The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(50)

“She’s home already,” Louis said. “My mom was in town, so I asked her to swing by and pick up Annabel when I realized you hadn’t. You don’t mind too much, do you?”

“Why would I mind?” Dorothy said, half-serious, half-sarcastic, all of her displeased. Louis was named after his mother. That’s the kind of woman she was. A former Miss Spokane, she graduated from Gonzaga Law School, summa cum laude, and passed the bar with flying colors. She quickly found her calling in corporate law, where modeling for a jury and carrying a caseload were more profitable than walking a runway and carrying a bouquet of roses. While many graduates of Gonzaga’s Jesuit-led law program went on to be public defenders, or border lawyers, or argued against the criminalization of poverty before the US Supreme Court, her most notable case made it possible for corporations to anonymously donate to political campaigns and earned her the moniker “The Woman with the Sandpaper Heart.”

Dorothy smiled and said, “You know I love it when your mom comes to visit.”



* * *



When they stepped into their apartment, Dorothy saw her de facto mother-in-law sitting at their dinner table, going through a stack of mail.

Annabel sat next to her with a box of crayons, busily drawing.

“Ah-ma’s home,” Annabel called out, then she went back to her artwork.

“Hello, Louise,” Dorothy said, even though the woman had often implored her to call her Mom. It had been a magnanimous gesture, but Dorothy sensed it was less of an invitation to the family and more of a way to let her know that she was a child and Louise the stable, mature, venerated grown-up. Besides, since Dorothy had lost her mom at a young age, she was in no hurry to find a replacement or even a surrogate mother.

“I thought I’d clean up a bit for you, do some organizing around here, make myself useful,” Louise said. “I don’t know why you keep all of these rejection letters lying around? Who wants to be reminded of failure?”

Dorothy set her jaw as she realized the woman had gone through their mail, even casually opening today’s, en route to sorting it. In the pile had been form-letter rejections from the many online job applications Dorothy had filled out. As well as letters from prestigious artist residencies, far away from typhoon season. Though Dorothy didn’t know how she’d be able to attend even if she got into one of her top choices—Yaddo, Ragdale, or Ucross—since leaving Annabel with Louis for a month was out of the question. Dorothy glanced at her partner, who merely shrugged. She remembered him saying that his mother always opened his mail when he’d been younger, that it was an OCD thing. But then again, before they’d moved in together his mother had hired a cleaning service to attend to his dirty dishes, make his bed, and do his laundry once a week, so maybe it was, or maybe it wasn’t.

“Really, you don’t need to,” Dorothy said.

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” Louise said, smiling innocently. “No trouble at all. You know me, I’m always happy to help out when I can.”

Dorothy watched as she sorted their bills into two piles. Their apartment lease, power, and car payments, which she split with Louis, and the bills from her therapist, her prescriptions, and the bills from Epigenesis, which she alone paid, despite her income having been reduced to whatever she could manage from substitute teaching.

“Why even bother applying to these?” Louis asked, pointing at the rejection letters from the residency programs as he kissed his mother on the cheek.

The two of them stared at Dorothy, and she realized the question was more than rhetorical. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. She couldn’t bear to tell them that she applied because an acceptance letter would at least feel like validation, that she was worthy of someone’s time and consideration. Even that of a group of strangers.



* * *



Dorothy sipped a cup of dragon pearl tea and lingered in the kitchen as Louise made dinner. She’d offered to help, but Louise had said, “I have all the help I need,” as she nodded to Annabel, who was making a show of squeezing lemon halves into a bowl.

“Lemon artichoke pesto.” Louise smiled. “My boy’s favorite.”

Dorothy smiled. “Great.” She hated artichokes almost as much as the fact that Louise knew this and conveniently pretended not to remember.

“You know, I was thinking,” Louise said. “Maybe Annabel would like to spend a few weeks with me in Spokane where the weather is better and she can actually see the sun once in a while. I’m only four hours away, after all.”

“That’s very generous,” Dorothy said, glancing at Annabel, who had washed her hands and was now busy sharpening her crayons. “But her friends are here, her classes at preschool…”

“Along with tropical storms, blackouts, downed powerlines, emerald fever. Oh, and the perpetual smell of rotting fish, as a bonus,” Louise said as she casually sprinkled a pinch of salt into a pot of boiling water. “It’s a veritable Disneyland around here. I can understand why any mother would want her child to grow up in the middle of all this.”

Dorothy looked around their lavish apartment, a place better suited to Louis’s desire to impress others. The penthouse allowed him to sit with clients at the Canlis restaurant, where over a plate of winter crab with kani miso remoulade, he could casually point his fork to the Seattle skyline and say, “You see that tall building, the one reflecting the sunset. I have a place at the very top.”