Chapter 4
“You’re going to make me walk the entire municipality, aren’t you?” Allan said, already regretting his choice of slippers.
“Not the whole municipality,” Robby said. “Just our barangay. And half of the next one, since that’s where the health center is.”
“That’s still a lot of walking for someone whose only exercise in Manila was speed-walking to the elevator.”
“Wear the right footwear next time,” Robby said, entirely unsympathetic, and set off down the road at a pace clearly calibrated for someone used to walking everywhere, all the time, without complaint.
They passed the covered court first, where a group of kids was mid-scrimmage, and then the market, louder and more crowded than Allan remembered, awnings patched with a colorful, haphazard mix of tarpaulin from three different election years.
“This is new,” Allan said, pointing at a two-story concrete building that definitely hadn’t existed a decade ago, its ground floor lined with sari-sari stalls, its second-floor marked EVACUATION CENTER, CAPACITY 400 in stenciled letters.
“We put this up after the big typhoon, six years back now,” Robby said.
“Before, the school was the only evacuation center. But when a storm dragged on, the kids couldn’t get back to class, a whole week sometimes, because families were still crammed in the classrooms. So we pushed for a separate building, not the school anymore. ”
“You say ‘we’ like you personally built it.”
“I didn’t personally build it,” Robby said. “But I wrote the proposal. And I’m the one who followed up, four years, at the municipal hall, until it got approved. So, a little bit of ownership, yes.”
Allan looked at the building with new eyes: underneath the concrete and the stenciled paint, four years of one person’s stubborn, unglamorous persistence.
“That’s actually incredible,” he said.
“Thanks,” Robby said and looked, for a second, almost shy about the compliment, which Allan found unfairly charming for a man who could apparently out-argue an entire municipal budget committee.
They kept walking: past the chapel, freshly repainted; past the old basketball court, its ring finally replaced after what Robby called “years of committee meetings about a single hoop;” past a row of houses that Allan remembered as flood-prone, now raised a full meter off the ground on new concrete stilts.
“Kapitan pushed for the elevated foundations after the last big one,” Robby noted, catching Allan’s look. “Expensive, yes, but cheaper than rebuilding everything every time there’s a storm.”
“You people really did rebuild the whole town while I was gone.”
“Not all of it,” Robby said. “A lot of it’s still the same as before.” He nodded toward Cine sa Isla’s distant, crumbling silhouette, still visible from where they stood. “Like the cinema. There are things we left behind because we didn’t have the time, or the money, or the right people.”
“Or the right artist,” Allan said, only half joking.
“Or the right artist,” Robby agreed, utterly serious.
They stopped at a small carinderia near the health center, where the owner, a stout, cheerful woman who greeted Robby by name, called out “Dios mayad, mga iho!” the second she spotted Allan trailing behind him, and, before he could even place the greeting properly, had already rounded the counter to hug him like a favorite nephew, insisting on feeding them both for free “para sa Wonder Kid, bumalik na.”
“Manang, please stop calling me that. No longer a kid and no longer wonderful,” Allan said, around a mouthful of rice.
“We’re not going to stop,” the woman said cheerfully. “You grew up here, then you left, then you came back. You’ve earned the nickname.”
“See,” Robby said. “The whole barangay agrees.”
“This is a conspiracy.”
“You know they only do this because they love you,” Robby said, quieter now, less teasing. “That’s why they do it. Not to embarrass you. To remind you, you have a place here, no matter how long you were gone.”
Allan looked around the small carinderia, the owner already fussing over another customer, the health center’s fluorescent lights humming steady across the street, the evacuation building standing solid against a sky that, someday soon, would test it again, and felt something settle in his chest that had been unsettled since he’d stepped off that ferry.
Not just nostalgia. Not just guilt for having left. Something closer to belonging, offered freely, without him having had to earn it back first.
“Thank you,” he told the owner, on their way out, and meant considerably more than the free meal.
“Anytime, iho,” she said. “Just tell your friend to bring you back here again sometime.”
“Always,” Robby said, before Allan could answer, and slung an easy arm around his shoulders as they continued down the road, past more houses, more small proofs of a town that had kept surviving and rebuilding without waiting for him to come back and notice.
The weight of Robby’s arm landed heavier than it had any right to, warm through his thin shirt, and Allan’s whole body seemed to recalibrate around the fact of it: the easy, deliberate press of Robby’s hand at his shoulder, the accidental brush of a thumb near his collar, the specific, humiliating way his own pulse picked up over something as small as an arm.
He almost laughed at himself. He didn’t move away.
This is Robby, he reminded himself, like reciting a rule he wasn’t sure he still believed in.
The boy who used to make his ears go hot just by smiling at him, and also, inconveniently, the reason he’d spent a decade flinching at his own name.
Some old, self-protective part of him wanted to read nothing into it, wanted to file it under friendly and walk on.
The rest of him, the part that had apparently not gotten the memo in ten years, was already busy memorizing the exact weight and warmth of Robby’s arm, filing it away for later, for the late-night replay he already knew was coming.
Allan let himself lean into it, and into the whole loud, patched-together, stubbornly hopeful shape of the place he’d spent ten years insisting he didn’t miss.
He had, though. Achingly. He just hadn’t let himself say so until now.