Chapter Thirty-Four #2
“Yes, yes,” Joan said, folding her tissue.
She could feel his fingers gently rubbing the skin right beneath her collar; it was one of those moments she had once dreamed of happening.
Did she love Trevor? Had she ever had big love in her life?
Big, romantic love? Joan thought so at times, and other moments she thought she’d only ever taken these little sips.
But perhaps that was wrong. Pleasure doesn’t keep so well as a memory. Everything fades.
She could sense Trevor waiting. Joan was afraid she would say something ridiculous were she to speak. I’m going to miss you, maybe. I wish we could have been together earlier. I think it would have been worth it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Trevor asked.
Joan cleared her throat. “It’s just a nice song, that’s all.”
After Joan forgot she’d already purchased a deep freezer, and had become angry when a second freezer she’d ordered appeared in front of the café, berating her favorite UPS deliveryman, she turned over daily management of the business to Jamie.
It was Jamie who volunteered; she originally told him she was posting a job listing. “Patty’s already so busy.”
“Don’t hire anybody,” Jamie said. “I’ll do it.”
“What about your work?”
“Oh, they’re fine. The company is super flexible.”
Atom was indeed super flexible, not least because Jamie no longer worked there.
He had quit months earlier, after Joan’s diagnosis, although the two hadn’t been related, not exactly.
It was more that he’d had enough: the meetings, the projects, the recurring one-on-ones; the managers, the climbing, the gossip, the endless doomsday whispers of a looming “reorg.” He had half a year of savings and asked Chloe if she might want to travel around the world: “We wouldn’t be getting back together,” Jamie said. “Just as friends.” Chloe had said no.
Jamie hadn’t informed Joan of his leaving, which he considered an act of benevolence. Joan attached a great deal of meaning to corporate work, possibly because she had never done it herself.
“There’s nothing special about a company,” Jamie once told Joan. “There’s nothing admirable in working yourself to death for an entity that doesn’t care about you.”
“You should be proud just to work ,” Joan had said.
Whether Joan suspected and found it convenient not to comment, or failed to notice that Jamie now spent most of his days at the café, he never knew.
He took over her managerial tasks: he arranged and rearranged the host schedules and kept track of the evening’s receipts and maintained a list of banned customers.
He swept the floors in the morning and evening, and when they still weren’t clean enough for his liking, he began to sweep nearly every hour.
He brainstormed menu additions and attended trade shows to select items for the shop.
All of this is work , Jamie thought. So much actual work. It staggered him that he had once thought sitting at a desk all day, staring into a computer, was work.
In contrast with Jamie’s sweeping and scurrying, Joan appeared relaxed, carefree—her condition had fostered in her a tranquil disposition that Jamie and Lee had never witnessed.
They realized that for their entire lives, their mother had always been so stressed .
Even when happy, she had also been anxious, looking around for something to do.
Jamie recalled when Joan had to stay home the whole day to wait for a repairman.
He had gone to school, and when he returned, his mother had assembled an end table and regrouted the shower.
Now Joan was no longer in constant motion, cleaning or sorting; a languor had set in, that extended from her schedule to her body.
She carried a journal, in which she scrawled notes that she showed no one.
She sat at a table in the café and read her latest library selection, her notebook within arm’s reach.
When Jamie was free, he’d join her. He tried to intrigue his mother with anecdotes about his friends.
This once reliably interested Joan: What’s Darrell doing, you know, that handsome boy who was so good at math?
And your ex-girlfriend Eunice, her parents, did they ever move to Korea?
In the evenings, when Joan stayed late, Jamie would sometimes bring her the plastic file containing all the day’s receipts and any notes on unusual incidents or customers.
One Friday after closing, Joan asked for the file; her left hand rapped against the table as she leafed through papers.
Her finger went down a sheet; she was wearing her usual ring, in the shape of a gold panther.
“Are you glad things are the way they are?” Joan asked without looking up.
“Things?”
“Yes.” Joan flipped a page. “Your life.”
Maybe she’d realized he was working full-time at the café. “To be honest, I didn’t like Atom. I barely understood it.”
“Eh?” She looked up and narrowed her eyes. “I mean about Lee. And her joining. Our family.”
“Oh.” Not once had Joan asked this of him. Jamie had been only three when Lee arrived. To him, it was the same as if Joan had given birth herself. “Of course.”
“You didn’t wish you had a brother, more siblings?”
“No,” Jamie said honestly.
Joan peered up at him again. Her notebook lay in her lap.
“Life is very strange,” she said. “It turns out the things I thought would be difficult aren’t so.
It’s what I hadn’t thought about that’s causing all the problems. Sometimes I wonder if I’d worried more, fewer bad things would have happened. ”
“I had a friend like that in the navy. He used to say out loud what he was most frightened of because he was convinced God was listening.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was with me on the roof.”
Joan showed no sign of understanding. “It was Nick,” Jamie added. “The one who died. You met his mother.”
Joan blinked. She held her hand in front of her face as if she needed to examine something on it.
“I’m tired,” she said. She pointed to the expense tracker.
“I think you forgot to add the fee for the plumber.” She went off to another table with her notebook, scrawling into it her mysteries, and Jamie wondered how much she would recall of the conversation.
Jamie and Lee agreed upon a routine: at least one of them saw Joan each day.
They also tried to drive her whenever possible, though they hadn’t broached the topic of Joan giving up her car.
One weekend she said she wanted to go hiking, and Lee drove them to High Rock Park.
Still there was no railing or sign at the cliff base.
Lee had been afraid Joan might be angry—she was angrier these days—but her mother seemed resigned.
“Oh well,” Joan said. “What can you do?”
After the hike, Joan had been withdrawn, wordlessly staring out the passenger window during the drive home.
The following Saturday, Lee thought it best to ensure a pleasurable activity, and Joan always enjoyed a good meal.
To qualify as good to Joan, the food had to be Chinese, well priced, and the restaurant busy. Lee settled on dim sum.
When they arrived at Joy Palace, there was already a line. Customers were pressed against the fish tanks, the excess crowd spilling onto the lawn.
“I told you we should have come earlier,” Joan said.
“We are early. We left the house at eleven.”
“Look at how many people. So many Chinese here now. And even some white people.”
Lee didn’t respond. She knew Joan thought of her as a Chinese person.
The crowd, however, did not, and when she went in to get a number, a grandmother elbowed her from behind.
Lee didn’t push the woman aside, not exactly, but she did square her body in front of the counter.
To make a point, she asked for a table for two in halting Mandarin.
“What number are we?” Joan asked when Lee returned outside.
Joan had found a bench, and she lifted her handbag so Lee could sit.
The bench faced the Chinese supermarket at the front of the plaza.
Lee watched the grandmother who had shoved her scurry into the market.
There passed a set of twins in starched eyelet dresses with large bows in their hair, each holding a hand of their mother.
“I think if we hadn’t had you, maybe I would have tried to be pregnant again,” Joan remarked, looking at the twins. “Were you happy to be in this family?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What if I’d had a baby after you and Jamie?”
“It would have been fine,” Lee said carefully. “But I’ve always liked things exactly as they are.”
Joan stared off. “I just worry that you miss another life you didn’t have. I hope you really are happy.”
She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Lee thought. She’s just making conversation; sometimes when people get older, they just blurt things out. She glanced at Joan; her eyes were foggy, and she was breathing with her mouth slightly parted.
She’s tired, Lee thought again.
Lee didn’t know that, just days earlier, Joan had asked Jamie a similar question.
Lee didn’t know how loudly this idea of whether her children were happy rumbled through Joan’s head.
If Lee had thought a little more, she might have realized how strange, how out of character it was for Joan to ask about happiness.
And if Lee were really thinking about her mother, she might have recognized certain patterns, such as Joan’s routine of checking items off a list before starting a major task.
But Lee didn’t consider any of this, which was what Joan expected. After all, it was natural for your children to think more of themselves than they did of you. That was what parents did too, as they aged—they thought of themselves. I’ve thought of myself plenty, Joan mused.
Inside Joan’s tote was her notebook. On her desk at home, she kept a jar stocked with her children’s old gel pens.
As a result the pages were filled with different colors: blue and green and silver and pink.
Sometimes she would open it and know exactly what she had written, and other times she would read and be surprised.
She never doubted its contents, however. She did not doubt her intentions.
When Bill was dying, or rather, when Bill knew he was dying, he complained that people treated him differently. “They see me and think: Dead man walking,” he said.
Joan was the opposite: she believed that her children and her employees weren’t thinking about her mortality enough.
They nursed foolish hopes and yearned for her to get better; when she had good days—and she still had them, good days—they thought it was like before. But she knew what lay before her.
And yet.
“Fifty-eight,” the loudspeaker said from above. “Party of two. Fifty-eight,” the voice chimed again, first in English and then in Mandarin.
“Okay,” Lee said. “Let’s go.”
But Joan didn’t move. She remained seated and petting Lee’s hand.
Lee was wearing a dress, a light orange number that went nearly to the ground, and little white sandals.
Joan used to have white sandals like that.
She had kept them pristine, thinking they were too good to use, and then they had been lost in the fire.
Wear those sandals all the time, Joan wanted to tell Lee.
Wear them until they fall apart. Joan had loved Falling House, but she never thought of it now.
It was just a building. Everything goes.
Their number was called again, and finally Joan rose and together they went into the restaurant.