Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-One
Lee Lee
The day Lee Lee took Sabrina, she did not yet know that it would be her last day alone. Lee Lee woke up to her alarm at four o’clock and swung herself off her mattress in one motion. It took her a moment to remember it was a Monday—just an early shift, a half day.
Her commute was always the same. The same bus from South Philadelphia.
The same older woman who drove the bus. But she never looked up at Lee Lee, who paid with single coins, in spite of the irritated line that formed behind her.
One week, Lee Lee had decided to count how many times the bus driver ignored her, but after four days in a row, she stopped counting.
She heard her from the middle of the bus.
Hey, sugar, what you got for me today? Oh it’s gonna rain cats and dogs later.
God bless you, honey. But the words were always for someone else.
Lee Lee always sat in the middle. It was easier to get off at her stop that way.
She dreaded when larger men sat beside her and she was forced to raise her voice to ask them to move aside.
But mostly, nobody took that seat, and she stared out at the low-rise houses and the graffiti and watched the world outside as the bus tumbled its way to the airport.
Before the sun rose fully, Lee Lee paused to stare out the window as the orange and pink skies transformed everything into a thing of beauty. A young mother stopped beside her, clutching at the neck of her child’s T-shirt. The boy rushed toward everything.
“Just won’t stop moving, this kid,” she mumbled to nobody in particular, but it could have been to Lee Lee, as the woman forced a smile.
Lee Lee watched the boy climbing up onto the chairs and climbing back down again. An immense pleasure and satisfaction spread across his face, and he laughed as he clambered up and down. The mother held him lightly by his dimpled elbow.
Children were everywhere she looked. She couldn’t get away from them.
Daming had died almost six months ago. She didn’t know whether she grieved for him or for the life they had planned to have.
Lee Lee still hadn’t told her mother that he was gone, and she continued to ask after a child, her admonitions increasing with every call.
Lee Lee knew she was being a coward, she knew she needed to tell her that the man she had planned to start a life with was gone, but she did not want to admit that she had failed.
She woke every morning to notice that any evidence of his existence was fading.
She felt invisible and forgotten, and wondered whether Daming had ever loved her, or whether, like her, he was just lonely.
Hurry up, Lee Lee. Don’t wait around like these Western women. Just get on with starting your family.
We all have a duty to continue our line.
You could even have two children, you’re not here, after all.
She let her mother’s hope for a child continue to grow over the phone lines.
···
It wasn’t just the family expectations. Lee Lee knew she was too sharp, she lacked a softness that many women had.
She had no delicate vulnerability, no need to be cared for, or saved by a man.
She liked to be in control. Daming would take her orders and shuffle a few steps behind, that was in his nature.
But now he was gone, she wouldn’t find anyone else like him.
That morning, she walked into the staff canteen and saw that Tanya from Sbarro had taken Lee Lee’s usual seat in the far corner by the window.
A small knot of anger rose up inside her chest. It was Lee Lee’s seat, didn’t Tanya know this?
Lee Lee considered sitting at the same table, but the thought evaporated fast. She turned to find another table and heard the squeak of her left sneaker with every step she took.
The noise was deafening in her head until she sat down, close to the bathrooms. She was hungry.
The staff breakfast was a burrito. She stared at the congealed egg that had started to glisten on her plate.
She felt the hunger pull at her insides.
She longed for rice. Clean white rice and green vegetables, cooked in garlic and chili.
She closed her eyes and took a large bite of her burrito.
The red sauce with its sickly sweetness clung to the insides of her mouth.
And a large drop of green mush fell onto her plate.
The wet heaviness of the sauce splashed onto the table in specks.
She wiped the table with the thin napkin.
There were tiny wet dots on her gray uniform.
Her eyes darted up to see if anyone had seen the piece of food fall onto the table. But nobody saw. Nobody was looking.
···
The baby was not crying. Her eyes were round and shiny.
When the baby looked up at Lee Lee, she expected the child to cry or crawl away, but instead she held her gaze.
Lee Lee stepped away from the carts she had collected and walked toward the chubby hand that reached outward and found herself meeting her small fingers with her own.
Lee Lee looked around Gate D12 to see where the child’s mother was.
But there was nobody. The gates were closed and there wasn’t a single person there.
She always went to the empty gates at the end of her shift to return abandoned carts for any coins she could claim.
She watched the passengers in the distance walking quickly toward their gates and heard the siren of the buggies carrying those who needed physical help fading on the opposite side of the terminal.
“Where’s your family?” she heard herself coo. But the child just looked up at her. Sitting, legs open on the floor in front of a five-seater bench.
The child held Lee Lee’s finger in her hand, and something burst inside of her.
A dam that held back her sadness from the last year began to overflow.
She pulled her finger from the child’s grasp and looked around.
She was just twenty or so steps away from the staff door that would take her to her locker.
She slowly started to move away from the child.
But the child laughed and began to follow.
A game. A few more steps, and the child’s deft hands and knees on the ground carried her in pursuit of her new friend.
Lee Lee finally reached the staff exit and looked around her.
It was still a few hours until any passengers would come to this gate.
She pushed the door open, and the child looked at Lee Lee.
The child seemed to immediately accept her, and a small part of Lee Lee’s heart broke away, a small piece that would always belong to this child.
She knelt down and picked the baby up as she passed the threshold into the staff area, which was empty after lunch.
In the distance she heard crying—a woman wailing.
She glanced back and saw a small crowd of people.
But she didn’t turn back with the child.
The baby wrapped herself around Lee Lee’s waist, a movement that felt natural, and her small legs instinctively squeezed, as though she and the baby were two pieces of a puzzle that were suddenly fitting together after so much time searching.
The child played with the end of Lee Lee’s limp ponytail, and she wished she had washed her hair the night before.
A crumb from the child’s fingers balanced among the strands.
She decided she must be a girl because of the leggings—but it was only hours later when she knew for certain.
Lee Lee stood in front of her locker and took out her bag.
The child’s weight started to strain her arm.
She looked down into the round shiny eyes that smiled at her.
Lee Lee wrapped her arm tighter around the child and threw her bag over the other shoulder.
She walked out of the room, putting her time sheet into the wall-mounted shelf.
She looked ahead, eyes straight as she walked out of the terminal, toward the bus stop, and then past the bus stop.
She walked and walked, as the child sat on her hip and laughed.
Her arm burned from the pain of carrying her, but she walked.
Finally, Lee Lee sat down at a different stop from her regular one and waited to see if she would recognize the bus driver who pulled up.