They left Fiona and me standing in the bare living room. The place felt smaller somehow, with all of her and Aaron’s stuff gone, the curtains off the rods. The cupboard doors in the kitchen hung open, and the ceiling fan in the dining nook spun in the bright emptiness, the only thing moving in the apartment.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I was just counting,” she said, “how many apartments I’ve lived in, the last ten years.” She was still looking at me as if with only the whites of her eyes, but the glare was gone from them. “And all the times we had to move around when I was a kid.”
I thought of Mah then. She still lived in the same house in the suburbs where Fi and I grew up. My old upright Yamaha in her living room, the bench draped with the same white doily. The Jesus painting over the sofa, the cerulean of His eyes faded to gray now. Even the Lord developed cataracts in time.
“Remember that yellow apartment?” Fiona said. “Did you know we were evicted from there?”
“Your neighbor had that mean dog—”
“No, that was another place,” she said. “The yellow apartment was when my brother was born.”
“Why’d they evict you?”
Fiona shrugged. “Why do you think?” she said. “We didn’t pay the rent.”
“I didn’t know—”
“You’re lucky,” Fiona said. “You still have the same home to go back to.”
A knot grew in my throat. What she said about home made me think of my father. I couldn’t stand the ceiling fan spinning around like that. Ten years ago. I’d just turned twenty-two not long before I got the call about my dad. Fiona was already in New York, or about to move there. I didn’t remember her; I can’t recall much of anything about that year, I realized all of a sudden.
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry. I pushed away the thoughts of my father alone by himself in the end, in some dusty apartment in Shanghai.
“Let’s go down,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
? ? ?
Ed and I only dated for six months. Then he flew home to Evanston for Thanksgiving and when he got back, the guy dumped me. His popo had taken him aside and told him if he kept seeing me something terrible would happen—his ED issues were an omen, she’d warned, holding up a crooked finger before his face. She’s never been wrong, Ed had said when we met up to talk.
“What is she, some kind of psychic?” I asked. “How’d she know about—”
“I’ve been taking these Chinese medicine packets she gave me.” He leaned toward me. “Maybe we can try—one last time?”
Anyway, I let him kiss me. Five minutes later, we both had our jeans off. I stuck a hand in his briefs, but his grandma’s herbs weren’t performing any miracles.
“Why can’t you get a prescription for Cialis, like a normal person?”
Ed rattled off the list of side effects: nausea, headache, dry mouth, diarrhea. “And what if I get a boner that lasts four hours?”
“So that’s it? We’re breaking up?”
He didn’t reply, just zipped up his pants.
* * *
? ? ?
The movers hoisted Fiona’s sofa through the front door at the new place and set it down in a corner of the living room. While they brought in the rest of the boxes, I stripped the plastic wrap off the pilling sofa cushions and stuffed them back into place. The cushions smelled like Fiona. I wondered if she’d been sleeping on the sofa these last few months, instead of the bed.
Sonny stepped through the door with a package shrouded in a blue towel.
“Please—careful with that one.” Fiona crossed the room and took it from him. She lowered it softly on the glass coffee table and unwrapped the towel.
“Haven’t seen one of those in a minute,” Sam said. “Does it work?”
I’d found the old typewriter at the Goodwill on Vine Street, in the electronics section next to a squat thermal paper fax machine. Immediately, I thought of buying it for Ed’s Christmas gift. I knew he’d love it. He filled his apartment with all sorts of old, battered things; I didn’t know if it spoke to a Chinese immigrant mentality passed down from generations who saved and salvaged everything （I’d witnessed the same compulsion in the apartments of my tenants）， or if it was some eco-friendly hipster upcycling scheme. Fiona had sidled up to me in that musty aisle, and we’d stood there a moment, silently admiring the blue Remington case, the elegant black keys. She knew what I was thinking.