I took her phone and stared at the picture of my father’s brother. His hair, an elegant gray, held a wave in it, like my father’s did. My uncle had a broad forehead, a pronounced eyebrow ridge above genial dark eyes, crinkled at their corners. My heart beat in my chest. My throat felt tight. There was my father’s mouth. His smile.
I looked up from the phone at Mah. Tears sat in her eyes. “We never get to see him past forty-five,” she said. “I think maybe, he would look something like your uncle now—if he was alive.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “I see it. I see his face.”
I held Mah’s phone in my hand a long time.
* * *
? ? ?
Mah packed a bag for me with a stack of Tupperware containers filled with leftovers, and a quart-sized bag of frozen dumplings. “Don’t drive crazy,” she said. “Call me when you get home.” The same refrain every time I left her house.
“I almost forgot,” I said, standing in the driveway. “I have a New Year’s present for you.”
“A red envelope?”
I popped the trunk and pulled out Mah’s gift: a brand-new Jesus painting in a rococo gilded frame.
Mah laughed and patted me on the back as I carried it inside for her. I removed the faded Jesus from the wall and hung up the new one. The Son of God looked right at home, over the sofa. Reincarnation, I thought. A miracle made possible by Etsy. Mah beamed.
“Mah,” I said suddenly. “You would be happy? If I got married.”
She was silent for a moment, thinking.
“I have a new girlfriend,” I said. “I want you to meet her.”
Mah held my gaze. “Okay,” she said. “Good,” she added. “What’s her name?”
I felt my stomach unclench. Somewhere between the old Jesus and the new one, Mah and I understood one another.
* * *
? ? ?
Late Sunday night: my phone buzzed, Julian’s name flashing across the screen. Something felt off as soon as I picked up. I asked him about the weather, if it was snowing again. He answered in a dead-sounding voice.
“Are you okay?”
He said my name. He said, “I fucked up. Royally.”
I asked him if he was drunk, and he said no, then yes. I waited for him to go on.
Another week at work had droned past, he said, meetings that should’ve been emails, a scrapped acquisition deal. He’d hit the sixty-day mark and passed the interim review with flying colors; HR officially presented him with a box of business cards. The ex-captain with the beer gut congratulated Julian with a nice bottle of rye.
“What does it mean that I hate this job,” he said. “But everyone thinks I’m doing great? What a sick joke,” he added. “I’ll probably quit on Monday, if they don’t fire me first.”
Last Friday, he continued, he’d gone to happy hour with his group, where everyone clapped him on the back and bought him shots to celebrate the review. Someone suggested that they move the party to Scores—“I thought it was a sports bar!” Julian said—and the two women among the dozen or so men shouted yes the loudest. At the strip club there was Dom, and Krug, and one of those female colleagues ended up sitting next to Julian, squeezed in tight together in the middle of the velvet booth. At one point they started making out, and before he knew anything they were hailing a cab back to the office, where they polished off the rye in Julian’s desk. She’d hitched up her skirt and crouched down on her knees in front of him.
“I didn’t notice her wedding ring until after. Before Friday we’d barely even talked,” he said. “There’s cameras everywhere in the office. And I used my keycard to swipe in—”
“You’re not getting fired for that,” I said. I started picking up the comic books I’d been trying to read these last few weeks. One by one, I threw them back into the cardboard box. “I have to call you back,” I said. “I’m on my way out—”
“I freaked out,” he said. “When you told me you were seeing someone else—and all this week, you didn’t call—”
“Julian,” I said. “It’s fine. You’re going to be fine.”
“I like you, okay?”
“I went all the way to New York to see you,” I said. “What else do you want from me?”
“You’re a real person,” he said. “And when I talk to you, I feel like a real person.” He hesitated. “When you told me about your dad—”