“Did you cancel Ping for this week, too?” I said. My lessons were on Friday afternoons.
“Oh!” Mah cried. “I forget. I have to call her—”
I promised one last time to get to the airport early, and then we hung up.
“Heavens,” Lee said. “Don’t be late for this, don’t forget that—I bet you can’t wait to go off to college and get away from all the nagging.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction by agreeing.
“You look so much like her.” Lee’s unwavering gaze made me uncomfortable. “It’s almost like being back there again, twenty years ago.”
So he did know my mother, before.
“You’re going to have to find a new badminton partner, Uncle Lee,” I said.
“I see,” he said. “Of course. You miss him.”
“He’s coming back to the US soon.”
“But in six months, you’re leaving home, too. Correct?” Lee’s eyes hardened, as if he’d been assessing me this whole time and had just now decided something. “Isn’t this American tradition? You move out of your parents’ house after high school. Different from Taiwan—”
“He doesn’t belong here,” I said. My voice was unsteady. I took a breath. “He belongs with my mother—me—”
“Did you ask him if that’s what he wants?”
“I don’t have to ask him.” He’s my father. I know him. He’s mine.
“She’s our only child,” Baba said. He put a hand on Lee’s arm. “Let’s go home so you can finish packing.” His voice was gentle, but firm.
I shook Lee’s hand when we said goodbye. He exclaimed at my long fingers, how wide my palms were. I could span an octave easy with my right hand. The left needed practice, but I was getting there.
Baba and I strolled in the direction of the subway station. As we walked, I clenched my left hand in a fist, then spread my fingers wide, as far apart as possible. Ping had taught me this exercise to loosen up my reach. Imagine fire shooting out, she’d said. Energy! Power! Add gasoline! I tightened and relaxed my left hand at my side, over and over again.
* * *
? ? ?
It was past eleven, but the night market still thronged with people at this hour. Baba and I picked our way through the crowd, both of us silent. We passed into an alley that led to a turnout to the main road; neon signs lit up the storefronts along the boulevard. We paused at the corner, waiting for the traffic light to change. Now that we were a ways off from the night market din, the sound of cicadas chirping filled the air all around us, teeming thousands nested in the camphor trees.
I thought about Mah. Was she missing me? Baba? Or was she glad to be free of us? Her way of loving was sharp, never tender. She needled us about every little thing, blamed us for every strand of gray hair on her head, every frown line that settled on her face. I missed her all of a sudden. I realized I’d barely thought of her at all, my whole time here.
As if reading my thoughts, Baba began to tell a story about her.
“After college,” he said, “Mah worked as a clerk at the department store. They only hired the most beautiful, elegant girls. Ones who knew how to dress, how to talk to customers. Everyone—I mean everyone—admired her. She could have picked any young man to marry.” He paused for a moment. “But she chose me.”
I thought of the photos I’d seen of them from those days, preserved behind vellum in an album back home. They’d looked like actors in a movie to me: Baba all Bruce Lee bravado in yellow aviators and polyester button-down shirts with huge collars, Mah rocking bell-bottom jeans and platform sandals, her waist tiny, hair curled into lustrous ringlets.
Mah had always blamed the pregnancy for ruining her trim shape. One time, in a moment of rage when I was a kid, Mah unzipped her pants and let her gut hang out, the loose flesh puckered with purple stretch marks. She’d grabbed me by the neck and smashed my face against her belly. “You did this to me. You! Are you happy?”
“Before I left Taiwan,” Baba said, “she made me promise not to meet any American girls. I gave her my word.” He smiled. “That was our engagement.”
“No ring?”
“It was a secret between us,” he said. “And then I went to the US for graduate school.”
The traffic signal flashed green. Baba reached for my hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. We crossed the street linked together that way. Past the median, a dozen scooters flew within inches of us, mufflers rattling as the riders sawed through the night.