Chapter 2
Allan woke up the second time to actual daylight, and that particular ache of a body that had slept in yesterday’s clothes.
He found the whole house awake and operating at BEBES volume. Breakfast was tapsilog and an inquisition.
“So,” Tita Becky said, sliding a plate in front of him like this was a hostage negotiation. “Bakit ngayon lang? What took you so long to come home?”
“I got laid off,” Allan said, then reconsidered. “Fine. I resigned. Before they could ‘realign’ me into a ghost.”
“Realign,” Tita Yolanda repeated, tasting the word like it was spoiled bagoong. “Sounds like an exorcism.”
“That’s Manila for you,” Tita Gemma said, shaking her head. “It eats its young.”
“I’m twenty-eight, Tita. Not a kid anymore.”
“You’re still a kid to me,” she said, unfazed, and ladled more rice onto his plate as if volume could undo a decade.
Cora came in from the yard, a wet umbrella in one hand.
She’d been up before any of them, apparently, checking on a neighbor’s roof, negotiating with the barangay tanod about a stray goat, the usual retired-principal turned senior citizen association president errands that somehow filled an entire morning.
“Ma,” Allan said carefully, once she’d sat, “seriously, what did the doctor actually say?”
She sighed like he’d asked her to explain long division to a class that refused to pay attention.
“Mini stroke,” she said again. “Blood pressure. Stress. I need to rest, exercise, cut back on the bagoong.” She glanced pointedly at the bagoong dish in front of her, then took a spoonful anyway. “Don’t be dramatic, Allan. I’m not dying tomorrow.”
Tita Becky leaned toward Tita Yolanda and didn’t bother lowering her voice.
“That’s another few hundred gone on her Amlodipine this month, you know.
Plus, the aspirin now, every morning, since the scan.
” They’d gotten her in for the brain scan that same week, apparently, the doctor in Virac not willing to wait on that part.
“And now the doctor wants a quarterly scan in Virac on top of it.” She ticked it off on her fingers like a grocery list.
Cora set her spoon down hard enough to click against the bowl and lifted her chin the exact half-inch she used to reserve for a student caught passing notes.
“Becky.”
“Relax, chinichika ko lang naman,” Tita Becky said, already reaching for more rice, the matter, as far as she was concerned, closed.
“I didn’t say—” Allan tried again.
“I saw it on your face,” Cora said. “That look, like it’s already over. Relax. We’re on a break, not at the end of the world.”
Ver called from Legazpi mid-breakfast, his face pixelating on Cora’s ancient tablet propped against the achara jar, still in the polo shirt he wore for his logistics manager job at a consumer goods distributor, the kind of job that had him living out of Legazpi three weeks out of four.
“Hey! You’re still alive?” Ver said, grinning through choppy signal. “Robby said you almost went down in the bathroom.”
“That happened because someone left soap on the floor,” Allan said.
“A soap crime scene, really?” Ver laughed. “Okay, take care of yourselves there. I’ll see you this week; help Mama with the prep. I’m getting married; this feels surreal!”
“Awwww…our Kuya Ver is finally getting married,” Tita Yolanda said, dabbing a dry eye theatrically. “We lived long enough to see it.”
“Tita naman… it’s giving dramarama sa hapon,” Allan said, candidly, before Ver dropped the call.
Robby appeared halfway through the second round of rice, dressed properly this time, a faded shirt with a DRRM logo peeling at the chest, cargo shorts, hair damp and pushed back.
He looked, Allan thought with some resentment, disgustingly good for someone who’d been screaming a bad cover of the Backstreet Boys very, very early in the morning.
“Morning,” Robby said to the room, then, to Allan specifically, with the ghost of a smirk: “Safe from bathrooms now?”
“I have filed a formal complaint with management,” Allan said. “You’re still on the list of suspects.”
“Let me know when there’s a verdict,” Robby said.
“Robby’s been here since yesterday,” Cora said, not looking up from her rice.
“Fixed the porch railing before someone else went down on it too. Drove me to the health center for my follow-up. Drove all the way to Virac when the pharmacy here ran out of my maintenance meds.” She said it plainly, like she was reading off a chore chart, not handing out a compliment.
“I told him just to shower here instead of wasting an hour walking home and back before his barangay meeting tonight.”
“Least I could do,” Robby said, shrugging it off. “Your mom tried to reschedule her own recovery around everyone else’s convenience. Somebody had to keep her honest.”
“Have you eaten yet, Robby?” Tita Gemma asked, already handing him a plate before he answered.
“That’s what Tita Loida used to say,” Tita Becky said. Then, catching Allan’s blank look: “One of us, from way back, before you left. She passed away, anak. Two years now. She used to say the same thing: ‘Robby, eat, so you’ll have the strength to save us all when the storm comes.’”
“Sorry to hear that,” Allan said, and meant it, filing the name away, one more absence he hadn’t been home for.
“Anyway,” Tita Yolanda said, moving briskly past grief like only a barangay elder could, “We have news, Allan. We have a list.”
“A list of what?”
“Of men,” she said, producing an actual folded piece of paper from her bag like this was a covert operation. “Single. Good family. Has a job.”
“Absolutely not,” Allan said.
“There’s one who works at the municipal hall. There’s an engineer. There’s a seaman, but he’s usually away, so maybe not practical—”
“There’s another name here,” Tita Becky added, leaning over her shoulder. “Number three. Has his own piggery business. Very promising, they say.”
“A pig farmer.”
“Successful pig farmer,” Tita Yolanda corrected, offended on the man’s behalf. “Has a three-bedroom house, close to the health center.”
“I appreciate the specificity, but no.”
“Number five, from Virac, an elementary school teacher. Young, handsome, knows how to cook—”
“Tita, I’m begging you to stop reading the list.”
“Why not? You didn’t even have a boyfriend in Manila, right? Your resignation email said—”
“How do you even know about my resignation email—”
“You told us last night, quite clearly,” Tita Gemma said. “You were crying right here while you ate.” She patted the table for emphasis.
“I… I don’t remember. Are you sure that was me?”
“Ay iho, who was that then? A ghost or something?”
Allan looked at Robby for backup. Robby, mouth full of tapsilog, only raised his eyebrows in a very unhelpful, very entertained way.
“Please,” Allan said to the ceiling fan, since it was the least judgmental presence in the room, “I just got here.”
“That’s enough of that,” Cora said, and to Allan’s genuine surprise, the table actually quieted. “We have something very important to do. One wedding at a time please.”
She reached into the sideboard drawer where the good scissors and the emergency candles lived, and pulled out a folder: old, soft at the corners, held together with a rubber band that looked like it predated Allan’s childhood.
Inside were photographs. His lolo on a bamboo scaffold. His dad, teenage, holding a paintbrush like a sword. A whole cinema facade, hand-painted, towering over a street Allan barely recognized as San Andres’ town plaza.
“Cine sa Isla,” Cora said. “Closed for four years now. Kapitan keeps saying they’ll turn it into storage.”
“Storage?” Allan said, his stomach twisting at the idea of that whole painted history reduced to storage for plastic chairs.
“The new generation,” Robby said, unexpectedly serious, setting down his fork. “The children of the barangay. They have no idea it used to be like this. All they know is that it’s closed. Off-limits.”
“Sayang,” Allan said quietly, echoing his father without meaning to.
“We have a plan,” Cora said. “Small, nothing big. Clean it, fix it, make it useful again, DRRM meetings, community screenings, this and that. All we need is,” she waved a hand vaguely at the photos, at the peeling paint, at the whole idea of restoration “—someone who still knows how to do this.”
Allan understood, with the particular dread of someone watching a trap close very slowly and very lovingly, exactly where this was going.
“Ma.”
“I’m not saying anything,” Cora said, completely unconvincingly.
“You’re absolutely saying something.”
“Robby,” she said instead, pivoting with the smoothness of someone who had spent thirty years managing a faculty room, “tell him what the plan is.”
Robby wiped his hands, looking, Allan noted, unfairly, like he’d rehearsed this.
“The barangay’s chasing a grant,” he said.
“Community resilience funding. We need a building, a house, that we can use when a storm comes: evacuation, storage, meetings, but Kapitan also wants a ‘community value’ component, to bump up the scoring.” He said the last part with the faint, tired precision of someone who had filled out too many government forms. “Cine sa Isla could work. It already has a story. It already has heart. It’s just missing a little… art.
“The grant committee does a site visit and a progress review in October,” Robby continued.
“Eight weeks from now. Maybe less. They moved it up on us before. If the ‘community value’ component isn’t visibly, verifiably underway by then, mural included, Kapitan says we lose our slot in this funding cycle, and the whole evacuation-building plan gets pushed back at least two years.
So, no pressure,” he said, with the exact, unconvincing lightness of a man who meant the opposite.
“And you thought of me,” Allan said, “because…?”
“Because I happen to know someone who used to draw,” Robby stated, matter-of-factly, and there, barely there, gone as fast as it came, something flickered across his face that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite guilt. “And because I don’t have anyone else left to boss around.”
“Charming,” Allan said. “Very compelling pitch.”
“I don’t really need to pitch it,” Robby said. “You just need a reason not to rush straight back to Manila.”
The table went very quiet in that specific way that meant everyone had heard it and was pretending not to.
Allan opened his mouth to say something dismissive, a joke, a deflection, his usual emergency exit, and found, embarrassingly, that nothing came out.
“Just think about it,” Cora said, gentler than she’d been all morning, sliding the folder toward him. “You don’t have a job right now. You have the time. And—” she tapped the photo of his lolo on the scaffold “—you can use to distract yourself while you think about your next move.”
Allan looked at the photograph a long moment. His lolo’s grin. His father’s careful, serious hands.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, which everyone at the table correctly understood to mean yes, obviously, but let me pretend I have a choice for at least twelve more hours.
Tita Becky was already elbowing Tita Yolanda. “I told you, didn’t I? He has a reason to stay.”
“No betting on this,” Allan said quickly. “Absolutely no betting on this.”
“Who said anything about a bet?” Tita Yolanda said, folding her list of eligible men back into her bag with the patience of someone who fully intended to bring it up again the following week.
Robby caught Allan’s eye across the table, amused, a little cautious, like he wasn’t sure if he’d overstepped by asking at all.
Allan looked away first and hated himself a little for how fast his pulse was going for someone who was allegedly just eating rice.
“Wait — before you run off,” Tita Gemma said, sliding her phone across the table like she was serving another plate of rice. “We also made you a...paano ba ’to... a love ad.”
Allan looked down. A grid of shirtless torsos glowed up at him under a bright, unmistakable yellow icon. His stomach dropped somewhere near the floor.
“Tita. Tita, is that—”
“Grindr, gryyyynduh, eh basta G app,” Tita Yolanda said, visibly proud of the pronunciation. “The sakristan told us this is like Facebook for the badings. You put in your, ano, your specifications, and the men just—” she made a sweeping gesture “—arrive. Very convenient. Parang Jollibee delivery.”
“It’s not— that’s not how it—” Allan’s ears were on fire.
“Some of them are so close,” Tita Becky said, squinting at the screen, genuinely baffled. “Zero meters, sabi dito. Zero! Nasaan sila? Nakatago ba sa ilalim ng mesa?”
“That just means they’re nearby, Tita, not literally under the—”
“And this one,” Tita Gemma cut in, tapping a thumbnail with the reverence of a pageant judge, “very good bone structure. I give him a nine. Would look good in a barong. Ay wait, I’m now craving for sinigang na panga ng tuna.”
“Number two only shows his stomach,” Tita Yolanda sniffed. “No face? Suspicious. Grabe naman the abs. Penge palaman.”
“Delete it,” Allan said, reaching, only for the phone to be yanked out of reach with the reflexes of a woman half her age.
“Too late,” Tita Becky announced, beaming. “We already messaged three of them. Very polite naman. One said ‘Fun?’ We said, ‘yes we are having fun. God bless. Then he sent a photo of a weird looking sausage but I’m not wearing my glasses and the photo disappeared.’”
Allan put his face in his hands and gave serious thought to catching the next ferry straight back into the typhoon. He didn’t have to look up to know Robby was already losing it, silent-laughing so hard he’d gone red in the face.