Chapter 2 #2
He handed out the morning buns. Denny said Albert was the best. The front desk said Albert was a saint.
The two guys in structural said something that was technically thanks.
Corinne took hers, set it on a napkin, did not eat it, and said, "Ocampo.
My office, ten minutes," which was either very good or very bad and gave no clues as to which, because that was Corinne's entire management philosophy.
His mom came at nine-fifteen and hugged him too hard in front of everyone and pressed the rice cooker into his hands in its box and told Denny, a stranger, that Albert had graduated top of his class, that Albert was going to be a big architect, that Albert's father worked twelve years in Jeddah so Albert could sit in a room like this, gesturing at the glass, at the light, at the whole expensive view of the thing the family had bought with two decades of somebody being somewhere else.
"Ma, you can't just tell people —"
"I can tell people. I'm the mother." She held his face.
Her hands smelled like the hand sanitizer from the hospital, the same smell his whole childhood, the smell of a woman coming off a double and still driving to a school thing.
"You eat. You look thin. Lola says come Sunday, she's making — she wanted to make pandesal but she can't find good flour and the old bakery on Mission closed, so she's making something else and she's mad about it.
Come Sunday. Bring nothing. Bring yourself. "
"I'll bring myself."
"Bring yourself and maybe a nice thing for the table," she said, because bring nothing was, in this family, also a standing motion that meant its opposite, and then she was gone in a cloud of Bath & Body Works and unpayable love, and Albert stood holding a rice cooker in the middle of the floor and felt, for one second, so tired he could have laid down on the good gray carpet and let the light watercolor over him too.
It wasn't that he didn't want it. That was the part nobody in his family would ever believe, because from the outside Albert wanted everything, loudly, all the time — he was the wanter, the enthusiast, the one who'd buy four of anything.
But the wanting was always on behalf of someone.
He wanted his mom to stop working doubles.
He wanted Lola to have good flour. He wanted the front desk to have a decent morning.
Somewhere in the middle of all that was supposed to be a want with his own name on it, and this morning a man had held the whole current still with one hand and gone looking for it, and they'd both come up with a napkin.
His phone buzzed. Marcus. so the random q — could u look over my portfolio site this wk? u have such a good eye. no rush!! unless ur free tn lol.
Albert typed sure, send it over, and hated the knee, and walked into Corinne's office.
***
"Sit." Corinne did not look up from her monitor, which was covered in a site plan Albert couldn't read upside down. "You know the Sunset. You grew up out there."
"Daly City, but adjacent, yeah. I know the Sunset."
"Good. Because I'm giving you a live one.
" Now she looked at him, and there was a thing in her face that in five years Albert had learned to read as the closest Corinne came to warmth, which was the look of someone handing you a loaded thing because she trusted your grip.
"Mixed-use, ground-floor retail, six stories, a whole block assemblage.
Client's Sutro Capital — they move fast, they pay on time, they are going to be a nightmare in exactly the ways that make careers.
I want you as project architect. Not associate-on. Project architect. Your name on it."
The room did a slow tilt. Project architect.
That was the title his mom didn't have the word for but had been describing at Denny for twenty minutes.
That was the Jeddah years converting, finally, into something you could point at.
That was the thing Albert had been being the easy one for, for so long that being the easy one had become the only self he could locate in a hurry.
Twelve years in Jeddah. His mom's doubles.
Lola telling every person at every party, since he was nine, that this apo was going to build something — she always said it exactly like that, build something, like the buildings were beside the point and the something was a kind of receipt you could hand the family to make all the leaving worth it.
This was the something. It had a title and a client and a nameplate, and all he had to do was say the word he'd been saying his whole life.
"Yes," he said, before any other part of him could get to the microphone. "Yes, obviously, thank you, I won't — you won't regret it."
"I know I won't. That's why it's you." Corinne turned the monitor a few degrees toward him.
"Kickoff's Monday. Get into the file today, know it cold before you meet them.
There's a community session on the calendar in a couple weeks — that's your circus now too. Familiarize yourself with the parcels."
"Absolutely." He was already standing, already glowing, already composing the text to his mom and deciding not to send it until Sunday so he could watch her face. "Thank you, Corinne. Really."
"Go be brilliant. Close the door."
He went back to his desk in a warm gold blur, the rain still coming down the glass, the light doing its criminal thing over the whole city, and he opened the project file, and it was enormous, hundreds of sheets, and he loved that, he loved a big beautiful problem, and he clicked into the site plan to start learning it cold like she said.
The block resolved on his screen. Judah. The cross street. The worn brick row drawn in flat gray survey lines, each parcel outlined and numbered, the whole assemblage Sutro had quietly bought up one storefront at a time.
His eye went to the corner parcel the way your eye goes to your own name in a list.
He knew the corner. He knew the depth of it and the way the morning light came off the wet street into the front windows and made the ugly tile look almost worth looking at.
He knew the hook by the door that was technically for staff.
He knew whose hands were folded in quarters in his coat pocket right now, drawn on a napkin, still a little damp.
The corner parcel, drawn to be erased, with a cheerful little retail box and a fern where the rendering said it would go.
It was Proof.
For a second the survey lines swam, and Albert put the heel of his hand flat on the desk, the way you steady a drawing board, the way you steady anything at all.
There's a community session in a couple weeks — that's your circus now too.
He was the client that moved fast. He was the friendly focus-grouped font. He was the fern.
He'd sat on that stool for two months drawing the man's hands, and the whole time his own firm had been buying the ground out from under him, one storefront at a time.
His phone buzzed. His mom, home already. anak did you eat.
Albert closed the file. Opened it again, like it might resolve into a different block.
The corner was still the corner.