Chapter 9
Chapter
The rest of the day passes in a daze. I read through all my tabs and still don’t have any answers, and by the time I get into the elevator, my head is swirling.
It takes me a second to realize some of the accountants from earlier are in here with me. You know things are bad when I pass up a perfectly good opportunity to feel mortified.
One of them gives me an up-nod and says, “Hey, Ruby.”
“Hey,” I say, and turn to the wall to hide my confusion. I guess Greg must have told them who I am.
After work, I’m sitting on the couch alone in the fading afternoon light, staring into space. Thinking about how I should open the app and talk to Mom, but putting it off, the way I used to put off calling her. Cycling through the same three panicked thoughts in my mind, on loop.
And then it dawns on me: Fuck, I need to tell someone. I can’t handle this on my own. So I consider the options.
Someone from back in New York? My roommates and I were barely on a “getting stoned and watching movies together” basis.
I had some work friends there; we still message one another sometimes, to gossip or send links back and forth to other people’s social media shitposts.
But these aren’t the kind of relationships where I’d open up about anything real—certainly not about my mother’s ghost being trapped in the company Slack server.
Al? Tita Wendy? Too heartbreaking to go straight to someone who was friends with Mom in life—I can’t start there.
And I know Tita Wendy loves me, but it scares me sometimes, how much I need her.
How much darker my life would be if she weren’t dropping by, asking how I’m eating, bringing over a thermos of arroz caldo.
There’s…my dad?
Like I do every few months, I google him. His LinkedIn always comes up first, and to view it, I have to sign in to that sterile, cursed echo chamber of professional updates and productivity tips.
I stare at his photo—IT professional, Dallas area. I hate seeing the echo of my face in his. A prompt asks me if I want to endorse any of his notable skills. Excels at disappearing!
The page informs me we’re three degrees of separation apart, and that somehow seems like too many and too few at the same time.
I haven’t talked to him in years, but his absence and Mom’s anger at him were like their own characters in our lives, coming out sideways, in between things.
Every time someone let her down, she’d make a crack about him.
I can see her standing in the kitchen, hand on hip, sour twist to her mouth, telling the story for the umpteenth time.
He left without warning. In the end, he wasn’t really a person who wanted to be married.
When she retook her maiden name, I begged her to let me do the same.
I swipe away the tab on my screen. I’ve made it this far without him. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
My phone buzzes, and it’s a text from my cousin Trisha.
Trisha:
hey Ate Ruby it’s been awhile my dad wanted me to tell you we’re having a family party weekend after next u should come
I definitely can’t tell her. For one thing, Trisha is seventeen, and this would probably freak her the fuck out. Bad older cousin behavior—not that I was exactly in the running for Ate of the Year, anyway. I’ve never been that close with the rest of my family.
Maybe it’s because I felt like such a failure where Mom was concerned—I didn’t want to add more people I could disappoint to the mix.
The faces of Trisha’s parents, Tito Rob and Tita Rina, flash through my mind, well-meaning, concerned. They live in San Diego, and we’d go see them once or twice a year.
Mom would constantly tell me I should be closer with them. But even though she talked a big game about the importance of family, she was always finding excuses not to go. I can’t be away from home that long, we have a big project coming up in my department, I’m working lots of nights and weekends.
Then the realization emerges sharp and clear from the fog of my mind: Greg would get it.
And even though the thought makes me lightheaded, I instantly know it’s true.
Yes, we’ve drifted apart since high school, and barely talked for the past five years.
Our friendship didn’t cut off dramatically, after whatever went wrong when we kissed.
It fizzled out slowly, less and less frequent contact, excuses and evasions and things unsaid.
But he knows my mom, and not just the way other people in the office do—from the casserole dishes of pancit she’d bring to office potlucks and her stiff emails and the sad story on the GoFundMe that circulated for her funeral expenses.
Greg knows her from spending holidays together, from hearing her lectures and laughing at her jokes. He knows her from chopping vegetables when he’d come by before I’d gotten home from school—and she’d put him to work, if he was going to stand around anyway.
He knows her from living together, because when Greg and I were eleven, the market crashed, and he and his mom lost their house—so they moved in with us for a bit, just until Tita Wendy could get her bearings.
At the time, it made me and Greg even closer.
A couple months of staying up late whispering, getting scolded by our moms, talking in our own secret code.
I cried so much when they went to stay with Tita Wendy’s sister up north while she rebuilt her savings.
They moved back and rented a place a couple years later, at the start of eighth grade, and the fact that Greg and I had survived two years of long distance made our friendship seem invincible.
And even though I spent years feeling bitter that it wasn’t, it’s so clear to me, right then, that I can tell him about this.
Greg might be the only other person in the world who can viscerally understand why it’s hard to talk to Mom, now that I have a chance again. Because Mom loved him like family, and if there’s anyone she was harder on than me, it’s Greg.
Back before we kissed—back in the sun-dappled time when we were solidly, safely friends—whenever one of us was upset and needed to talk, we had a tradition.
We’d meet at the playground after dinner.
Just the name of the park it’s in, Sterling Field, became our shorthand for Emergency meeting!
I hate talking to people but if I don’t talk to someone I’m probably going to explode.
I haven’t used it in years. But when I was home from the East Coast for holidays, sometimes I’d still text Greg Sterling to see if I could, and he’d always show up.
When I was back for Christmas once and found out my boyfriend had cheated on me, and I needed a shoulder to cry on.
Right after my interview with my old company in New York, when I thought I’d bombed and would never get hired there—but a couple days later, I got an offer email.
When I was so acutely jealous of his new girlfriend, a couple years after college, that I called him to the playground just to talk about my existential dread (and regretted it shortly afterward).
I decided then that it was unhealthy, the way I wasn’t moving on, and we drifted apart.
But a literal haunting has to qualify as desperate times. With shaking hands, I text Greg:
Ruby:
sterling?
Greg:
i’ll be there
The way he barely missed a beat leaves my heart pounding in my ears for a while after.