Chapter 3 Dinner in Makati, Eyes in the Mirror #2
Mina did all of it. She learned the woman’s name and used it.
She asked the sister on the video call which hospital, because the sister mentioned a hospital, and she remembered a name of a doctor and said it, and the sister broke down, and Mina stood on a roof holding a stranger’s phone and talked a crying woman in Cabanatuan down to steady in under ninety seconds and then handed the phone back like it was a plate.
When she sat down again the squid was cold and the thread was gone.
“Where were we,” Mina said.
“You were about to tell me about the bad teleserye.”
“Was I.”
“You were.” Hal pushed her beer back toward her. “Take your time.”
She looked at the beer.
“They will do it again in about twenty minutes,” she said. “The two guys by the rail have not gone yet, they are working up to a second one, and the kid from the bar is going to come back with his cousin. That is not a complaint. That is a schedule.”
“Okay.”
“I am telling you because you should know what dinner is.” She turned the bottle around. “Every dinner. For eleven years. I have never once finished a conversation in a restaurant in this country, Hal. Not one. I finish them in cars.”
Hal thought about that.
“Then let’s be in a car later,” he said.
Mina looked up at him.
“That is it? That is your whole reaction?”
“Baby, I have eaten in a truck stop outside Valdosta at four in the morning for nine years running. You are describing a room where the food is better.” He shrugged. “Also I have got you for seventeen days and about four hundred hours, and if two hundred of them are in cars then they are in cars.”
She told him about Quezon City after the second beer.
She told it well, which he noticed, and which he understood to mean she had told it before, on camera, more than once, in a version that had been sanded. So he waited, and drank his beer, and did not help her, and after a while the sanded version ran out and something else started.
She told him about the pageants. Not the big ones.
The provincial ones, the barangay ones, a stage in a covered court with a tarpaulin backdrop and six contestants and a prize of four thousand pesos and a sack of rice, judged by the town councilor and a man who owned a hardware store.
She told him she had won her first one at nineteen and had given the four thousand to her mother and kept the rice, and had gone home on a bus at two in the morning holding a sack of rice on her lap, and had thought, with total clarity, that she was going to do this until it turned into something else.
“And it turned into something else,” Hal said.
“It took six years. It is not a story about being discovered. Nobody discovered me. I did four hundred of those and then I did commercials for a bank and then I did a bad teleserye where I played a nurse who was in love with a doctor who was in love with a ghost.” Mina drank.
“The bad teleserye is the one that did it. Not the good one after. The bad one, because it was on at seven every night and the whole country got used to my face.”
“That is the least romantic origin story I have ever heard.”
“It is the actual one.” She turned the bottle. “Ask me the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“You have not asked me a single question about it in eleven months and I have been waiting and it is starting to be funny.”
Hal set down his beer.
“Baby,” he said, “I do not have a question.”
“Everybody has a question.”
“Then everybody is rude.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “I know who you are. You told me in the first week, in the middle of a story about your brother, and I remember being annoyed because you never finished the story about your brother.” He shrugged. “Which, by the way, you still have not.”
Mina looked at him for a long moment across a plate of squid bones.
“He is in Cebu,” she said. “He sells air conditioning. He is extremely boring and I would die for him.”
“There it is.”
“There it is.”
She pulled her feet up onto the chair, which was not a thing a person did in a photograph.
“He was the one who came,” she said. “When I was twenty. Everybody else took a while and some of them took years and one of them never did, and Nonoy got on a bus.” She was looking out at the towers.
“He did not say anything correct. He said about four things that were completely wrong and one of them still makes me want to hit him. But he was in the room in eight hours and he slept on the floor.”
“What was the wrong thing?”
“He asked if I was going to be okay for money.”
Hal thought about it.
“That is not the worst wrong thing,” he said.
“No,” Mina agreed. “It is the wrong thing of a man who sells air conditioning in Cebu. It was, in fact, a completely reasonable question, and he was right to ask it, and I have never forgiven him.” She smiled into her beer. “He has three children now and they think I am the moon.”
“Do you see them?”
“Twice a year. I fly in at night and out before the school run.” Something crossed her face and left. “It is better for them.”
“Better for them,” Hal repeated.
“Do not.”
“I did not say anything.”
“You said it with your whole spine,” Mina said, and drank, and then, after a moment, quieter: “It is better for them.”
And she smiled at him, and it was not any of the smiles from the television, and Hal thought: okay. Okay, that is it, that is the whole thing, I am not going home.
He did not say it. He had seventeen days and it was day one and there are things you cannot say on day one.
Then the lights went out.
Not the lights. The Wi-Fi.
He knew because the bar noise changed. A guy two tables over said “ay” and held his phone up over his head, and the girl with him did the same, and at the bar the kid running the card machine hit it twice with the side of his hand and said something to the manager, and the manager came over and hit it in exactly the same place.
“Ma’am, sir.” Their waiter, apologetic, arriving. “Sorry po, the card is down. Cash lang muna.”
“Ay, no problem,” Mina said. “It is the rain, no?”
“Opo, siguro.”
“Kuya, is it the whole street or just us?”
The waiter thought about it.
“The whole street, I think, ma’am. The place downstairs also. Their machine also.”
“Naku.” Mina made a sympathetic face. “On a Tuesday, ha.”
The waiter went away.
Hal watched her drink her beer, and something about the way she did it was wrong, and he could not have said what. It was too normal. It was normal the way a photograph of somebody drinking a beer is normal.
“Hey,” he said.
“Mm.”
“What are you looking at?”
Because she was. Not at him. Past him, over his shoulder, at the plank rail and the four stories of air and the street below, and she had been doing it for about ninety seconds while making entirely ordinary conversation with her face.
“The rain is coming back,” Mina said. “Look at the towers, you can see it crossing.”
Hal turned around and looked. You could, in fact, see it crossing: a gray front sliding over the lit floors of the CBD, taking them out a few at a time.
When he turned back she was standing up with her shoes on.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
“We have not paid.”
“I paid in June, baby, they know me here.” She had her bag over her shoulder and her hand out and her voice was completely light. “Come on. Fast. You will like this.”
“Mina.”
“Hal.” Still light. Still smiling. “Please.”
He got up.
She did not go toward the stairs.
She went toward the bar, and past the bar, and through a doorway hung with plastic strip curtain into a kitchen the size of a shipping container, where three men were working a flat-top and a fryer in a heat Hal could feel from the door, and she said something in Tagalog to the oldest of them that made him laugh and wave her through with a pair of tongs.
“Ate Mina, ha!”
“Salamat, kuya!”
They went past the flat-top and past a sink and Mina stopped at the screen door at the back with her hand flat on it and did not open it.
She stood there for four seconds.
Hal, jammed into a two-foot gap between a fryer and a wall of shelving in a kitchen the temperature of an engine block, watched her put her ear near the mesh and close her eyes.
He had time, in those four seconds, to notice several things.
He noticed that she had picked this restaurant, and that she had told him she picked it for the view, and that she had also told him she had booked it in June.
He noticed that on the way in she had gone up the stairs behind him, which he had thought was politeness.