“Baby? I told you I haven’t decided, and that I didn’t want to talk.”
“Right. Talk. But you didn’t say anything about a care package.”
“Bullshit. It’s manipulative. Why not just throw me a baby shower while you’re at it?”
She sounds tired, frustrated, and he remembers how hot it is in Hello City. Here in Colma, the ground is so damp he can’t sit.
But he wants to talk again; he has so much to tell. Like how he took down Jun-Jun after he called Maxima a bitch, that he tried (and failed) to fight Gunter, and now knows what it’s like to be punched in the face. And that he is learning to be someone else, a fourteen-year-old kid named Perfecto. But did all this, and whatever came before and whatever might come after, happen because he’s TNT? And if so, will Sab still want him?
“I held a baby,” he says.
“What?”
“At The Pie. I was Sloth the Sleuth and a woman had me hold her baby then took a picture.” He didn’t actually touch the baby, not through the thick shaggy costume and the oven mitts, but he could feel his weight, the presence of his tiny body in his arms. “I held a baby and it was . . .”
“It was what?”
“It was right. I think it was right.”
He looks down at Joker’s tombstone, sees chewed stems of what might have been roses. Deer had come at night.
“You really want this,” she says, “don’t you.”
“Do you?”
“I asked you first.”
“Yeah,” he finally says, “I do. I think a baby could be a good thing. For both of us.”
“Would it help?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, would a baby help you? Would having a baby that was born here, in California, make it easier for you to stay?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” But he thinks he does.
“I’m talking about you staying here legally. Is that why you want this baby?”
He doesn’t know if it’s anger or hurt that gets his heart racing, but he takes a breath, calming himself so that he can speak. “I can’t believe you said that to me. I wouldn’t have a baby for that reason. I’m talking about family. Making a home.”
“Hello City”—she sighs, sounding exhausted, maybe even fed up—“is not a home.”
“Tell that to Lucia. Or Rosie or Red.”
“It’s different for them. They’re not hiding.”
He almost asks her to repeat what she’d just said, but he heard her perfectly. “I wasn’t hiding in Hello City.”
“You said it yourself. That night we introduced ourselves. You said you’d come to Hello City to hide. I even asked you about it later, and you didn’t answer.” He thinks back to that night, nine months before. He was high, he remembers, so perhaps misspoke, paranoid from the pot and nervous from all those strangers’ staring faces. But he’s almost positive: Sab is wrong. He didn’t move to Hello City to hide. It was the exact opposite.
He won’t argue the point. They’ll agree to disagree on that night. Maybe on all the nights after, too.
“Hello?” Sab says. “Are you there?”
“I’m back at the apartment now,” he lies. “I gotta go. Is there anything else you want to say?”
“No,” she says. “You?”
“No,” he says. “I’m done.”
“Me too.”
They hang up, no good-bye.
Excel bends down, picks up the chewed stems from the tombstone. Looking for a trash can, he remembers his original plan: before they’d left for Hello City, he’d meant to tell Sab he was TNT right here, at Joker’s grave. The place where they met. The one place he’d miss, after he was gone.
Maybe he would have been better off not telling her at all.
MAXIMA OPENS THE DOOR BEFORE EXCEL CAN EVEN TAKE OUT HIS keys, as though she’s been waiting all day for his return.
“I have news,” she says.
He steps inside and removes his shoes, the tips flecked with mud and grass from the cemetery. “Good or bad?”
“Very good,” she says. “We got three hundred dollars.”
“Three hundred dollars? From where?”
“From Jerry.”
“Already? What’d you say to him?”
“Not me. You. It’s what you said. He got your e-mail. He feels bad that you quit your job, so he sent money to help us get by.”
Instinctively, he does the math: 10,000 − 300 = 9,700 dollars closer to Hello City. After his call with Sab, he’s not sure what these numbers mean. “Jerry believes us?”
“He believes you. I didn’t even have to ask for the money.”
Excel thinks back to his e-mail, Perfecto’s e-mail, wonders what choice of words, what specific phrase, might’ve made so strong an impact so quickly. Maybe it was the story behind it, how pathetic Perfecto’s life must seem.
“Why is your face like that?” she asks.
He’s not in the mood to hear that he’s looking like a snot-nosed, ungrateful kid, rolling his eyes. “Like what?”
“Like this.” Her eyes shift downward. She clenches her jaw, tightens the line of her lips. Whatever face she means to mimic looks tired, beat down, sad. “You should be happy,” she says.
“I’m happy. It’s just weird, fooling Jerry like this. Three hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
“So is ten thousand.”
He nods.
“Well, you’re going to have to get used to this,” she says. “We’ll work hard, work fast if we can. And we’ll only take what we need. Understand?”
He says he does.
“Good. Now go wash your face and put on your good Target shirt,” she says. “We’re celebrating tonight.”
ROXY PICKS THEM UP AND THEY DRIVE TO MAMA CHIX, A NEW Filipino point-point joint in Daly City. Barely seven p.m. and the place is packed, Filipino families filling almost every booth and table. They pick up trays and line up, and Maxima orders combo plates for each of them, pointing to the pinakbet, fried rice, paksiew, laing, lechon kawali. When they reach the cashier, the food barely fits on their trays.
A table frees up in the middle of the restaurant and Maxima nabs it. “Lucky timing!” she says, but as soon as he sits Excel feels surrounded, like all the families are staring at them, the way the audience did at the F.O.F.F.F. screening, when Maxima forced their standing ovation for a movie that everyone knew was laughable crap.
“Okay, okay,” Roxy says, clapping twice, “tell me about Jerry. Three hundred bucks! Excel, what did you say?”
“Just ‘hello sir, how are you sir,’ that kind of stuff,” he says. “Nothing special.” He looks at the food heaped on his plate, not hungry at all.
“He was better than that,” Maxima says, practically beaming. “And the key was memorizing those facts. He has one of those photograph memories, talaga. Like the spelling bee, when he’s in grade six. He memorized over a hundred words, stayed up all night for a week. Almost fifty students, and he came in second.”
“I still lost,” he says.
“What word did you miss?” Roxy asks.
“‘Coalesced,’” Maxima says. “Alam mo ang word yan? I don’t. But that’s the word they gave him. The kid who won—white girl, di ba?—they went so easy on her. What was her final word? ‘Ball’? ‘Cat’? ‘Ice cream’? Something like that.” She describes the moment: Excel and the girl (Tammy Lundell, Excel remembers now) side by side on the auditorium stage, Maxima and Joker in the third row, cheering their boy on. “Joker was nervous 100 percent, and my heart was like this”—she knocks on her chest with her knuckles, five times fast—“because nothing this big ever happened to us before. Joker is squeezing my hand, I’m saying an orasyon, and the whole room is true suspense, talaga. But it’s okay. You did your best.” She reaches over, gives Excel’s shoulder a squeeze, begins to eat.
“I knew the word,” Excel says.
She puts down her spoon.
“‘Coalesced.’ I knew how to spell it. C
-o-a-l-e-s-c-e-d. It means ‘coming together.’ I knew the word.”
“You knew the word,” Maxima says.
He’d entered the spelling bee only for extra credit, which he needed to offset his C− average, but it wasn’t until that moment, when the spelling bee was down to its final round, that he actually realized he could win. From the stage, he could tell that Maxima and Joker believed it too. But when all the students were eliminated and only Tammy and Excel were left, he remembered that the previous year’s winner, Bonaventure Nguyen, was presented with a leather-bound dictionary and a hundred-dollar check from the City of Colma, and that his picture was taken for the Colma Weekly, his name, even the names of his parents, printed in the caption. For Excel to see his and Maxima’s names in print, with an accompanying photo—that was the opposite of hiding. He could win the spelling bee, but lose everything else. When it was his turn, his last turn, he dropped the second c in coalesced. “I’m sorry,” the spelling bee announcer said flatly, “that’s incorrect.” As he took his seat, he could see Joker trying to smile but Maxima made no effort, just folded her arms across her chest, teeth digging into her upper lip.
He looks at Maxima. “Why is your face like that?”
She doesn’t answer.
He turns to Roxy. “All you got for winning was a stupid gift card and a book. No big deal.”
“How can you say that?” Maxima says. “All those kids, and you could’ve beat all of them! That’s a true victory!”
“It was a long time ago,” he says. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. To Joker. To me. We cheered for you. I prayed for you. And you do this to us?” She shakes her head and stares at some faraway point beyond the restaurant windows, like she has never been more ashamed of him. “You had something good and you threw it away.”
“I didn’t,” he says.
“You did. And that’s a sin, Excel.”
“A sin. You think throwing a stupid spelling bee is a sin. You know what a sin really is? A sin is pretending you don’t know an old man when he’s dying at Sizzler. A sin is acting like a stranger when they wheel him away into an ambulance while you just stand there. A sin is making your son do it too.” His voice is rising now, he can hear it, is almost shaken by it, but he can’t stop. “I would’ve gone with Joker in that ambulance. I would’ve been there when he died. And if they’d taken me away and handed me over to the police or Immigration or whoever the hell we’re always hiding and hiding from, at least he wouldn’t have been alone. ‘We owe him everything,’ that’s what you always said, and look what we did to him.”
Maxima has no expression on her face, none that Excel can understand.
He gets up, goes outside, and walks to the curb. He sees, across the street, in the Home Depot parking lot, a small girl pushing an orange cart with a potted lemon tree inside, her parents two steps behind her. The mom pops open the trunk and the dad sets the tree inside, ties the trunk down with rope. The girl is jumping up and down, so excited that she does two cartwheels, one away from her parents, then one right back.
Excel closes his eyes, puts his head on his knees.
Later, he feels a hand squeeze his shoulder, firm and strong. He lifts his head, wipes his face with the back of his hand. He looks up, expecting Maxima, but finds Roxy standing there instead. “Come on, hon,” she says, “I’ll take everybody home.”
24
He could not get the applause from the Hello City Town Council meeting out of his head. It was two or three people, maybe four, but that small number only amplified the sound of their clapping, like the first drops of rain pelting the roof of the bus. Maybe it would’ve been better if everyone had clapped at the news of the border patrol sweep, so that the applause was less sharp in his memory, just white noise instead. And then he’d know to keep his distance from everyone, instead of always wondering who in the Hello City crowd could not be trusted.
It was the middle of May. The day of the sweep hit ninety-six degrees. Excel stayed inside the bus the entire day, most of it in bed. He’d never been to the Outerlands, but remembered the way Lucia described it when he’d first arrived—it was criminals, addicts, people who wanted nothing to do with other people. But all he imagined were men and women in the desert, children too, doing their best to stay cool. Sab worked all that day but had come by for lunch, then later to change into a cooler shirt, Excel in bed the whole time. “Are you okay?” she finally asked, sounding more annoyed than concerned. Excel said he was fine, just tired, that the heat was getting to him. “Yeah,” Sab said, “tell me about it,” then left and went back to work.
The sweep happened and no news followed. No announcements were made at the next town council meeting, no rumors circulated. Excel, as casually as he could, brought it up with Red and Lucia, even Heddy and Ned, asked if anything had become of the sweep. They all shrugged, said they had no idea. The days, for now, could go back to normal.
But not for Sab. She was exhausted, which was understandable—Pink Bubble orders seemed to increase every week—but there was a shifting distance between them that Excel couldn’t track. One night, she had dinner with Excel on the bus, but took a sleeping bag and slept on the helipad right after. Two days later, she blew off work and stayed in bed, and asked Excel to do the same, but rolled away when he tried holding her, saying it was too hot inside the bus to be touched. May was ending and Excel realized it was almost a year since they’d met and nearly nine months since they’d arrived in Hello City; these days, he seemed to know less and less what she was thinking, what she felt.
One day, another without work for Excel, Lucia dropped by with a padded envelope. “Addressed to Sab, but care of Pink Bubble,” she said. She handed it to Excel and left.
Sab was gone for the day, getting supplies, mailing off orders. It wasn’t his place to open it, but he saw it had been sent by Sab’s aunt, and he knew what was inside. Carefully, he opened the envelope, pulled out a small silver picture frame.
The photograph was black and white, a high school portrait, wrinkled and scratched in the middle with a corner torn off. Sab’s mother wore what looked like a blouse with a sailor’s collar and tie, her hair in pigtails, and held an unrolled diploma with Japanese characters written on it. “Cancer killed her when I was seven,” Sab had said, but in the picture she looked confident and proud, a true smile on her face. Nothing, he knew, could brighten up the bus more.
He propped it on the dashboard, the first thing she’d see when she came back home.
SEVEN P.M., THEN EIGHT. SAB WORKED LATE SOMETIMES BUT NOT like this, and when he hadn’t heard from her by nine thirty, he walked to Lucia’s Airstream but she was gone too, out for the night. He’d already left a voicemail but left two more, checked his e-mail right before Beans! closed—nothing. He even considered calling the police (wherever they were—Whyling? El Centro?), unsure if this qualified as an emergency. What it took for a person to become missing, he had no idea, and he was, admittedly, scared for himself: to call the police, he’d undoubtedly have to explain his relationship to the person in question, then give them his name.
Sab was fine, he told himself. Just wait.
He stayed awake the entire night. In the morning, he took the picture frame off the dashboard to protect it from the sun, and just as he slipped it back inside the padded envelope, she texted him. I’m OK. Be back soon.
He stayed in all that day and finally went out at night, but only as far as the helipad, where Sab had left the sleeping bag. He picked it up and shook it out, brought it back inside.
The car pulled up just past eleven p.m. He was in bed but wide awake, and he heard Sab’s slow footsteps into the bus. He turned on the light, sat up.
“I woke you,” she said. She set her keys on the table.
“I’ve been awake,” he said. “Since yesterday. Waiting.”
“I should’ve called. I know.”
“Where were you?”
“Out. In El Centro. At a hotel.”
> Excel had never stayed in a hotel in his life.
“A Best Western,” she said. “Nothing fancy. I didn’t mean to do it. But I drove past it, and next thing I know I’m making a U-turn, parking my car, and checking in.”
“What for?”
She shrugged, leaned back, looked at the ceiling. “I wanted to take a bath. I wanted to watch cable in bed. I wanted to sleep in an actual room.”
He got out of bed, joined her at the table. “I know the bus isn’t perfect, but we can change it. We’ll get better furniture, paint the walls a happier color. Yellow, blue, whatever. This is our home. We just have to invest, you know?” He put his hand on hers, but he could feel, from the stillness of her own, that she didn’t want it there.
He went to the shelf, pulled out the padded envelope. “This came yesterday. I’m sorry I opened it.”
She reached into the envelope, pulled out the framed photograph. “Mom,” she said, thumbs pressing into the glass. She blinked back tears, set the frame on the table.
He crouched down in front of her. “See? It just takes time. We’ll be all right.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Of course we will. I know it.” On his knees at her feet, looking up at her, he felt like he was pleading.
She put her hand on his shoulder, gestured for him to get up. He stood, sat back in his chair. “I need to tell you something,” she said, and he immediately thought of Renzo, that night on the roof years before. How Renzo had told him the truth, how Excel refused to tell his. What he lost because of it.
“The reason I went to El Centro was to go to the CVS. I bought a pregnancy test. Two of them. I took the first test in the CVS bathroom, if you can believe it”—she shook her head—“and took the second one at the hotel. Positive. Both times.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Yeah,” she said. She looked at her hands, rubbed her thumb over the spot on her wrist where she’d burned herself while making soap. The skin had healed.
“This is okay,” he said. “We’ll handle this.”
The Son of Good Fortune Page 18