The Vanishing Half(61)
Seven schools were reading her application right now and would, in a few months, decide her future. Made her sick to even think about.
“I figured out how to fix that ceiling,” Reese said. “I know it’s been drivin you crazy.”
It was November, and already unreasonably wet. Every morning this week, they’d driven through deep pockets of rainwater on Normandie, worried the car would stall. At home, they nudged a silver bucket underneath the leaking ceiling, which Reese dumped on the sorry patch of grass behind the Gardens Apartments. The Edenic name of their building always made him laugh. Why not call this building the Brick Slab, or the No Hot Water, or the Hole in the Roof? But Jude didn’t find that funny. She glanced back at the clock, only five minutes left of her break.
“Why don’t you just call Mr. Song?” she said.
“You know he’s too old to be climbin up that ladder.”
“He should hire someone, then.”
“Too cheap,” he said, squeezing her hip.
He’d found a new job at the Kodak store, selling cameras and developing photographs. He missed the camaraderie of the gym, but the Kodak store offered an employee discount on film. Not that he’d needed any lately. He hadn’t taken a new photograph in six months. He spent his free time helping Mr. Song mop up water from the basement or plant mouse traps or whatever little chores he could do around the building to earn reduced rent. He unclogged the Parks’ toilet, fixed the Shaws’ broken pantry shelf, fished into the kitchen sink for Mrs. Choi’s fallen wedding ring. If he came across a job he didn’t know how to do, he called Barry for help.
“I told you that place was a dump,” Barry said. But what were they supposed to do? Their old landlord had jacked up the rent, so off to Koreatown it was. In a way, it was an adventure. The new foods to try, the signs you couldn’t read, the language spoken around you, on the bus or the street, that allowed you to drift off into your own thoughts. The neighbors in the Gardens, mostly elderly like the Chois and the Parks and the Songs, who pitied those two young people living in the apartment with the leaky ceiling and brought them sticky rice cakes for Christmas. But the ceiling. The cramped bedroom. The tiny kitchen. Reese said that if he helped enough around the Gardens, maybe they’d save so much on rent they could find a new place. But by then, Jude hoped that she would be gone.
“You worryin about nothin,” her mother told her once over the phone. “You a smart girl.”
“Plenty of people are smart, Mama.”
“Not like you,” her mother said.
Whenever they hung up, Jude always felt a little guilty knowing that the life she most feared was the one her mother was already living. Waiting tables forever, living in a cramped home. At least she had Reese. At least she wasn’t in Mallard. She could be grateful for that, even if she couldn’t stop herself from projecting into the future. Each time she mentioned spring, Reese shifted a little, a distant look falling over his face, like he didn’t want to talk about it.
That night, after she closed Park’s, they walked home, Reese’s arm around her shoulders. On the corner outside the Gardens, a pale dark-haired woman passed and Jude held her breath. But it was just a white woman gliding underneath the streetlights.
* * *
—
IT COULDN’T BE STELLA. For years after that Beverly Hills party, Jude had thought of little else.
Sometimes the woman in the fur coat looked exactly like her mother, down to the curve in her smile. Other times, she was only slender and dark-haired, a passing resemblance at best. After all, she’d only caught a glimpse of the woman before the wine splashed against her leg. Then she was scrambling to pick up the shattered glass while the whole party gawked. This, of course, stayed with her too. How she’d groped along the table for cocktail napkins before Carla pushed her out of the way, frantically blotting the ruined rug. By the time she’d dumped the wine-bloodied napkins into the trash, Carla told her to leave and never come back. She’d quietly gathered her purse, too embarrassed to glance around the room lest she lock eyes with one of the many witnesses to her humiliation. She looked up once as she shut the door behind her and she didn’t see the woman at all, only the girl with the violet eyes watching her leave, pink lips curled into a smirk.
A dark-haired woman who could have been anyone. Maybe she just missed her mother so much, she’d convinced herself of the resemblance. Maybe she felt guilty about not going home, about never going home, and this woman was a projection of her subconscious. Or maybe—no, she wouldn’t even consider that possibility. That she had been in the same room with Stella, that she’d caught eyes with her even, before she’d dropped that wine bottle and shattered everything.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Reese had asked later that night. “You’re shaking.”
They were walking to meet Barry at Mirage. She hadn’t said much since she’d returned home early but Reese looked worried, pausing under the stoplight, and she knew that she had to tell him the truth.
“I lost my job,” she said.
“What? What happened?”
“It’s stupid. I saw Stella. I mean, I thought it was her. I swear she looked just like her—”
She felt even crazier saying it aloud. That she’d gotten herself fired because she’d caught a glimpse, through a crowded party, of a woman who may have resembled her mother.