Chapter 30
CHAPTER 30
Bingo
Long after Mr. Ng? left Philadelphia and Bingo, she began to rebuild by herself. He claimed he was heading to San Jose to check up on Paulina, but something about his mannerisms made Bingo more suspicious of him. But brick by brick, tile by tile, plank by plank, Bingo set out to breathe new life into the shop. As the store transformed slowly, so did Bingo. The more the old sandwich shop was stripped of Duc and his old vision, the more Bingo began to find herself.
Who was Bingo Tr?n as an individual? What did she want out of life? Bingo saw the store as an extension of her body, a garden of some kind that needed tender care. Never had Bingo cared about anything more. She even got a proper mattress for the back room, with an actual bed frame—an ode to growth and ridding herself of any hetero energy.
But her mind was occupied by thoughts of Iris. What would Iris think if she could see her now? Would she even care?
Though Mr. Ng? and Bingo had bonded while he was here, her father’s lawyer stayed mute when it came to questions about his life and background, as he always did. He forever remained a fill-in-the-blank game, always leaving everyone guessing, with minimal clues.
But the photo that Bingo had found, of her mother and Mr. Ng?, and his embrace, stayed pinned to the wall, next to her bed. Every night since, she stared at it, perplexed. It was the way Mr. Ng? had his arms around her mother, that look of care and tenderness, that let Bingo know something was very wrong. This was the look Bingo had anytime she used to look at Iris. She knew this look well. She pined to be able to look at Iris like this again. But it’d been months since they had spoken.
And Bingo was no fool or stranger to unrequited love.
Did that mean neither was Mr. Ng??
Duc’s eccentricity was no longer a shield or an excuse to hide behind, because Bingo knew something was very deeply off about her mother, Duc, and Mr. Ng?. What had the three of them been up to? What were they hiding?
So, Bingo called Jane first. It went straight to voicemail. She then called Paulina, who hung up immediately, not even allowing it to go to voicemail. She debated calling Georgia. But what answers could Georgia possibly have? Georgia, bless her heart, was simply too young to be of help. Bingo almost caved and wrote a text out to Jude. But then deleted it. Individual texts in this family were not for the faint of heart. Group chat it was. Just Jude, Jane, Bingo, and Paulina. She left Georgia out, as they often did. This was a discussion for the adult table only.
Bingo tested the waters with a simple: we need to talk
Hours later, a follow-up text, with a word she’d never used before: please
The following day: hello????
Bingo waited and waited.
While Bingo waited for any signs of life, she kept working and kept her head down. Though the part of town where she was was a ghost town, Bingo began to bring care and joy back onto the sidewalks. She planted wildflowers, built a bench to put outside, and redid the windows. Neighbors looked on curiously, watching her day in and day out. The strange, lone woman with the pixie haircut and the steely demeanor, hammering away, night and day, by herself. Though they refused to approach her, viewing her as nothing more than a visiting alien, they waited and watched from afar. They all knew who she was; of course they did. One of Duc Tr?n’s daughters? He was a living legend, and by extension, so was she.
But not all living legends were created equal. Some had a dark shadow over them.
Bingo wasn’t sure what she was building for, or what the vision was. But there was a little voice inside of her that constantly made her think of Iris and her cooking. God, she missed that woman’s cooking. The way Iris brought joy back into Vietnamese food for her—when her body had begun rejecting Vietnamese food as a way to remove herself from her father and his empire—was nothing short of medicinal. Her food had healed her. Iris cooked with love and treated every ingredient as part of her community, which reminded Bingo of Evelyn’s cooking.
Memories of her mother flooded her, reminding her that once upon a time, Evelyn used to love cooking, and how she used to cook up a storm, both at home and at the shop. The sweet and sour marinades she would make, the way she bit down on chili peppers for a bit of heat, the joy of squeezing lemon juice and mixing sugar into a drink. Evelyn used to love food. And then one day, her mother stopped cooking, and she never came back to it. As a child, Bingo couldn’t understand why all of a sudden the food was replaced with frozen dinosaur nuggets or fast food. Why did all that love get suddenly yanked from all of them?
Iris had reminded her of the best parts of it all.
And god, did Bingo miss her.
As spring slowly inched its way into summer, the city of Philadelphia had begun to swelter. Pants were replaced with capris, skirts, and shorts, and Bingo watched the streets slowly come back to life. The days were long, sticky, and somehow, even lonelier. But Bingo had begun to find solace in it. In search of fresh air, she found a red rusted ladder on the side of the building that went up to the rooftop. As she climbed each step, the skyline formed a faux mountain ridge, almost smiling back at her. Once on top of the roof, she saw how much space there was, and the possibilities were endless. The next day, she carried a lawn chair up to the roof. The following day, she brought up some shade. The following day, some planter boxes.
But Iris was always lingering, her smell, traces of her touch.
Did you know that Philadelphia has always been my favorite city? I remember thinking I could live here forever.
For once, Bingo agreed with Duc. She could live here forever.
As Bingo began to place planter boxes all over the roof, a vision began to crystallize in her mind. She saw a vision of the shop in a way that she couldn’t before, and the shop had a full, beating heart, akin to her own.
That was when her phone lit up, message after message after message flying in. Her siblings had finally responded, bringing news of something much bigger than all of them were prepared for. Bingo looked down in horror as she read snippets, and she went back to reread the messages just to confirm that she wasn’t hallucinating.
Then Paulina came back from the dead and chimed in, exacerbating the urgency. Soon, it was Jude, Jane, Bingo, and Paulina furiously texting each other, confirming all the gossip that had been buried. They had to find their parents. It was the only way. Who did they belong to? What branches of a tree did they belong to?
The truth was ugly: Duc wasn’t their father.
But in all of their hearts, they knew. They had always known that they didn’t belong to Duc. It wasn’t because none of them looked like him, or because of the forced distance that Duc put between them—it was simply children’s intuition. Something was wrong their entire lives. All of the children on the playground knew the truth back then. The gossip would seep into their ears, and they could see the truth. It was always the adults who pretended not to see.
Bingo stood on the roof, looking out onto the city, and knew she had to leave right away, to be with her siblings again. There was a sadness to her departure from a city she had been transient in. She was nothing more than an onlooker. There was something to be said about transplants, always observing, unable to find their way in. Perhaps that loneliness of being a transplant was just a constant way to remind her to come home. Bingo hadn’t missed Houston since she left when she was eighteen, but now the call of the South was something she couldn’t ignore anymore.
Her departure was imminent because she was certain she knew the identity of one of the fathers, and that proof had been next to her bed, nagging at her every night.
But first, she had to say goodbye.
To the city, but also, more importantly, to a girl.
In the final days, Bingo finished her shop.
As she took in the full view, standing on the sidewalk, caked in paint and plaster, she acknowledged that something she had created, with her own hands, was beautiful in an understated way. The wood finishes, the crown molding, the sleek marbled countertops. For her final act, Bingo got up on a stepladder, and with a crowbar, she began to remove the letters, one by one, that spelled out Duc’s Sandwiches . Each letter piled on top of another on the ground, the pile growing bigger and bigger—a Jenga game about to topple over any minute now. The shop now belonged to no one and had no trace of Duc Tr?n.
It was freeing in a way.
Finding out the last few days that Duc wasn’t her father somehow made all the sense and no sense at the same time. It pushed her to finish the shop faster, a final goodbye to the childhood and father figure she had known and had grown to resent.
Because Bingo was done being angry. It was time to move on.
Once you bypass the fear of the unknown, con, this place will become your favorite city, too.
Who was really behind those letters all along? Bingo had always thought it was strange that the tone didn’t sound like Duc. Tenderness hid between the lines, but Duc had been incapable of feeling that toward them.
Bingo knew. Rereading the letter with new eyes, from nearly a year ago, Bingo realized who had really written the letters to all the Tr?n children, and it most certainly wasn’t Duc.
One by one, the neighbors slowly came out. They circled Bingo nervously. The CPA who rented the corner office. The owner of the Thai restaurant, who had a 3.5 review rating, which only meant that it was probably the best Thai restaurant in town. And the middle-aged Vietnamese woman who owned the orchid shop a few doors down. But eventually one of them went up to her.
“What will replace Duc’s?” the woman asked Bingo, her ears raised for any scrap of information and gossip.
Bingo didn’t respond right away. She just gazed at the now empty space where the sign had been, with only the faintest outline of the old name. There was one possible name that would make sense. It was the one name that Bingo held firmly on to, remembering the late nights together, and early mornings. The name that had ridden SEPTA with her, had gone on picnics over at Rittenhouse Square, one too many times, the name that forced her to rent a tandem bike, even though Bingo never learned to bike.
It was the one name that would have made her stay in the city forever.
“A place called Iris’s,” Bingo finally said, responding to the woman. “Better Vietnamese food is coming to this block. Trust me.”
The woman shrugged, not believing her. “Duc’s was pretty bad. But I’ll believe it when I taste it.”
A biker zoomed past the small crowd that had formed on the sidewalk, and Bingo looked up a little too eagerly, hoping to see a familiar face. But it wasn’t her. It turned out to be just another anonymous biker, in a city full of them.
The familiar smell enveloped her. Iris was at it again. The charcoal smoke carried for miles and miles, creating a visible trail that led to the storefront. Bingo was instantly comforted, knowing who the woman was behind all of it. As she rounded the corner, the queue was still standing strong, because everyone knew what was waiting at the end of the line, and that the wait would be worth it.
Bingo knew more than anyone here that yes, the wait was always worth it when it came to her .
Bingo spotted Iris immediately. Bantering with a customer, she was able to somehow joke and chop food at the same time—a skill Bingo used to find intimidating, and she’d worry that one wrong laugh would send Iris off to the ER needing stitches. But Bingo worried over her like a lover, when Iris had needed more than just surface-level worry. Iris had kept waiting for Bingo to grow up, and once Bingo did, it was too late.
Bingo saw Iris’s bike, locked up in the same spot as it always was. Crowded among hundreds of other bikes, the familiar blue-and-green bike that had brought them together that fateful day stuck out to her immediately. She owed that bike thanks, for allowing her to collide with fate.
The queue grew longer, and Bingo watched on longingly, imagining a life in which she had gotten her life together earlier, and they had been able to build something together. She imagined a world in which she had gotten out of her own head, and had allowed herself to be happy. Maybe that would have led to more afternoon naps together, and she’d be curled up in Iris’s arms, purring softly as she was showered with kisses. Then no earthquake, asteroid heading toward Earth, or viral pandemic could ever make her get out of Iris’s arms.
But reality yanked her back, because it sounded too picture-perfect. All she ever had as an example of a marriage were Duc and Evelyn, and now that the truth had surfaced, knowing their marriage was built on a foundation of lies, there was no point in living in the “what ifs.”
Maybe she’d allow herself to pursue real happiness one day. Maybe.
She walked over to Iris’s bike and shoved a sealed envelope into the spokes, just as she had done before with the bouquet. It simply said To Iris . Inside the envelope was a key, along with a simple note: Finally got a bed frame. Also, the store is yours. Enjoy.
She didn’t have to sign it. Iris would know exactly who it was from.