Picture Us In The Light(42)
We eat quietly. The soup is hot and salty and sharp with ginger. Food tastes better in the middle of the night, I think—more soothing.
I think how much my mom would’ve loved to have an adult daughter, someone who’d come over and drink tea and gossip with her at night, someone to go shopping with or maybe to Napa or something on weekends, not that my mom ever really does either of those things. She would’ve loved having a daughter to feed when she dropped in.
“Is everyone coming over for Christmas?” I say, raising the bowl to my chin and sipping the broth. We all love Christmas, and it kind of snuck up on me this year—it’s just a week and a half before break.
“Yes, I think so. Everyone as usual.”
“Are you excited?”
She kind of laughs like I said something bizarre; it’s the word excited, I think, the idea that she’d pin it to herself like a name tag, describe herself that way even if it’s true. “So much work.”
“What? You love Christmas. You like cooking.”
“I’m getting too old.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re not old. I can help you cook, though.”
“Aiya, Daniel, you don’t know how to cook. Worthless in the kitchen.” I grin, and she takes my empty bowl. “Are you hungry still?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
She puts the bowls in the sink and reaches for her rubber gloves. I’d offer to wash them, but if she does it that means she’ll stay here longer and I don’t have to go back to my dark, quiet room. I guess I could at least turn on the lights. She scrubs and rinses the bowls and puts them in the dishwasher to dry, and I say, impulsively, “Do you ever miss Texas?”
She looks surprised. “Texas? It’s been so long.”
“But do you ever miss the people from there? Like the Parker-McEvoys, or”—I almost say the Ballards, but I stop myself—“or anyone else?”
“It’s much nicer here.” She pauses. “I miss the Freshtival.”
I laugh, startled—I’d forgotten all about that. It was this garden festival, and we used to go every year. Kids got free plants if you dressed up, so my mom used to gather up as many of the neighborhood kids as possible and pin green leaves to our hair, and you could enter the Fruits and Vegetables show. My mom entered her cai tai, but they didn’t know how to categorize it and no one knew what it was supposed to taste like, so she didn’t win anything. “You got robbed,” I tease. “Your cai tai should’ve won.”
“They don’t eat it. Americans don’t know how to prepare vegetables. Next year, Daniel, you’ll have to cook them for yourself. Make sure you eat five servings a day.”
“You never miss Auntie Monica, though?”
“You meet new people.” Does she really feel that way? I don’t get how a person can. She peels off her gloves and busies herself wiping down the countertop, moving the bottles of sauces and oils out of the way. “People are the same everywhere. Some good. Some bad.” She yawns hugely, then switches back to Chinese. “It’s so late, Daniel. You have to be up in less than two hours. You should go try to sleep just a little bit more.”
Back in my room I make myself imagine she’s still awake, reading or thinking about her garden or watching the night pass by so I can stave off the dark primal fear of being the only one up. Finally a little before six, forty minutes before my alarm goes off, I fall asleep.
Still, the uneasiness from my dreams stays with me all morning, and I don’t feel better until I see Harry and Regina walking together by the cafeteria—silently, like they aren’t speaking to each other—and tap both of them hello to feel them solid under my hand, to reassure myself they’re real, alive.
All day, though, I think about what my mom said about the people we knew in Texas—some good, some bad. I only knew the good ones. I didn’t know there were both.
I look up every connection to Clay Ballard and Austin I can think of. I google some of the surrounding cities, too. And I find things—the street he used to live on, although I can’t find the dates and it’s not an area of town I remember—but nothing to explain a connection.
It’s close to midnight when (let it not be said that I learned nothing in all my years of Journalism) I look him up in the archives of the Daily Texan, the school paper. And there’s an alumni profile of him in there, something that didn’t show up in a Google search. His MBA was, it turns out, a few years before my parents came to Austin, which means he could’ve easily still been in Texas when they got there. The article says he graduated near the top of his class and went on to start a debt collection company, which I think must have been right before he moved to the Bay Area. He saw an opportunity amid a housing crash, apparently, and jumped on it, purchasing debt from lenders.
How do you purchase debt? Regina would know all this, I think—there were a few weeks last year when she talked about things like redlining all the time. But I have to look it up. I’m kind of stunned, reading through a few websites, that this is a thing—that you can, without any connection whatsoever to someone who owes money, spend a fraction of what they owe and go after them with all you have and take them for whatever they originally owed someone else. And I’m stunned at how far you’re allowed to go in ruining someone’s life to take what’s now, legally, owed to you.