ONE EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP CALLING THE HOUSE!
Adults are so weird about death.
Just look at some of the “helpful” things people have said to me and my sister since Mom was declared dead:
“She’s in a better place now.” What am I supposed to say to that? “Yeah, it sucks that they still haven’t found her body, but the ocean is cool. She always wanted her ashes to be scattered there someday anyway!”“At least it was peaceful. Drowning is like falling asleep.” This isn’t true. I looked it up and wish I hadn’t because it turns out drowning is, in fact, a really scary way to die. But now I can’t unread that, so thanks for that, Uncle Mark.“This is why it’s so important to be healthy so you can live to a hundred.” To be fair, this was said by my Auntie Lilli, who will look at any food you put in front of her and immediately tell you whether it prevents or causes cancer. (Nothing is cancer-neutral, apparently.) But Mom woke up at 6:00 A.M. every day to run in the park and used low-sodium soy sauce and it didn’t do her any good, so if anything, this just shows you that it doesn’t really matter.“The important thing is that she loved you.” This one is a little better because it’s actually true. I know that just like I knew every time I opened my lunch box, there’d be a handwritten note reading You can do well if you work hard! Love, Mom. Always the exact same words ever since my first day at kindergarten. But the thing is, it was just as true ten days ago, and back then, Mom was still alive. So I don’t see how that’s supposed to make me feel any better.We finally had the funeral three days ago, but the weird old landline phone in the living room is still getting calls from family members and family friends, including some I’ve never heard of before. I know they mean well, calling to check in on us. And I guess I’d be mad if they didn’t call. But it’s starting to get on my nerves because we’re also getting calls for our tailor shop downstairs. It doesn’t reopen until next week, but since we already have a two-week backlog—not to mention all the orders that we already had and were left unfinished when we closed—Dad’s started taking them so he wouldn’t be totally bombarded on Monday. He also started putting the phone on speaker so he could cook at the same time. All morning has been an endless series of sympathy calls mixed with: “Hem these pants.” “My jacket is missing buttons.” “Make me this dress from the internet.” “When are you reopening? Sorry for your loss.”
Over the weekend, my grandma had been coming over to help Dad out with the house, but today Āh Mā had to go back to work at the beauty salon. So I woke up to find two to-do lists stuck to the door of the room I share with my sister. I just picked up our last load of laundry from the laundromat next door, so I only have a couple items left on mine. My best friend, Thida, said she’d stop by after lunch, and I won’t know exactly when that is because I don’t have my own phone yet and I told her not to call the house. But it’s almost one, so it should be soon. I just need to power through a little bit longer.
“Oh, come on, Mona Li.” I groan when I come back into the living room, only to find the laundry basket containing the previous load still unfolded. My eight-year-old sister’s list of chores was just a Post-it note, but all she’s gotten done are four socks. Not four pairs. Not even two pairs. Four single, unmatched socks folded in half. Very neatly, to be fair.
“It’s not my fault! My hands are small,” Mona Li whines. The uncut bangs of her bowl cut hang in front of her eyes, so she has to keep swiping them aside. Dad usually takes us to get our hair cut a couple weeks before school starts, but Āh Mā said we’re not supposed to cut our hair until after the mourning period is over.
“What does that even mean?” I reply. My voice comes out angrier than I meant it to, and it freaks me out. After we drove home from the funeral, Āh Mā made us stop at a random McDonald’s and all get out to use the bathroom, so the bad death vibes wouldn’t follow us home. Now that I think about it, it seems kind of messed up to just dump said vibes in a public restroom, but I just wanted to go home already, so I didn’t question it. Āh Mā and Auntie Lilli then took me aside by the ketchup dispenser and told me that as the oldest, I have to “woman up” and be strong for my dad and my sister now. But even if growing up means no more skateboarding with Thida on Saturday mornings because I need to do chores, I’m still too young to be snapping about chores.
I take a deep breath and try to calm down. A few weeks ago, I could just roll my eyes and tell my sister not to be so sensitive, but things are different now. I don’t want to be like the callers, trying to help but just being another problem for Dad to deal with.
And then the phone rings again, and I imagine snatching it right out of my dad’s hands and hurling it out the window. But our apartment is on the second story above the tailor shop, which is right across the street from the second-most popular boba shop in downtown Avalon. I don’t want to accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian. Their family might hunt me down for revenge, or spam us with one-star reviews on Google.
“Reliable Quality Tailoring,” says Dad in the kitchen. “Oh, sorry, Auntie Susan—”
Even though Dad’s family hasn’t lived in America as long as Mom’s side, his Chinese is a lot worse than hers. He speaks Mandarin at about a first-grade level, or maybe a second grader who is not very bright for his age, if you’re feeling generous. So he takes his calls in mostly English with the occasional broken Chinese, which means a good number of both the customers and the family friends hang up pretty quickly. But it also makes it harder for me to block out the ones that don’t. I grind my teeth as I listen to him explain to Auntie Susan that it’s very nice of her to call but he’s making lunch right now.
“Wow! You cook?” Auntie Susan says over the speaker phone. She’s not actually my dad’s aunt, but a friend of my grandma’s that he calls “auntie” out of respect, just like Mona Li and I do to all Chinese adults.
“No, not really,” Dad admits. “I mean, I could make instant noodles okay in college, but … well, it’s been a while. I’ve been learning with YouTube, though.”
Dad took care of most of the housework while Mom ran the business. The exception was cooking. Āh Mā never taught Dad how to cook, because according to her, he was “too handsome” to need to learn to make his own food. That seems super weird and sexist to me (not to mention really insulting to my Uncle Kenny, who she did teach to cook). But Mom thought it was the funniest thing ever. She would ask Dad to help her with something in the kitchen and then go, “Oh, sorry, I forgot you can’t cook because you’re too handsome.”
Literally two seconds after Dad hangs up, the phone rings again. “Reliable Quality Tailoring,” Dad says. His voice is so dead, you’d think he just got back from his own funeral. “Oh, hi, Mark.”
I squeeze the necklace around my neck tightly. It’s basically just a red string but tied into an elaborate pendant of interconnected knots and loops, like the red knot decorations that we hang up for Lunar New Year. Mom made it for me before I was born, and she and Mona Li and Auntie Kathie have ones, too.
I have my own chores to take care of. I don’t have time to do all of Mona Li’s, too. But maybe she just needs a nudge to get started. Grudgingly, I fold a pair of pants in half, then toss it on the floor for her to fold again.
Pouting, Mona Li looks down at the butterfly-print pants in front of her. “Mom made that for me,” she sulks.
“Well, yeah. Mom makes—made all of your clothes.”
I realize and correct my mistake as soon as I say it, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Mona Li’s lower lip starts to quiver.
Oh no.
“EVIE MEI!” Dad shouts suddenly from the kitchen. “Can you come over here?”
My insides twist. Dad doesn’t get mad, ever. The first time I ever heard him yell at someone was last week, when Uncle Kenny told us, “Everything happens for a reason.”
Sucking in my breath, I fling my braid over my shoulder and head to the kitchen. Dad is washing his hand in the sink. I follow a lot of YouTube channels about how to make movies, and there was one about how CGI humans are always so creepy because they’re almost lifelike but not. That’s how I’ve felt looking at Dad ever since Mom died.
“Hey, Robin,” he says, and some of the tension leaves my body. Dad calls me that because when I was little, I liked to play with him like we were Batman and Robin. But then he adds, “Just got to smile through the pain.”
He’s been saying that a lot lately. I think it’s supposed to make me worry less about him, but now every time he smiles, I can tell he’s dying inside.
“Could you go down to the shop and get some dollar bills from the register? I’m going to order food and I need to tip the driver.”
“I thought you were cooking lunch?” I almost make a joke about how he’s too handsome for this, but I stop myself. Normally I would joke around with Dad, but I don’t know if it’d make him feel better or if reminding him of Mom’s old joke would only make him upset. That’s been happening a lot lately: I don’t know what to say that won’t be useless or worse, so I just end up not saying anything. Mom was always telling me that I could get straight As if I just thought through my answers a bit more, but now I have to think about everything and I hate it.
“Uh, yeah…” Dad looks down at his hand, still under the running water. Suddenly I notice the huge cut on his finger. He manages a smile, and I feel like throwing up.
I stuff the still-incomplete chore list into the pocket of my shorts and turn toward the stairs. At first I’m relieved to get out of here. But when I put my hand on the rail, it hits me that I haven’t been down to the tailor shop since Mom died.
I tell myself I’m being dramatic. There are lots of things I haven’t done since Mom died, and I can’t just freeze up before every single one of them. I’d never be able to do anything. I roll my eyes at myself to emphasize how silly I’m being, then grip the railing and walk down the stairs to the shop.
I switch on the lights. Everything is as organized as a museum exhibit, like usual. When I look over toward the cash register, there’s still a bowl of guava candies on the counter and a potted bamboo plant by the door, which I hope is still alive considering no one’s watered it since Mom was reported missing. To my shock, my nostrils even catch a faint whiff of my mom’s favorite banana milk body lotion. It’s a smell that used to relax me, but it’s like even my muscles know it’s not the same. The usual rat-a-tat-tat of the sewing machine is gone. The only noise in the room comes from the tick-tock of the clock and my own breathing.
Suddenly my unease about coming down here disappears, replaced by a weird kind of relief. It might be musty and full of painful memories, but at least it’s quiet. Mom had the shop soundproofed a couple years ago so her work wouldn’t wake us up. I could set off firecrackers and Dad wouldn’t have any idea.
I shut the door behind me, then take a deep breath and scream.
It feels even better than I thought it would, to be able to just explode and not have to worry about anybody asking me if I’m okay. I fill my lungs up with air one more time, then scream loud enough to drown out a hundred well-meaning relatives, “AND NO ONE CARES THAT IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!”
Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention that besides being three days after my mom’s funeral, today is also my twelfth birthday. I haven’t said anything to my family because I don’t want to be sulking about my birthday when there are obviously more important things going on. But after getting call after call from anyone who even vaguely counts as a relative and not a single “happy birthday,” it’s hard not to feel a little petty.
When I open my eyes again, I see that the bamboo is actually fine. Āh Mā said bamboo is pretty much unkillable, and I guess it’s nice that something is. But hanging above it on the wall is Mom’s calendar, which is still turned to July. Ten days since Mom thought she’d be right back, since her car was found in the ocean. I still don’t understand how that even happened. She was as careful and precise behind the wheel as she was with a needle and thread. Dad used to say that she always drove like the cops were right behind her. But somehow she ended up in the water—or at least, her car did. Search and rescue never found her body, so we had to get dressed up and make a big fuss about an empty box. For a while Dad tried to keep the shop running, but as the days piled up and they never found her, they eventually stopped searching.
As fast as it appeared, any relief I had is gone, here and gone just like that. Like Mom. My muscles tense back up as my own thoughts surround me. No, the silence isn’t relaxing down here. I just feel alone.
Maybe down here I can scream and whine and cry all I want and no one will care. But then I have to go back upstairs to give the money to Dad, and I can’t do those things upstairs. I need to “woman up.” But at the moment, all I can bring myself to do is lean back against the wall, breathing in and out, clutching Mom’s pendant like it might just disappear on me if I let it go.
Then I hear a bang!
TWO ARE YOU AFRAID OF …
My eyes burst open. At first I think I must have accidentally knocked over the little home altar with my dead grandparents’ photos that sits in a nook in the corner of the shop. But when I look over, it’s still there. A shiver runs down my spine.
I flash back to when I was little, when I was convinced for a while that the tailor shop was haunted. Back before we had the place soundproofed, I would sometimes hear my mom’s sewing machine in the middle of the night and thought it was a ghost. When I told Mom, she told me not to worry about it because “ghosts only bother people who believe in them.”
Why am I thinking about ghosts? It was probably just a small earthquake. Unwinding my shoulders, I look around the shop, just to make sure nothing’s broken before we officially reopen for business tomorrow. I glance at the back wall, where spools of thread are mounted. They’re organized by color—unlike my mom’s closet, which is sorted by material—so it’s easy to tell just by looking that nothing fell off. On the opposite end is the clothing rack with suits and jackets and dresses hanging in plastic bags. Doesn’t look like the noise came from there, either.
Along the side wall are three parallel worktables. Mom didn’t have any employees, unless you count Dad, so they’re just extra workspace. I spent a lot of time here doing my homework at the back table before I was old enough to watch myself upstairs. But I never just sat here watching Mom sew the way Mona Li did. It annoys both of us when customers assume that as the oldest, I’m going to “take over the family business” someday.
Dad can alter and mend just fine—he’s not great at anything like Mom was, but his secret superpower is that he can learn to do just about anything really quickly. He’ll probably be a pretty good cook by the time school starts. But his work is more Reliable than Quality. Will people still come to us for things like fixing up wedding dresses without Mom?
As I check behind each of the sewing machines and cones of thread in the work area, I remember Dad is waiting upstairs. I head to the counter to get the money and, sure enough, I find Mom’s thread book overturned on the ground. Mystery solved.
I bend down and pick up the “book.” It has an indigo cloth cover embroidered with an image of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, this Chinese love story that Mom told me and Mona Li all the time when we were little. But when you open the book up, the “pages” are swatches of fabric folded into dozens of intricate boxes that can be tugged open, like a pop-up book. Mom uses the boxes to store her threads and needles and buttons.
I gather up fallen spools and pins from the floor and tuck them back into the compartments neatly and carefully, the way Mom would have done it. It always made me impatient whenever we’d play family board games and she’d take forever to get the pieces lined up perfectly. I almost got banned from game night when she was on my team and I complained that if she spent less time straightening the board and more time thinking about her next move, maybe we’d win for once.
It’s kind of funny. Mom’s perfectionism really annoyed me sometimes, and now she’s gone and I’m straightening all her things for her.
The last thing I put back in the book is a family photograph. Mom loved physical mementos, maybe because she worked with her hands. This picture was from several Halloweens ago: Mom always made us the coolest Halloween costumes, and for a couple years now Reliable Quality Tailoring has been offering custom costume services in October. That year was Studio Ghibli costumes. Mona Li was Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, and I was San from Princess Mononoke, with a fake fur cape and mask and everything.
Without meaning to, my eyes go straight to Mom’s tiny face, smirking as she poses with her creations. She wasn’t really smirking, but she didn’t like showing her teeth because one of her front teeth was crooked, so in photos she always looked like she was. Her chin-length hair is permed and meticulous, without a strand out of place.
Suddenly, my eyes start to sting, like when it’s fire season and there’s smoke in the air. My hand shakes as I slip the photo inside the front cover. Exhaling, I press all the page compartments flat so the book closes shut, then get up to put it back on the counter. But when I do, I find myself staring at a hunched figure, sitting on the countertop and peering at me. Its face is so white it’s almost bluish, with beady black eyes and a flat, almost skull-like nose. The rest of its body is covered with striped golden fur.
It’s a monkey. In our shop. Less than six inches away from my face.
I almost cry out with alarm, but I clamp my hand over my mouth. I don’t want to startle it and set it off. (I know I said this birthday is total trash, but you know what it really needs? Rabies.) Swallowing, I back away slowly. But before I can move toward the door, the monkey bares its fangs at me and screeches louder than a fire alarm.
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