Chapter 10
The barangay’s quarterly evacuation drill fell, with what Jake insisted was cosmic timing, exactly one week after the cave trip, which meant Allan found himself conscripted before he’d even finished his coffee.
“Why am I even part of this?” Allan asked, examining the orange vest someone had thrust into his hands. “I’m not officially from here.”
“Everyone’s official here,” Tita Becky said, adjusting her own vest with the seriousness of a four-star general. “You’re the senior citizens sector advisor now. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.”
“I don’t remember applying for that.”
“Nobody applies for anything here,” she said. “We just decide.”
The drill, as it turned out, was not a small thing.
The whole barangay hall had been converted into a mock command center, with laminated maps taped across every available wall, colored pins marking evacuation routes, shelter capacities, and, Allan noted, with real surprise, individual households flagged for mobility assistance, elderly residents, families with infants, and anyone who’d need extra hands during an actual event.
At the center of it, radio in hand, voice pitched to carry without shouting, was Robby.
“Sector 3, report,” he said into the handset, and waited, patient, while a crackling voice on the other end confirmed the headcount. “Copy. Two senior citizens haven’t transferred yet, you said? Who’s with them?”
Allan watched him work for a solid twenty minutes before Robby even noticed him standing there, watched how he moved through the room correcting small errors without embarrassing anyone, praising a nervous teenage volunteer’s map-reading, and quietly rerouting a family whose assigned shelter had, in the mock scenario, “flooded.”
A junior volunteer approached mid-drill, panicking slightly over a “family” that had, in the mock scenario, been assigned to a shelter already marked full.
“Kuya Robby, what do I do, Sector 2 is already full—”
“Breathe first,” Robby said, calm, steady, crouching to the volunteer’s eye level instead of towering over the panic. “Check the map. There’s still Sector 4, and it’s actually closer to them. Your call wasn’t wrong, you just didn’t have all the information yet. That’s fine, we can fix it.”
The volunteer exhaled, visibly steadied, and hurried off with a new plan and considerably less panic than she’d arrived with.
“You’ve got a whole other face,” Allan said, when Robby finally caught a break, “when you’re working.”
“A different face?”
“More…I don’t know. Serious. But not rigid. Whole, somehow. Like what you gave those kids when you taught them how to tie knots.”
“This is my job,” Robby said, simply, like that explained everything, and in a way, Allan thought, it did.
For the mock scenario itself, Allan got assigned, over his very vocal objections, to play a stubborn elderly evacuee refusing to leave his house, a role Tita Yolanda had apparently lobbied hard to cast him in specifically “so the kids could get some practice talking a stubborn old man down.”
“I resent this deeply,” Allan told her, settling into a plastic chair positioned to represent his “house.”
“You can do this,” she said, patting his shoulder. “Method acting.”
A pair of terrified fifteen-year-old volunteers approached him nervously, scripts fluttering in their hands.
“Lolo, Manong, we really need to evacuate now—”
“I’m not leaving,” Allan said, committing fully now, crossing his arms with theatrical stubbornness, channeling his inner Bea Alonzo energy in Four Sisters and a Wedding. “I was born here. I’ll die here. Foreveeerrrrrrrr.”
“Manong, please po, the storm’s getting close—”
“I don’t care about any storm. I’ve survived five of them already. I can handle this.”
The teenagers, flustered, glanced toward Robby for backup. He crouched beside “Manong Allan” with the easy patience of someone who’d done this a hundred times for real, no cameras, no drill, just an actual frightened old man refusing to leave a house full of memories.
“Manong,” Robby said, gently, voice dropped to something warmer, “I know you love your house. But you matter more than the house does. If you come with us now, you’ll still have a house to come back to.
If you don’t—” He let the sentence trail, careful, never cruel.
“I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave you here. ”
Allan, fully aware this was a drill, fully aware he was supposed to be improvising stubbornness, felt something genuinely catch in his throat anyway.
Shet, patay, ang pogi.
“…Okay,” he said, breaking character slightly, his voice rougher than the scene called for. “I’ll come.”
The teenagers cheered, relieved, and moved on to their next scenario, and Robby helped Allan up from the plastic chair with a hand that lingered a beat longer than the drill required.
“You okay?” Robby asked, quiet, just for him.
“Yeah,” Allan said. “Just, I get it now. Why you’re so good at this. It’s not just that you know what you’re doing. It’s that people can feel you actually mean it.”
“I do mean it,” Robby said. “Everyone on my list matters.”
“Am I on the list?” Allan asked, half-joking.
Robby’s expression softened into something completely unguarded. “Number one,” he said. “Have been for a while.”
Later, once the drill wound down and the barangay hall emptied out into the usual post-event scramble for snacks, Jake found Allan restacking chairs and elbowed him companionably.
“You know,” Jake said, “I’ve spent ten years watching Robby be good at everything, his job, his family, the whole barangay. But this is the first time I’ve seen him get even better at it than that. I think that’s you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Allan said. “He’s just good at his job.”
“It’s not just the job,” Jake said. “You know, for the longest time he’d been scared to choose something for himself because he’s been so used to taking care of everyone else. You’re the first thing he’s chosen just for himself.”
Allan looked across the emptying hall to where Robby was crouched beside an actual elderly resident, laughing at something she’d said, patient and present the way he was with everyone, but when Robby glanced up and caught Allan watching, his whole face changed, just slightly, just for him.
“Yeah,” Allan said, quiet, mostly to himself. “I think I get that now.”