The Leavers(13)

Elroy was visiting his aunt in Maryland, Hung was at a relative’s upstate, and Sopheap, that traitor, had promised he’d be home all summer but had decamped at first opportunity to outermost Queens, where his cousin allegedly had a large-screen television and lived in a building full of hot chicks. Last time Michael and Deming had seen Sopheap, four days or six weeks ago or whenever it was, Sopheap had described the peek-a-boo bra strap exposed on the shoulder of the hottest chick, how close she had sat to him while they watched TV. She smelled, he said, of bubble gum and pepperoni pizza, and Michael and Deming had hooted and said Sopheap was full of crap, how come he never invited them to outermost Queens. Instead of hot chicks Sopheap might be spending the days with his grandma, who had moley arms and a long yellow tooth that caused her to fling saliva as she barked away at the boys in Khmer, slapping her slippers against their shoulder blades to get them to sit up straight.

Everything was suspect. Had Sopheap’s family ever lived there in the first place? Would Elroy and Hung even show up for school at the end of the summer? What happened to his mother? Nothing, no one, was certain anymore.

Michael and Deming stood in the space beneath the overhead tracks and hurled curse words into the subway’s rattle. A car bumped past blaring a bass line in rich, glossy maroons, and a slow ache spread in the center of Deming’s chest. Before his mother disappeared, he and Michael had been united in the secrets they kept from their moms, like filching a can of beer from Leon’s twelve-pack. Michael had grimaced and belched as they drank, and Deming had knocked back more. They had giggled, teetered. Another time, they stole a pair of panties out of a cart at the laundromat across the street from Elroy’s building, and in Elroy’s room ran their hands over the tiny cotton panel where an actual girl’s actual crotch had actually nestled. Held it to their noses, sniffing exaggeratedly, saddened yet relieved when they smelled only detergent. Hung laid the panties on the bed and the boys stared at the scrap of pinkish fabric until Elroy plucked them up and smuggled them into his closet. “I’ll keep them here,” he said, “for safekeeping.” Deming said they might not even belong to a hot girl but to the woman who sat in front of Elroy’s building and rubbed her fingers into her ponytail after scratching her hairy armpits. The other boys yelped in horror, Michael’s shriek the loudest and highest.

Now the only mother in the apartment was Vivian, and the fact that Deming’s mother was gone was no secret. It was a car alarm cutting through an empty street in the middle of the night. He could curse as much as he wanted, but the words tasted like they had gone rotten in his mouth. He tried to remember as much as he could about her. Such a brief time when she had belonged to him alone. She cuffed her jeans twice so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. She pulled the sleeves of her sweaters down like oversized mittens. The pleasing incongruity to her cackle, how she’d pinch the fat under his arms and call him a meatball, the delicate prettiness to her features. You had to hunt for her beauty, might not even catch it at first. There was a sweetness to her mouth, her lips lightly upturned, lending her a look of faint amusement, and her eyebrows arched so her eyes appeared lively, approaching delighted.

He looked away so Michael wouldn’t see the tears that came so fast he almost let them fall.

They turned the corner. “Deming?” Michael sounded hesitant, like he was talking to a teacher or a friend’s mom. “Did you hear? Travis Bhopa’s moving to Pennsylvania.”

“So?” Deming didn’t know where Pennsylvania was.

“His mom left his dad for another man and now he’s got to go live with his grandma.”

“What other man?”

“Some neighbor.”

Deming dug his fingernails into his arm, ten sharp half-moons sparking pain. But what if she wasn’t dead? “That sucks,” he said. “For Travis.”

THEY ATE DINNER AT the folding table in the kitchen, the plastic top printed to look like wood, a corner peeling and exposing a foamy underlayer. Deming snatched a piece of chicken from Vivian’s plate.

She tried to grab it. “Stop it. Bad boy.”

Vivian’s fat was rearranging itself. Her belly and arms were thinner but extra skin had appeared beneath her chin and around her mouth, like plaster hastily slapped on top of an existing structure. She huffed when she walked upstairs, no longer danced to music on the radio, and fell asleep at the table, gave the boys food and claimed she wasn’t hungry. Deming had seen her look in her wallet and curse, and when he opened the refrigerator she yelled at him to shut it. He heard her and Leon fighting about the rent, who would watch the kids.

He licked the chicken before she could get to it, ran his tongue up and down the salty skin. Leon glared at Deming and passed Vivian the rest of his food.

Leon looked like hell, reminded Deming of pictures of cave men in a school textbook, standing straight and de-haired into upright Homo sapiens. Leon after Mama was reverse-order evolution; he had developed a stoop, a paunch, a spotty beard specked with gray. It scared Deming, like Leon had aged a hundred years while other people remained the same.

Once, riding the Staten Island Ferry with his mother and Leon, the wind had stung his face but he felt warm, as if nothing could go wrong. His mother had said, “Do you like this boat, Kid? Isn’t it better than Yi Gong’s fishing boat?” And Leon had laughed, a belly chuckle that made Deming feel like he’d outrun the other kids at the playground. Now he couldn’t recall he last time he had heard Leon laugh. Had Mama left, refused to marry Leon, because Leon got ugly? Deming chewed chicken. They had a lot of neighbors. Mrs. Johnson, Tommie Not-bad-not-bad-not-bad, Miss Marie with the baby girl. There was the bodega owner, Eduardo, who’d been asking, “Haven’t seen your mother lately, how’s she been?” Deming would say good, busy.