ bickering more palatable. I still didn’t really want to listen to it, though. I murmured something about helping my mom in the kitchen and sidled away.

I went and hid in the kitchen for a few minutes, where my mother was so busy cooking that she ignored me other than to tell me to stir a pot, but I couldn’t stay in there all evening. As soon as I poked my head out, I was roped into another conversation about New York and how dare I leave my aging mother alone and didn’t I know how to be a good daughter and my grandmother wished she could have seen me one last time before she died. It was excruciating. I gritted my teeth and smiled and nodded and got away as soon as I could.

As the night wore on, people started going home, until around midnight there was nobody left except my mother, her two sisters, and the handful of cousins who didn’t have to work in the morning. I sat down and finally ate something, for the first time in more than twelve hours. As soon as I was sitting, I realized how tired I was: eight hours of travel, and it was past 3 in the morning on the East Coast. I would usually be home from work by then, and getting ready for bed.

The room was warm and familiar, scented with cigarette smoke and flowers and food, and my head started nodding. Each time my chin hit my chest, I jerked my head up and blinked awake, but it kept happening. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

My mother came over and looked down at me, mouth pursed. “Sleeping at your grandmother’s wake?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I rubbed my eyes. “It’s the time difference.”

“Hmm,” my mother said. “I made up your bed. Go sleep.”

“But the wake,” I said, and then couldn’t figure out why I was protesting.

“There’s more to come. You’ll sit up with me tomorrow.” She jerked her head in the direction of the bedroom. “Go sleep.”

I wouldn’t say no twice. I staggered down the hallway and fell into bed, and was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I
n the morning, I woke to find an empty house, and my mother smoking at the kitchen table, wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. She didn’t look like she had slept at all.

“There’s coffee,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. I poured myself a cup and sat across the table from her. It was strange, after so long, to be back in this house where I grew up, sharing coffee with my mother like the intervening years had never happened. But if she didn’t want to talk about the past, I wasn’t going to bring it up. “You should get some sleep. I’ll sit vigil for a while.”

She shook her head. “Maybe later. I have some cooking to do.”

“I can do that, too,” I said.

“Oh, you still know Filipino cooking? You haven’t forgotten everything?” She scoffed. “I doubt it.”

That stung. “I still cook for myself,” I said. “Every recipe you ever taught me.”

“Well,” she said. She exhaled and stubbed out her cigarette. “At least you’re not on drugs, or in prison. It could be worse.”

That surprised me. I would have thought abandoning my family ranked me much lower on the scale than someone like my cousin Freddy, who—as I learned the night before—was doing six to ten in Chino but still called his mom every weekend.

We sat in silence for a while, me drinking my coffee, her smoking another cigarette. Then she said, “You help me make lumpia, and then I’ll sleep for a little while.”

“Okay,” I said.

We had made lumpia together more times than I could count, and we fell easily into the rhythm of it: me chopping, her rolling and frying. My mouth watered as the kitchen filled with the scent of frying lumpia and hot oil. We finished quickly, with two of us working, and my mother went into the back of the house to sleep. I set the lumpia to cool on paper towels, and went out into the living room.

One of my aunts, Marisol, had arrived, and was sitting beside the casket, smoking a cigarette. “You made lumpia?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Mom is sleeping.”

Marisol nodded. “Good. She needed it.” She motioned to the chair beside her. “Sit and play mah jong with me. It’s no good with two people, but we’ll make do.”

That was how we passed the morning, sitting beside the window with my grandmother’s coffin beside us, playing mah jong in silence. A couple of neighbors showed up, and my aunt roped them into playing with us, happy to have a full set of four players. She won every match. I had never been very good at mah jong, and I had almost forgotten the rules by now, after years without playing. It came back to me soon enough, but I didn’t stand a chance with the way Marisol played.

We took a break around noon and went into the kitchen to eat the lumpia. While we were in there, the doorbell rang.

Marisol looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Well, go get it. You’re the daughter of the house.”

She was right, technically, but I still felt weird about answering the door, when it hadn’t really been my house for a long time. But someone had to get the door, and it wasn’t going to be Marisol. Sighing, I hauled myself out of my chair and went to see who it was.

There was a person standing on the front step, but it was so bright outside, and so dim inside the house, that I couldn’t tell who it was. I opened the storm door, polite smile already fixed on my face, and then froze.

It was Malcolm.

“Hi, Regan,” he said. He looked just the same, only older, and my heart turned over in painful recognition. He was wearing the kind of jumpsuit that auto mechanics wore, and his name was stitched on the pocket. He had cut his hair so short that it looked like a thin fuzz covering his scalp.

“Hi,” I said, feeling dazed, and then belatedly stepped aside to let him in the house. “We have, um. There’s lumpia.”

“Great,” he said, giving me a cautious smile. “I’m pretty hungry.”

I led him into the kitchen, and stood in the doorway while he made easy conversation with my aunt and the neighbors, and ate twice as much lumpia as someone his size should have been able to. Malcolm was a small guy, only a few inches taller than me, but solid and muscular, and I had always been amazed by how much food he could put away.

Seeing him again was like a hot knife in my belly. I wanted to cry, or hug him, or run away.

He was my first boyfriend, my first love. We started dating our freshman year of high school, and we broke up the night before I left for New York, when I told him I was leaving.

Maybe I had never really gotten over him.

I wandered back out to the living room and stood over the casket, running my hands across the smooth wood of the lid, staring blindly into space.

Coming home had been a mistake.

I thought of Carter, three thousand miles away, and how he would never know this part of me, the Regan I became in California.

New York seemed like a distant country now.

A floorboard creaked behind me, and I turned. Malcolm came up behind me, wiping his hands on a paper napkin. “I should have changed, probably,” he said. “Sorry. I was at work.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Um. How are you?”

“Good,” he said. “Busy. The shop’s doing well.”

When I left California, he and his brother had been making plans to buy out the local mechanic, who was retiring. “So you bought the garage,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re making a good living.” He stuffed the napkin in his pocket. “You want to go talk outside?” He tilted his head in the direction of the kitchen.

I looked where he was indicating, and saw my aunt and the neighbors peering at us. They quickly turned away and pretended like they weren’t eavesdropping, but that was obviously what they were doing. I rolled my eyes. That had been one of the worst things about my adolescence: trying to do something,
anything
, without every Filipino person in San Bernardino hearing about it before dinnertime. The grapevine was all-seeing and all-powerful.

Malcolm and I went out into the front yard, and I was careful to close the door firmly behind me. I was old enough now that I wasn’t going to tolerate anyone spying on me.

We stood under the avocado tree. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling weirdly exposed. When I was eighteen, Malcolm knew me better than anyone; but we were different people now.

He scratched his head. “Now I can’t think of anything to say.”

I laughed, more out of nervousness than because he’d said something funny. “It’s a little strange, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, a little,” he said. “I heard you were in town. I wanted to see you.”

“I thought you would still be mad at me,” I said.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I was mad for a while. But I know why you left.”

“You do?” I asked, surprised.

“Yeah. Your dad, and everything.” He shrugged again. “Right? It wasn’t a secret, that he drank too much and—you know. And you were weird for months, like you were hiding something. I thought it was another guy, but after you left, I figured out that you were just planning your escape.”

I turned away, afraid to let him see my face. I felt raw, stripped down to bare nerves. That last night, when I told him I was leaving, I had said I didn’t love him anymore. I’d been trying to hurt him, to keep him from asking too many questions, and I knew from his expression that I had succeeded. That was the one thing that haunted me, my one regret.

And now he was telling me, in his roundabout Malcolm way, that he had forgiven me.

“Look,” he said, “I have to get back to work. Do you want to get dinner later? My treat. I’ll even talk your mom into letting you out of the house.”

I drew in a deep breath and turned back to face him. “How are you going to do that?” I asked. “I’ve got a strict curfew, you know.”

“I’m an upstanding member of the community now,” he said. “No more sneaking around.”

“Okay,” I said. I smiled at him. “Dinner sounds really nice.”

* * *

H
e came at 6 and picked me up in the same beat-up Chevy he’d been driving since high school. My mother went out onto the porch with me and said, “That Malcolm’s a good boy. Be nice to him.”

I stared at her in surprise. Malcolm had always been
that good-for-nothing
or
that delinquent
. I wondered what he’d done to get my mom on his side.

I walked down the cracked sidewalk and eased myself into the passenger seat of Malcolm’s car. “Can’t you afford a better car by now?”

He grinned. “Sure, but I like this one. Lots of happy memories.”

My memories of his car primarily involved driving up into the hills and making out in the back seat. I blushed and turned my head to look out the window.

We went to the same Mexican place we’d always gone to as teenagers, and sat in a booth overlooking the parking lot. The menu hadn’t changed at all. I ordered a chile relleno and a margarita as big as my head. We ate guacamole and waited for our food to arrive, gazing shyly at each other across the table, like middle schoolers at their first dance.

“I bet you can’t get good Mexican food in New York, huh?” Malcolm asked.

“Well, you’d be surprised,” I said. “These are still my favorite chile rellenos, though.”

“Will you tell me about New York?” he asked. “I still haven’t made it out of the state.”

“Not even to Vegas?” I asked. Whenever anyone had some extra cash, they went to Vegas and blew it all in a single weekend.

“Not even to Vegas,” he said. “I like to keep my money, not gamble it away.”

“Some things never change,” I teased. He’d worked two part-time jobs all the way through high school and saved every penny of it. It seemed to have paid off.