Chapter 8
CASSIEL
Peter rapped the frame, said something about the front display, and retreated. For lunch, Cassiel had the chicken katsu sandwich. Ever stalwart, ever consistent.
The whole time the dishwasher question sat with him.
May at his mother’s counter, his hands in the mandu filling, his voice at the table, his attention moving between the people and the food and the room with a fluency that Cassiel associated with people who did things like this professionally—bartenders, event coordinators, the rare salesperson at a watch fair who actually understood what they were selling.
Someone who could read a room in seconds and adjust to it.
Why was this person washing dishes and picking up gigs on a companion app on the side? He could just as easily be doing drink service somewhere, earning real tips. It was not a question of class, of whether that labor was worth doing. It was a question about May Huang.
The question had formed in his mind at the dinner. It was still here and he had not asked it.
Wednesday night, in bed, Cassiel was thinking about May, and upon recognizing that he was thinking about May, he had to find something else to think about.
He found a three-part series on the American Girl doll franchise.
The first video covered the original lineup and the historical research behind each character.
The second was about the company’s corporate acquisition, subsequent decline in quality, and the shifting trajectory of the modern dolls.
The third centered the creator’s personal relationship with dolls and girlhood.
Cassiel had not owned an American Girl doll and had no direct experience with girlhood, but he watched all three parts in full and came away with a favorite American Girl doll to name in case someone were ever to ask.
Knowing about Kit Kittredge did not dispel May. The dishwasher question was still there, the ceiling was dark, and the phone was warm against Cassiel’s chest when he finally set it down.
THE SEVENTH THURSDAY
The October light came through the front window at a lower angle now, catching the dust in the air and turning it visible.
The plum storefront was taking its autumnal form, darker and richer, color deepening as the days shortened and All Hallows’ Eve grew closer.
The marigolds in the window box were browning at the edges.
Cassiel settled at his bench seat, the mint chocolate latte hot and right.
May arrived at 10:08, which was early for May and therefore remarkable, but Cassiel had decided not to comment because any commentary seemed to function as reinforcement and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be responsible for May’s punctuality as an ongoing project.
He looked tired. Cassiel saw it in the circles under his eyes and in the slowed movement from door to table. He ordered at the counter, came over, and sat down.
“Fleet Week’s over,” May said. “You survived.”
“Barely.”
“Your neighborhood must’ve been brutal. I could hear them from my place and I live in the avenues.”
“The shop rattled.”
“Like, the building?”
“The display cases. Peter thought it was exciting. I considered filing a noise complaint with the Department of Defense.”
May smiled, tired around the edges but soft, and wrapped his hands around his cup.
They’d been talking about nothing—a video May had sent him about a woman who collected high-end Japanese stationery and organized it by hue, which Cassiel had found both impressive and somewhat beautiful.
May had sent it with: could be you if you were a lady with cute stuff.
The conversation drifted from there to the pen May used for his notebooks, a Pilot G2 07 which Cassiel had thoughts on but did not share, and then to the notebooks themselves, and then finally to a quiet that neither of them filled quickly enough.
May had been looking down at his phone, one brow raised, chewing the left side of his bottom lip in thought. He looked up, sensing Cassiel’s gaze on him.
“—My brother. Relaying a message from our mom,” he explained.
Cassiel nodded. He took a drink of his chocolate mint latte, lukewarm, and looked at the opposite wall while May tapped a volley of responses into his phone. He waited until the haptic sounds stopped before opening his mouth.
“I wanted to ask you—”
“Do you wanna go to—”
They stopped. The café sounds filled the gap—the espresso machine, a spoon against ceramic, the low hum of the fridge behind the counter.
“Go ahead,” Cassiel said.
“No, mine was stupid. You go.”
Cassiel folded his arms. The question he’d been carrying for a week was right there, and he was either going to ask it now or carry it for another week and another week after that.
“I wanted to ask you a question. About your job.”
May’s eyebrows shifted. “About… STDY? Or Lau Kee?”
“About Lau Kee. Specifically—” The sentence stalled.
Why are you washing dishes was too blunt.
Too close to an assessment of someone else’s life that Cassiel had no right to make.
He tried again. “You’re good with people.
Better than—You’re very good with people, but you wash dishes. You could be earning tips.”
He stopped short of saying elsewhere.
May looked at him. His hand went to the back of his neck and rubbed it.
“I used to be out front,” he said. “I was pretty good at it, actually.”
“Then… a few years ago, I was in an accident. Car thing. Not a lot of damage, but—head injury. Headaches and stuff, not a big deal, considering. But anyway, after that my brain just…” May made a flicking motion near his head.
An explosion, or a magic trick. “I started losing things. Orders and names. I’d be talking and then would just—pshhh. Fall out from under me.”
“Auntie and Uncle moved me to the back. They didn’t make a big deal of it, they’re chill. They just—one day I was washing dishes and that was the job now.”
The notebooks and the phone alarms, the way May sometimes repeated things under his breath.
The moment at the table on Chuseok when May had paused mid-sentence and his eyes had gone flat for a half-second before snapping back.
Everything Cassiel had attributed to quirk or ADHD or May being May now looked different.
His mind ran the arithmetic. A car accident meant emergency room.
Emergency room meant hospital. Hospital meant imaging, neurology, follow-up, and in the United States of America, that meant debt.
It did not go away. It restructured and accrued and did not stop.
So STDY was not pocket money. The rate May charged per booking was not supplemental income for somebody who washed dishes in Chinatown and rode a bus for thirty minutes to get to a café in the Inner Sunset.
There was more in what May had said and what May left out.
Cassiel could ask. May had given him one answer.
The rest—the accident itself, his family, whatever May’s life looked like on the other side of Thursdays—was not information he’d been offered.
Why his nights were empty and not filled with friends, why he only ever talked about his siblings.
Why someone who was so good at being liked seemingly had fewer people than Cassiel.
“The notebooks,” Cassiel said.
May looked at him. A flicker of something—surprise, maybe.
“Yeah.” May exhaled. “The notebooks.”
A silence opened between them and Cassiel let it stay open. He sat in the quiet and May sat in the quiet with him, and the light through the window moved a fraction across the table.
May’s fingers found his cup. The ice shifted. He took a sip and set it down and pressed his thumb against the scar on his hand once, hard enough that the skin there turned white under the pressure, and Cassiel just watched.
“Anyway,” May said, “that’s my whole deal. Sorry for the trauma dump.”
“You didn’t trauma dump. I asked.”
“It’s still weird. I just told you my brain’s broken at our regularly scheduled coffee appointment which you pay for.”
“Your brain’s not broken,” Cassiel said. “It has a limitation that you’ve built a mechanism to accommodate.”
May stared at him. Then the laugh came—sharp, startled, bent shoulders and a flash of canines.
“That’s—I like that, like I’ve rigged up a Rube Goldberg machine.” He shook his head, his eyes bright and wet, and he pressed the heel of his hand against one of them. “And the marble gets stuck.”
They stayed at Sparrow another forty minutes.
The conversation found its way back to the stationery woman.
May made a joke about organizing his notebooks aesthetically, like the lady from the video, and Cassiel told him he would need significantly more notebooks to accomplish that.
May laughed again, and this was the sound Cassiel had organized his Thursdays around.
More precisely, it was the production of this sound.
The same laugh as last week and the week before.
Knowing what the notebooks were for changed nothing about the laugh.
He did not know where that fit other than here, in the gap between Wednesday and Friday, in the time between nine and noon.
Cassiel slid the beads on his ring, one by one, from one side to the other.
Then, in a gap between topics, he asked, “What were you going to say?”
May blinked. “When?”
“Earlier. Before I asked.”
“Oh.” May’s mouth twitched. “I was… gonna ask if you wanted to go to the park.”
The scale of the thing—head injury, broken brain, the structure of a life rebuilt, and May’s original question had been do you want to go to the park—was almost enough to make him laugh.
“Maybe not today,” May said. He was grinning now, sheepish, aware of the disparity. “But next week? I could come early-ish and we could grab our drinks to go. If you wanted.”
“I’d want,” Cassiel said.
Outside, the N-Judah passed on Irving and the café windows rattled once in their frames, a vibration that reached Cassiel’s latte and broke its crema into a tremor—circular, expanding, gone.