Chapter 13
His mother was on the back steps a few days later, shelling mung beans into a chipped basin, radio murmuring an old OPM ballad from the kitchen counter behind her.
He’d come out to escape the BEBES’ latest round of wedding logistics warfare, someone had strong opinions about centerpiece flowers, and the debate had gotten, unnecessarily, personal.
“Tara dito,” Cora said, without looking up, which was as close to an invitation as she usually offered.
He sat. Took a handful of beans without being asked, because some habits from childhood never fully left the body.
They worked in silence for a while, the radio filling the space neither of them seemed inclined to fill themselves.
“You can spill the beans, you know,” Cora said eventually, “if you’ve got something on your mind. Figuratively, of course.”
“I’m not—”
“Allan Joseph Talan Reyes. Talk.”
He exhaled. “Just everything behind me. My whole life. I keep thinking, if I’d been braver back then, if I hadn’t run, if I hadn’t hidden behind spreadsheets and HR trainings. Maybe I would’ve figured out who I really am sooner.”
Cora shelled another pod, taking her time, before she answered.
“Did you know I used to draw too?”
Allan blinked. “You never told me that.”
“There was never a reason to,” she said.
“When I was young, I wanted to be an artist too, live in Manila, splash color over everything. Then I had you and Ver, and I chose to become a teacher, because the salary was steady, and steady is what you need when there are two children who need to eat every day.”
“Ma—”
“I’m not saying this out of regret, or so you’ll pity me,” she said, sharp but not unkind, the old teacher’s instinct to cut off a wrong answer before it went further.
“I’m saying this because I want you to understand.
My job was to make sure you had food, shoes, fare for the jeepney.
It was never my job to starve while martyring myself for art.
I chose that, and I’ve never regretted it. ”
“But—”
“There’s no ‘but,’” Cora said, flat. A beat. “There were nights, yes. I wondered.” She didn’t finish that thought out loud—some things, apparently, still don’t get said, even now. “But you. Ver. I won’t trade the two of you for anything. Bahala na, sabi ko noon. Good enough for me.”
She set down the basin, finally looking at him directly, the same assessing look she used to give a struggling student right before she told them exactly what they needed to hear, whether they wanted it or not.
“You know, when you were small,” she said, “I never asked you to be perfect. All I asked was that you be alive. Alive. Safe. That was always my only real standard.”
“But you always said—”
“‘Better than most,’ yes—I know, I said that. Because it's true. But I never once said, ‘you have to be successful for me to love you.’ Iba yun.” She reached over, and, with the same brisk practicality she used for everything, tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear like he was still nine years old. “You’re the one who put that standard on yourself, anak. Not me.”
Something in Allan’s chest cracked open, slow and total, the grief of realizing you’d spent a decade punishing yourself for a rule nobody but you had actually written.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I did tell you,” Cora said. “In the way I knew how. But sometimes showing isn’t enough.
You need to hear it plainly, without dressing it up.
” She shrugged, a small, rare softness in it.
“So I’m saying it now, in the plainest words I have.
Maybe that’s the only language that actually reaches you, anak, not all those English certificates you keep pressed against your chest instead. ”
Allan laughed, wet and unsteady. “That’s oddly specific.”
“I know I’m right,” Cora said, completely unfazed, and went back to her mung beans like she hadn’t just rearranged the entire architecture of his self-worth in four sentences.
“One question,” Allan said, after a while, testing something he’d wondered about since the folder of old photographs first came out. “If you had the chance now, not back then, would you change it? Would you stop being a teacher and draw instead?”
Cora considered this with real seriousness, not the brisk dismissal Allan half-expected.
“No,” she said finally. “Because choosing that back then didn’t mean I gave up on myself. I found out there’s art in teaching too. How to explain a hard lesson without hurting the child. How to shape a mind without breaking its trust. My canvas was just different. Not paint. Children.”
“That’s a very poetic way to look at thirty years of grading exams.”
“Not everything has to be suffering to count as art,” she said.
Then, almost to herself, still shelling beans: “I think that’s your mistake.
You think if it isn’t hard, it isn’t real.
” She glanced up at him, briefly, back to the beans just as fast. “You’re happy when you’re painting.
I’ve seen your face. Don’t argue with me about it. ”
“Ah naks, Ma. When did you get so wise about all this?”
“I’ve always been wise,” Cora quipped. “You just weren’t listening before.”
“Ma,” he said after a while, quieter. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For everything. Even the things you never said out loud. You know we’re alive because of you.”
“Alam ko,” Cora said, and there, briefly, was the ghost of real emotion crossing her carefully composed face before she smothered it, teacher-practical, back into something manageable. “Now, help me, because if we don’t finish this before dark, there’ll be no ulam tomorrow.”
He helped her finish the beans, the radio still murmuring behind them, the evening cooling into that particular blue dark that only ever happened in the province, thick with cricket-song and the distant bark of some barangay dog answering Oryo’s opinions about the moon.
Later, lying in bed, Allan thought about the phrase again, alive first, and realized it fit more of his life than just the career part.
He thought about the actual night he’d come out to Cora and Ver, years into Manila, over a static-heavy phone call he’d rehearsed for a full week and then said in under ten seconds flat: Ma, I’m gay. Kuya, I like guys, in case that wasn’t obvious enough already.
Gay had come out easier than bakla ever had, funnily enough, lighter, less freighted, like it belonged to a life he was choosing for himself instead of a life other people had already decided about him in advance.
Ver had said, “Yeah, I know, had known since we were nine, can we stop being dramatic now,” and gone back to whatever video game he’d been half-playing through the whole call.
Cora had gone quiet for one full second, long enough that his heart had tried to climb out through his ribs, before she said, plain as anything, “Okay. Kumain ka na ba?” No parade.
No tragedy either. Just dinner, eventually, and a phone bill.
She hadn’t brought it up again for weeks afterward, not because she was avoiding it, he understood eventually, but because to her it had simply never been a conversation that needed to be had twice.
He’d expected, after that, to feel done with it.
He hadn’t. It turned out coming out wasn’t a door you walked through once and got to lock behind you—it was a hallway lined with doors: a coworker asking if he had a girlfriend yet, some tita’s well-meaning matchmaking, and an intake form at a clinic with exactly two boxes on it, and he had to keep choosing, over and over, whether to open the next one or let it stay shut for one more day.
Nobody had warned him about that part. He wished, sometimes, someone had.
He thought about how much of his life in Manila had also been built on the opposite instinct from alive first: achieve first, prove first, and earn the right to exist comfortably in a room.
He thought about the mural sketch still tucked in his desk drawer, half-finished, the paint box smell of it more honest than any performance review he’d ever received.
He thought, too, about Robby: about taking things slowly, about the careful, deliberate way they were both, finally, learning not to run.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, the quiet didn’t feel like something he needed to fill with a plan.
It just felt like rest.