I carried the basin over to the sofa where Mah sat waiting, watching TV. She’d turned it back to LA-18. I set the water down next to her, and she lifted one of her feet in the air, dipped a toe in to test the temperature.
“Too hot?”
She shook her head and submerged both her feet. I watched her face. Her eyes were soft. I asked about the soap opera. A rich family going bankrupt, she replied. It was a popular Korean miniseries, dubbed over in Mandarin. Mah pointed to the actress on-screen, a beautiful woman with disdain in her eyes and full, dark red lips. “They hire her to trick the uncle,” she said. “But falling in love.” Then she said, “This girl, a little bit like your friend Fiona.”
I studied the actress for a few seconds. “She’s pretty,” I agreed.
I sat down cross-legged on the carpet in front of Mah, the white plastic tub between us. I wet a clean towel I’d found, wrapped it around the nub of soap I’d grabbed off her bathroom sink, and worked up a good lather. I cupped one of Mah’s heels in my left hand under the water. The bottom of her foot was smooth, flat. Mah had no arch in her foot at all.
With the towel, I started washing her shins, her calves. Her sweatpants were rolled up to her knees. The skin on her legs was as white as tofu custard. Blue veins branched underneath the surface, from her knees to her ankles. She rested her toes on the edge while I rubbed the towel over the top of her foot, and lifted it so I could clean her toes individually, sliding the towel in the spaces between each of them. After I finished her right foot I moved on to her left. By the time I finished, the water in the basin was gray with dirty suds.
“All done,” I said. Mah said thank you. I felt embarrassed all of a sudden and stood up to carry the filthy water out from sight.
* * *
? ? ?
I opened up the blue notebook again that night, back at my apartment.
Dear Fiona, I wrote.
I don’t know what to say. Won told me to write to you.
I broke up with a girl I was dating. Her name was isCarly.
I’m sorry I haven’t called.
How are you?
Hey, remember the time . . . you said . . . and then I
Remember how we
I was just thinking . . .
* * *
? ? ?
We drove everywhere in Shamu, her Civic hatchback. The 91 to the 605 to the 5. The 110 to the 10. She wore that spaghetti-strap dress, those patent leather Mary Janes. Her ponytail was tied with a strand of pink ribbon. Or, her hair was down and parted in the middle, loose and tumbling over her shoulders, caressing the small of her back. The feeling I had when Fiona was by my side: like we could do anything. Get everything we’d ever wanted—until I realized that what we wanted didn’t match up anymore.
She left, of course, after high school. Me and Won stuck around. I got my license, finally. He enrolled in Vidal Sassoon Academy, and I convinced Mah I was on a gap year, which turned into two, then three.
I thought maybe she’d come back home after Berkeley, but Fiona only kept leaving. She followed her boyfriend to New York. Won and I had met Jasper when we drove up north for Fiona’s graduation; on the way back down we’d dissected him in the car for hours, from Pleasanton to Kettleman City. “She likes him too much,” Won had said. “And he knows it.”
I missed her, but I didn’t know how to say it. Fiona’s life seemed serious. Grown-up. When she was in town over Christmas, she’d told Won and me that she planned to be engaged in the next six to nine months, the ring on her finger by next Christmas for sure. I still thought of her as my best friend, though more and more she was becoming a story to me, one whose plot I couldn’t make sense of because either I was missing information or maybe I’d forgotten something from before—something important—and it was too late to ask about it now, because it would mean admitting I hadn’t been paying attention. Like: Why did she want to marry Jasper? Why had she gone with him to New York in the first place?
Maybe these were questions Won would want me to write down in the notebook, as part of the dumb life-coaching project I never agreed to but—I hated to say it—somehow, incredibly, was working for me. Little by little, day by day, I was getting better. I vacuumed my apartment for the first time in months even though I didn’t expect company. I booked a dentist appointment when I realized it had been more than a year and a half since I last had my teeth cleaned. Carly was still the first thought in my head when I woke up every morning, but the empty space in my bed didn’t feel as pathetic and lonely as before.
I visited Mah on the weekends still, but I never washed her feet again. The experience was too mortifying for both of us to repeat. The next time I went over, she showed me the long-handled body brush she’d bought at Daiso for $1.99. “I get one for you, too,” she said, thrusting it at me. “Make sure you hang it after each shower,” she added, “so it can dry out between use.” Like me, Mah was getting better, too. Her life coach was Jesus, and their relationship, even if I didn’t understand it, had kept her heart beating all this time, after everything with my father.