“You’re gonna spill half your water by the time you get home.” He jumped off the tomb and jogged over to stand in front of me. He tried to help by taking one of the buckets.
“Hey!” I swung the bucket away, sloshing more water out. “What makes you think I live here?”
“Why would you need to fetch water if you don’t live here? Hmm?”
“Hmmmp!” He was right but I wasn’t about to admit it. I tried to move past him but he blocked my way. I eased the buckets down, trying not to spill any more water. I had to put them down anyway because my fingers were beginning to feel numb. When he reached for the buckets again, I smacked his hands away.
“Come on, I’m trying to help. I’m not gonna steal your buckets, if that’s what you’re worried about. By the way, my name’s Jojo.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard his name. “I can manage just fine, thank you.”
“Hey, aren’t you going to tell me your name?”
I rolled my eyes and bent to pick up the buckets. Jojo grabbed one of the handles and said, “I’ll carry this one, and if you can carry that other bucket without spilling any more water, then you won’t have to tell me your name, okay?”
He grinned at me, proudly displaying the gap between his two front teeth. He picked up the bucket and started off in the direction of my grave house. He must’ve been watching me for a while. He walked in a loping gait with his other arm stretched out for, what? Balance? The water surface in the bucket remained glassy and still as he walked.
Hmp! If he could do it, then I could as well. I imitated his posture and his walk, and followed him. By the time I got to my new “home,” my shorts were wet and my toes were squishing and squeaking in my wet rubber slippers. Mama was standing outside the grave house, smiling broadly, as Jojo spoke and pointed to different parts of the cemetery. They both turned when I set the bucket down. Jojo’s eyes twinkled with mischief.
Mama slapped her hands together and said, “There she is! I was just talking to your new friend. Oh, good, you have the other bucket with most of the water still in it. See, Jojo”—she turned to face him—“I told you she could do it.”
If my eyes could shoot fire, Jojo would have turned into charcoal.
“He isn’t my friend.” My teeth were clenched so hard I could barely get my words out. Who did this boy think he was? And why was he so at ease in a place like this? I thought I would see my misery mirrored in the faces of other squatters, but not this guy.
Mama paid no attention to my mumbling and told me Jojo would take us to meet his grandmother. He was also going to help us gather some of the supplies we needed to make our grave house livable.
Not only did I have to tell him my name, but he became a fixture in my life here in the cemetery. He always came by when he had nothing to do. Jojo had grown on me, but I couldn’t bring myself to open up to him. It would have been nice to have a friend to talk to, someone other than Mama. I missed Evelyn the most during these times. Jojo was nice, but he couldn’t be the kind of friend Evelyn had been to me. Besides, keeping him close would only hurt me in the end. Something would happen and I would lose him the way I’d lost Evelyn. Despite it all, I was glad to have him around.
Especially now, after Tiger had taken my father’s watch.
“So … are you going to tell me what happened?” Jojo leaned back on his hands, his legs stretched out over the mat we were sitting on. He was wearing a T-shirt now, with the sleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders. A small pile of clothes lay between us, a combination of Jojo’s and his grandmother’s, all folded and ready to go.
“Your lola has pretty dusters.” The cotton housedress on top of the stack was old, with faded blue flowers on a background of lemon yellow. I smoothed out the last wrinkle, picked up the pile, and held it out to him.
He didn’t move to take it from me. He just sat there with an expectant look on his face, wriggling his foot. Oh boy, he was in full “big brother” mode now.
“Well, you saw what happened,” I said, sighing. The grave house didn’t look as messy as it had earlier. Jojo had helped me clean up, which consisted mostly of throwing things into the empty baskets and setting them aside for tidying up later on. They were lined up against the wall like garbage to be thrown out. I scooped the soil back into my sweet potato plant, patting it down to keep the stems from drooping. Mama’s Santo Niño altar had been left alone, thank goodness. I had swept the floor and rolled out my pink and yellow mat to sit on.
“What in the world did they want? Is it true that your mother made a deal with Tiger?” asked Jojo. He stretched his leg out and pulled the plastic bag of food off the table using his toes.
I smacked his leg in disgust. His foot hit the table and jostled a bucket full of water that stood next to it, knocking the cardboard cover off. The water sloshed out and ran down its side, forming a small puddle beneath it.
Jojo rubbed his calf. “Aww, see what you did? Anyway, don’t you pay any attention to who your mother hangs out with?”
“How was I supposed to know?” My throat tightened at the hurt look on his face. I wasn’t being fair to him. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t know how to begin. He’d been nothing but nice to me since the first time I met him.
With an exhausted sigh, I opened the plastic bag from Aling Lydia. We talked about what I’d heard from the gossips earlier in the day and what Tiger had said to me about my mother.
“I didn’t even know who Tiger was until today.” The shoebox I kept Papa’s watch in lay empty beside me. Even the money I had saved was gone.
“He’s bad news, that guy,” Jojo said through a mouthful of steamed pork bun. “He and his little gang live over in the Chinese cemetery. You know, he killed my best friend a couple of years ago. Tiger tried to take my friend’s money but he resisted. That bastard beat him up so bad—we got him to the hospital but he died anyway. Teddy was on his way to buy medicine for his father. I was supposed to go with him. Boy, was my grandmother glad I didn’t.” He swallowed, his eyes focused on the past for a moment. “I wish I had gone with him, though. I would’ve made him give Tiger the money.”
Then he sighed, grabbed a pandesal, and bit into it. “Hey, I heard that Tiger works for some businessman now, if you can believe that. He takes care of the family tomb or something.”
“How awful for you and Teddy’s family. But why would my mother have anything to do with him at all?” It had to be because of the gambling, but I didn’t want to believe it. Why would Mama take that risk? She’d never mentioned the idea of borrowing money at all. I couldn’t finish the pork bun in my hand. I had taken only one bite, but it felt stuck in my throat, as if I had swallowed the whole thing. Plus, my lips felt bruised, swollen. I squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out the memory of Tiger’s filthy hand covering my mouth.
Jojo shook his head and frowned. “Who knows? But if he comes back here again, he’ll be introduced to my balisong dance. I’m not losing another friend to that dog!” He jumped to his feet and slashed the air with an invisible knife. “Check it out, Nora. All you have to do is slash across like this and they’ll leave you alone. I had a neighbor that taught me … Hey, are you okay?” asked Jojo. He peered into my face.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just that…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It’s getting dark and Mama hasn’t been home since last night. She’s always home by now.”
“I have an idea. Why don’t you stay with my lola and me till your mother comes home? I can ask little Ernie to come and get you when she shows up.”
It sounded like a good idea. I wouldn’t have to be alone, even though I was sure that Mang Rudy, and the whole alley for that matter, were on the alert. Tiger wouldn’t, shouldn’t come back if he knew what was good for him. And Jojo’s lola was nice. But it was still hard for me to accept this sort of help, and not feel that someday the same person who helped you would be the same one to hurt you later on. Just like Lola Fely. I just couldn’t go through that again.
&n
bsp; “No, that’s okay. I’ll just stay here and wait for her. She’ll be home any moment now, you’ll see.” I held out the stack of folded clothes to him.
He raised his hand for me to wait. He tore a strip of cardboard from the flattened box Mama and I used as padding under our sleeping mat. Jojo folded the strip and showed me how to jam it between the gate hinges to keep it from opening.
“That should do it until you buy another padlock. Those thugs would be idiots if they try to come back here. Still, I want you to feel safe,” he said, taking the pile of clothes from me. He stuffed another bun in his mouth and strode away. “Thanks for this and the snack. Goodnight.”
I closed the gate and shoved the folded cardboard where Jojo had instructed me to. It worked. When I unhooked the bedsheet to draw it across the bars, I noticed Jojo walking back.
“Take this and keep it near you, just in case,” he whispered, looking up and down the alley. He reached through the bars, placed something in my hand, and walked away. It was made of wood, scarred and worn from use. I turned it over in my hands and saw that it was made of two rectangular pieces stuck together on the long edge. I pulled them apart and out of its center came a shiny thin blade. I looked after Jojo in wonder. It was a butterfly knife, his balisong.
Chapter Seven
My kulambo looked like a hovering ghost in the flickering candlelight. Its corners were tied to loops of rope Mama and I had attached to the ceiling. Its gauzy material covered my sleeping mat in order to keep mosquitoes out. I crawled into it, leaving the candle burning in the corner. Being inside my kulambo felt safe. The netting blurred my surroundings, helping me forget where I was, even for just a while. The balisong lay on the mat beside me. I folded my arm under my head and lay there, watching the candlelight flicker on the knife’s polished handle. I waited for Mama, too confused and exhausted to sleep.
Mama hadn’t always been this way.
After she had learned to play mahjong Mama began organizing a few of the neighbors to come over and play. Mama did this once a week, usually on a Wednesday, before she had to pick me up from school. Sometimes, instead of mahjong, they would play bingo. She was always in a good mood on that day. Papa had said he was glad Mama and her friends had a good time, as long as they only played for snack money.
I began looking forward to Wednesday afternoons because Mama would take me to her favorite turo-turo, a stand that sold a variety of sweet and savory dishes.
“What do you feel like having today, Nora?” she’d ask, peering at the pans of hot food behind a glass case.
“I want some ginataan,” I’d say, bouncing on my heels.
Mama always ordered the same thing I did. We’d sit outside at a small table covered with red-and-white checkered plastic, blowing into small Styrofoam bowls full of my favorite snack. It was made of cooked sweet potatoes, saba bananas, taro root, jackfruit, and sticky rice balls in a sweet coconut cream sauce.
Afterward, we would go to the market so I could buy stickers for my notebooks, and Mama would buy mangoes to eat after dinner. It was Papa’s favorite fruit.
When we moved to the cemetery, I had believed that Mama played mahjong because it gave her comfort, reminding her of Papa and our Wednesday afternoons together.
“I’ll win big tonight, Nora. You’ll see,” she always said before going to an all-night mahjong game. And for a while, I had the same hopes. I wanted to get out of the cemetery someday and live in a real house.
Whenever Mama came back from a game with her purse empty, I began to realize that winning big wasn’t going to happen easily. Mama never saw it that way, though. She wanted to win badly and thought of nothing else. There wasn’t a game she wouldn’t try. She even bought lottery tickets. Once, she lined up at a television studio for an entire day to watch a TV game show called Wowowee where they selected people from the audience to play games and win money. She never got in.
Then Mama started playing mahjong at wakes held at funeral homes outside the cemetery. At first, she would go only once a week, on Saturday afternoons. She took me with her once, but I complained so much about being bored, I broke her concentration on the game and she lost. I was considered bad luck after that. Instead, I would work on math or reading exercises Kuya Efren gave me. Sometimes, I’d hang out with our next-door neighbor, Tina, and play with her baby until Mama came home.
After a few months, Mama also started playing on Friday nights. She would come home very late. Then she’d go back and play all day Saturday. And Sunday. She would be too tired to work the next day. She’d even find a reason to play during the week. I would try to stop her but she’d always promise it would be her “last time.” She broke her promises. We used to wash clothes for three different households. Mama would either make us late for the job or she’d make a mistake, like accidentally bleaching a pair of jeans. We had lost two of those jobs, no matter how hard I tried to cover for her.
Most of the time, she lost all the money she brought with her to the mahjong game, which was usually half of whatever we made on a washing job. She would come home at dawn, irritated, muttering to herself as she crawled under the kulambo to lie down. I’d keep my back to her and pretend to be asleep, relieved that she had finally come home.
There were times when she did win, but it wasn’t what I would consider winning big. Instead of saving it Mama would go out and spend it on silly things, like a fancy pair of sequined Bombay slippers for herself, or a plastic Hello Kitty coin purse for me.
“I have to look decent enough so they’ll let me play, you know,” she’d say as she admired the new pink cotton dress she also bought with her winnings. I’d frown and tell her it looked expensive. Then she’d distract me with stories about Davao, and what it was like to grow up there. How wonderful the farm was, how many carabaos her brother, Danny, had. She’d promise to write to him, so he could send money or come to Manila to take us home.
I’d listen and get carried away, daydreaming about Tito Danny’s farm and the fresh food we would eat. It made my mouth water to think about eating eggs and pandesal with cheese made from water-buffalo milk. We had to save at least five thousand pesos to get there by boat. We couldn’t save even five hundred pesos.
That was when I decided to do whatever I could to make and save money. Replanting my sweet potatoes every time I harvested was one way. Mixing boiled sweet potatoes with cooked rice expanded one meal into two. Since I was down to only one washing job, I spent my free days selling everlasting-daisy garlands at the cemetery gates to visitors, who hung them on statues of saints or on altars at home. The little I made went to my savings. I wanted to buy supplies and do home manicures and pedicures. One of my squatter neighbors did it, and she made almost ten times more money than I did selling the garlands.
With that much money, I could buy those boat tickets. Mama and I would live with Tito Danny and his family and I could go back to school.
Maybe.
Late yesterday morning, Mama had been up and dressed in her pink cotton dress and Bombay slippers when I came home to pick up more daisy garlands. There were lots of people visiting the cemetery and I’d sold twenty of them in just a couple of hours. She held out her hand to me as if waiting for something.
“How much money have you made? Come on, where is it?”
“From a washing job? It’s Saturday, Mama, there’s no work today,” I said, pretending not to know what she really wanted.
She stared up at the ceiling. “I meant the money you made selling everlasting-daisy necklaces. Come on, split it with me!”
I ignored her outstretched hand and pulled a neatly bundled set of daisy garlands out of a box. I hung them over my arm. Mama stood in front of my only exit.
“Anak, don’t I share everything with you? Didn’t I buy you a new pair of slippers? Come on, this could be my lucky night!”
She had bought me new ones. But now my slippers had a small hole right under the heel. She was making it really hard for me to stick with my plan. “Ma, you kno
w I’m saving this money so I can buy my manicure tool case. Aling Lydia said she would help me.”
“But you’ve never given a manicure. Who will teach you? Not me, I’ve never given one and probably never will.”
“Tina will teach me. She used to give manicures before she sold her kit after having her baby. She’d said she’d introduce me to some of her former clients. If I do home manicures and pedicures, I’d make double, even triple of what I make now selling garlands. At least I’m not throwing money away.” Like you are, I almost said.
Mama pursed her mouth; her face became sad and thoughtful. Her cheeks looked hollow, and the bones on her shoulders stuck out so much that they showed through the neckline of her dress. She looked away just when I saw a tear form at the corner of her eye.
I sighed and undid the safety pin to take money from a pocket sewn into the waistband of the shorts I had been wearing yesterday.
“No, keep it,” whispered Mama. She looked up at me, her mouth set in a determined line. “There’s someone I have to talk to. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
She came to me, held my face between her rough hands, and kissed me on the forehead. Then she’d left.
Now, I stared at the candle flame with the same dread I’d had when I watched her leave yesterday. I hadn’t asked her where she was going.
Now I wished I had.
Chapter Eight
I am huddled in the corner of my room, clutching my pillow to my chest. Smoke is snaking in under my bedroom door, rising to the ceiling, filling the air. The windows are covered with bars. There is no way out. I can hear my father shouting.
It’s hot, and sweat is dripping into my eyes and down my cheeks. I can smell the sour stink of fear coming from my body. I try to call out to my father but all I can do is cough. The sharp smell of the smoke burns my nose and throat. My chest tightens as I cough again and again.
Everlasting Nora Page 5