Chapter 8
Foundation
Albert had smiled at the world his entire life, and it turned out that when the smile finally broke, nobody at the office even noticed, which told him something about the office he wasn't ready to know.
He went to work. That was the horror of it — that the days just kept coming and you were expected to be in them.
He rode the N downtown and did not look at the corner of Judah when he passed it, kept his eyes on his phone the way everyone kept their eyes on their phone, and told himself it was because he had emails and not because he could not bear to see whether the lights were on.
He sat at his desk under the good east light he used to love and worked on the Sutro package, because Corinne asked how the session prep was coming and he heard himself say great, on track, the reflex firing even now, even gutted, great, on track, the two most fluent words in his whole vocabulary.
The community session was almost on him now; the ten days the flyer had promised were nearly gone.
He was going to stand in the basement of the Sunset rec center and be the neighborhood kid, the friendly face, and tell a room full of people — his people, the ones who'd raised him two miles from that corner — that the glass box coming for their block was a partnership.
And somewhere in the second or third row, if he came, would be a gray-eyed man in a clean apron who now believed, with evidence, that Albert had spent two months learning the shape of his hands so the demolition would go down easier.
Albert put his head down on his desk, once, for exactly thirty seconds, in the good light. Then he sat up and answered Corinne's email. Great. On track.
The flyers stayed up all week. He passed one taped to the pole at his own bus stop, his name in the fine print — A.
Ocampo — rain-warped now, and a part of him he didn't like wondered how many people on that block had read it and known the name and thought that's the Ocampo boy, from out here, isn't that something — the neighborhood kid, delivering the neighborhood to the wolves with a good smile.
Denny stopped by his desk on Tuesday and said Albert seemed off, was he getting sick, and Albert said maybe, a little, and Denny said take zinc, and that was the entire depth of concern the office had to offer.
And Albert understood, suddenly and completely, why he'd spent four months driving out to the fog.
Nobody here would ever make him a bad coffee because they'd noticed he was running on nothing.
Nobody here noticed anything. That was the deal.
That was the trade he'd signed at twenty-two and been calling a career ever since.
He didn't text Dave. He wanted to — he drafted forty of them, forty versions of I'm sorry, please, it was real, let me explain, I have a plan — and deleted every one, because he finally understood, four days too late, that another well-chosen paragraph was the last thing on earth that would reach a man like Dave.
Dave had heard ten thousand well-chosen paragraphs across ten thousand tables.
Words were Albert's whole toolkit and words were worthless here.
Dave didn't need to be told anything. He needed to be shown, and Albert had nothing to show him yet, and so he shut up, which was, he was aware, possibly the first genuinely respectful thing he'd done in the whole disaster.
Marcus texted Wednesday. hey you ok? you went quiet. also did u ever get a chance to look at my site lol no worries if not.
Albert looked at it for a long time. Then, for the first time in the recorded history of their acquaintance, he typed No, and put the phone in a drawer, and felt almost nothing, which was its own small dark landmark.
Once, Friday night, he drove out to the Sunset anyway.
He didn't plan it; he just ended up on the Great Highway with the fog coming in off the black water, and he parked across from the shop and sat in the dark car and looked at it.
The lights were off — it was late, Dave would be upstairs asleep in the spare room with the one chair and the napkin on the windowsill — and Albert looked at the black windows of the warmest room of his whole life and did not get out of the car.
He didn't get to walk in there anymore. He hadn't earned it back, and he wasn't going to try to earn it with his face at the glass at midnight, doing the sad eyes, managing Dave's guilt into opening the door.
If he ever came back to that shop, he was going to come back with something in his hands.
He drove home.
***
Sunday came the way Sundays came, non-negotiable, and Albert drove down to Daly City because you did not tell Lola you weren't coming to Sunday, not for a broken heart, not for a broken leg, not for anything short of your own funeral, and possibly not even then.
The house was the house — too warm, too loud, shoes in a heap by the door, the TV going in one room and a cousin's baby crying in another and his mother and two titas in the kitchen conducting the loud joyful argument that was how the women in his family said I love you.
The smell of it hit him in the doorway like a hand on the chest: garlic and vinegar and rice and something frying, adobo and pancit and a whole counter of it, the food of a family that had learned to say the unsayable things in the only safe language, which was here, eat, I made too much on purpose.
He did the rounds, because you did the rounds — hugged the titas, admired the baby, got interrogated by an uncle about whether he was seeing anyone (he laughed, he deflected, he felt the laugh come out of him like a coin out of a machine), let a cousin walk him through an entire soccer highlight on a cracked phone and reacted at all the right moments.
He was good at this. He'd been good at this since he was six, the easy one, the one who made the gatherings go.
And tonight he watched himself do it from a small distance — the performance running clean and smooth while the actual Albert stood somewhere behind his own eyes with a hole in his chest the exact dimensions of a gray-eyed man — and he thought: this is the skill.
This exact skill, the one everybody praises.
It's the thing that just cost me my whole life.
"Anak!" His mother, wiping her hands, already reaching up to hold his face, already frowning. "You're thin. You're thinner. What's wrong."
"Nothing, Ma. Work's just busy."
"Busy." She said it the way Dave said I make rye, a word laid over a thing to cover it, and for one second Albert missed Dave so hard he had to look at the floor. "Eat. Go say hi to your lola, she's asking. She's in a mood. The flour thing."
Lola Fely was at her spot at the head of the table, small and upright and eighty years of iron, holding court over a plate she wasn't eating, and when she saw Albert her whole face changed and then, a half-second later, changed again, because Lola had raised five children and buried a husband and could read a grandchild's face across a crowded room from forty feet.
"Apo." She patted the chair beside her. Not a question.
He sat. She looked at him. She did not ask what was wrong; she was better at this than that.
She picked up a piece of bread off her plate — pale, dense, wrong — and held it up between two fingers with an expression of profound betrayal. "You know what this is?"
"Pandesal?"
"This is not pandesal. This is an apology for pandesal.
" She dropped it. "I can't get good flour.
And the bakery on Mission that used to do it right, the Filipino one, they closed, the landlord — always the landlord.
So now nobody in this whole city makes it right and I'm eighty years old eating sad bread on a Sunday.
" She fixed him with a look. "You. You know bread now.
Don't think I don't hear things. Your mother says you've been going to a bakery every morning for months.
A sourdough place, out in the fog. Every morning, months.
" The old eyes were very sharp. "Nobody drives to the fog every morning for months for bread, apo. What's his name."
Albert opened his mouth to deflect and found, to his complete horror, that he was crying.
***
She took him out to the back steps, away from the noise, with two cups of the good coffee she kept hidden from the titas, and let him fall apart on the concrete in the cold Daly City evening with the fog rolling in off the same ocean, two towns north, that sat every night on Dave's windows.
He told her all of it. He hadn't meant to; it came out of him the way things came out of him around this woman, who had a way of being silent that made silence unbearable.
Dave. The corner. The project with his own name on it.
The six weeks he'd known and hadn't said.
The night he'd finally decided to tell the truth and had it blow the whole beautiful thing to pieces in a warm shop at dawn.
"He thinks I ran a con on him," Albert said.
"He thinks the whole thing was — that I was softening him up.
And the worst part, Lola, the worst part is I can see why.
Because I did the thing. I knew, and I managed it, I decided what he could handle, I kept it smooth, I kept everybody's morning nice — I did exactly what I always do, and this time it looked like a con, but it wasn't a con, it was just — me.
Being me. Keeping the peace. And it cost me the one—" His voice broke.
"It cost me the one person who ever wanted me for nothing. "
Lola let him get to the end of it. Then she was quiet a while, sipping her coffee, looking out at the fog.