“Don’t you ever talk about my mother like that,” I said.
She sat there quiet, cradling her cheek in her hand, her eyes wet.
I remembered the shock of feeling her skin beneath my hand, how soft it was. How easily her head snapped sideways, against her shoulder. The fear in her eyes, the reproach in her downturned mouth, how much like a child she looked then.
I apologized right away—I fell to my knees—I don’t know what came over me, I said. Please, baby, I said.
But I knew something had changed for her. In that moment, I’d become her father. And there was no coming back from that.
* * *
? ? ?
Saturday afternoon I drove out to the suburbs to visit Mah. I threw my overflowing laundry hamper in my trunk before I left my place and tossed a load into the machine in the garage before going inside.
“I’m here,” I shouted. “Mah! You home?”
The Jesus painting we’d had since forever hung crooked above the sofa. I sank into the worn cushions and found the remote in the crack between the seat and the arm. The TV flickered to life on LA-18, in the middle of a Mandarin talk show. I watched for a few seconds before I flipped through the channels, settling on cartoons.
Mah poked her head out of the bedroom, blinking her eyes. Her hair was flattened against one side of her head. I must’ve caught her in the middle of her afternoon nap.
“Eat yet?” she said.
She headed for the kitchen before I could reply, and I jumped up and followed her.
Mah listed a number of dishes she could cook for me to eat, tapping her fingers against her thumb. “Noodles, you want? Or white rice? With braised short rib stew.” She filled up a dented pot with water and set it over the flame. “You cut your hair?”
“Won did it,” I replied.
“Too short,” she said, dismayed. “Just like a boy.”
“I like it short, Mah.”
“Makes your face look big.”
“Don’t you know it’s the style now?” I said. “Having a big face is very popular. Every girl wants a big face. Bigger the better.”
Mah smiled and shook her head. When the water boiled, she tossed two bundles of clear rice noodle sticks into the pot. She stirred the strands apart with a pair of long wooden chopsticks, talked with her back to me about her plans to redo the kitchen tiles this summer. Ever since her fall and the subsequent surgery, Mah stood crooked on her feet. She favored her right hip now. When she looked over her shoulder at me, her body seemed as curved as a bell.
I skirted out during a pause in her monologue to stuff the wash into the dryer. In the garage there were boxes and boxes of my father’s stuff. After all this time, Mah couldn’t bear to donate it or throw it out. I didn’t know what all was there, and I didn’t want to find out. Tossing everything without going through it seemed wrong, though. Nothing to do but leave the boxes stacked there, gathering dust with time.
Back in the kitchen Mah pulled two bowls off the dish rack and set them down on the counter. She ladled noodles and steaming broth into each. A silence hung between Mah and me. It wasn’t a bad silence. Just the same old quiet. We sat down at the counter stools. I finished the first bowl and filled another. I ate until I was full.
She asked how Won was doing. I said he was fine.
“He asked me to marry him,” I said.
Mah looked up.
“He was joking,” I said.
“I need your help,” Mah said finally, as if making an announcement. She pushed her soup bowl away from her. “You won’t like it,” she added. “But my toenails grow long. I can’t bend down.”
* * *
? ? ?
I sat on the edge of the tub, waiting for the plastic basin to fill up with warm water from the faucet. While I was trimming her nails, I noticed the dirt and lint crusted between her toes, on the tops of her feet, and remarked on it. Mah had sighed and given an embarrassed smile. Six months after her surgery, Mah seemed fine, except for the slight limp. She didn’t need her cane anymore. Mah was back at work, driving herself to appointments, eating out with the church ladies, just like before. Last week she told me proudly the deacons had reinstated her Sunday school role with the first and second graders, a job she enjoyed more than anything else she did the rest of the week. She was kinder to those brats and far more lenient, I was sure, than she ever was with me. Some of their crayon drawings hung taped to the wall in our living room, next to the upright piano I hadn’t touched in years. One of them portrayed three crosses on a green hill, indistinct figures pinned on them with their arms outstretched—morbid, I thought—but the others were of normal kid stuff: cats and dogs, blue skies and white clouds, houses with windows, families of people wearing giant smiles. I was amazed at how fast she seemed to recover. Seeing the dirt caked on her feet, though, depressed me. How long had she waited before she felt she had to ask me for help?