Chapter Thirty-Four
Five whole lechons stretched across a row of banquette tables draped in white linen, their skins golden-brown and taut as drumskin, garlanded by an amount of tropical flowers that could only be described as aggressive.
Orchids, sampaguita, hibiscus in hot pink and tangerine, heaped between the platters in drifts so thick that the tables beneath had ceased to exist as furniture and become, instead, some sort of floral altar to roast pork.
Somebody had woven jasmine through the serving spoons.
Colin stood in front of the centrepiece pig and did not move.
He’d felt like this twice before in his life.
Once at the Tagaytay viewpoint, when Lakan had driven them up for a day trip and Colin had looked out across the lake at Taal Volcano rising from the water and really understood, for the first time, that the earth was alive underneath him.
Once in the Mall of Asia, standing on the ground floor with three storeys of shopping rising above him in every direction, so vast and gleaming that he’d had to put his hand on a railing and take a breath.
The lechon was doing the same thing to him.
Burnished to a shine and split, their cavities stuffed with lemongrass and spring onion, the air around them heavy with rendered fat and char.
Behind Colin, the ballroom of the Manila Shangri-La churned with de la Vegas.
The cousins circulated in clusters, their voices rising over a live band whose singer was doing something ambitious with a Whitney Houston number.
Children darted between legs. An uncle Colin hadn’t been introduced to was conducting a loud negotiation near the bar about the karaoke rota, a laminated sheet he clutched in one hand like a man defending a land title.
Colin kept his eyes on the pig.
A hand appeared at the edge of his vision and snapped a shard of crackling off the nearest lechon’s flank. The sound was crisp and clean, like a biscuit breaking, and Diwa pressed the piece into Colin’s palm without looking at him, his fingers warm and greasy against Colin’s skin.
Colin had just closed his hand around it when a shadow fell across both of them.
Maki was enormous. Colin had known this from Diwa’s stories. Had deduced it from the depth of his voice that had rattled through Diwa’s mobile. But the physical reality of Kuya Maki at close range was something else entirely. He was taller than Lakan and broader than Rudolpho.
His hand came down on Diwa’s wrist with a crack that made Colin flinch.
“Oy!” Maki’s voice carried the flat boom of a foghorn.
“Diwa! Hindi pa nag-start ang party!” He swatted at Diwa’s hand a second time for emphasis, the way you’d discipline a cat on a kitchen counter, before his gaze swung to Colin and his whole face changed.
He nodded at the crackling in Colin’s fist. “Eat it. Eat it. It’s very fresh. Very good.”
Colin ate it. The crackling shattered between his teeth, the skin giving way to a layer of meat so tender it barely needed chewing. He closed his eyes for a second, because the pig deserved that much respect.
When he opened them, Maki was watching him.
Colin looked down at the last fragment of crackling between his fingers, the sliver he’d saved without thinking about it. He turned to Diwa, who was nursing his wrist with a wounded expression, caught his jaw with his free hand, and pressed the piece to his alpha’s lips.
Diwa’s mouth opened. Colin fed it to him, his thumb brushing the swell of Diwa’s lower lip as the crackling disappeared, and he held Maki’s gaze the entire time.
Maki’s smile started slow and finished wide. He stepped forward, wrapped both arms around Colin, and pulled him against his chest in a hug so tight that Colin’s feet nearly left the floor.
“Good,” Maki said, into the top of Colin’s head. “That’s good. You watch out for him.”
Maki released him and seized them both by the shoulders, placing one enormous hand on each of them and steering them through the ballroom.
Clusters of cousins parted. A child on a collision course with Maki’s shins changed direction without being told.
The crowd thinned as they approached the far end of the room, where a long table sat beneath a canopy of sampaguita garlands and gold bunting, and the gifts behind it were stacked high enough to constitute a structural risk.
Lola Joy sat at the centre of all of it in a red dress so bright it could have stopped traffic on EDSA.
She was tiny, barely five feet, her white hair pinned up with a jewelled comb, and she was holding court over three grandchildren and what looked to be a cardinal as though the ballroom were her living room.
She looked up as Maki brought them to the table. She let out a shriek; high, percussive, and so purely delighted that it cut through the band and the general din of a hundred and fifty de la Vegas.
“Diwa! Diwaaaa!”
Diwa dropped to his knees beside her chair, wrapped both arms around her, and drew her carefully against his chest. She disappeared into him. Her small hands gripped the back of his shirt, and Diwa pressed his face into the top of her head and held on.
When he pulled back, he kept her hands in his and kissed her forehead, both cheeks, the bridge of her nose, and her forehead again, each one landing with an audible smack that she received as her due.
Her palm came up and cupped his jaw, turning his face side to side exactly the way Mutya had done at the family home, and the likeness of the movement was so precise that Colin understood where every woman in this family had learnt the gesture.
Then Diwa turned and reached for him, one hand extended, his face still soft from his grandmother’s hands.
Colin stepped forward. He took Lola Joy’s right hand in both of his, bent at the waist, and pressed the back of her knuckles to his forehead.
He held it there in the mano po gesture that Diwa had taught him in the bedroom at Greenhills. Her fingers were warm and papery against his skin, and when he straightened, she was looking at him with dark, bright eyes that missed absolutely nothing.
“So,” she said. “You’re the one.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you taking care of my baby boy?”
“Yes,” Colin said. “I’m trying to.”
She held his gaze for longer than was comfortable, and then she grinned, showing off the same dimples that Diwa had.
“Good.” She patted his hand before releasing it.
“He’s always been the one I worried about, you know.
The bunso. The youngest.” Her eyes moved to Diwa, who was still on his knees beside her chair, and the corners of her mouth softened.
“Always the one playing hardest because he likes to win and prove himself.” She reached across and smoothed Diwa’s hair back from his forehead. “My reckless little boy.”
Her hand came up and cracked across Diwa’s cheek.
The sound landed like a starter’s pistol. Diwa’s head snapped sideways. His mouth fell open, one hand rising to his face, and Lola Joy seized the front of his shirt before he could retreat.
“You have to smack him every now and then, ha.” She addressed this advice to Colin, her eyes bright with absolute conviction. “To keep him in line. Let him know that it’s not good to stay away from home for too long and be angry with his mother.”
She smacked him again. Diwa didn’t move, understanding that resistance was not an option.
Colin reached across and rubbed Diwa’s reddening cheek with his thumb. Diwa’s eyes closed under the touch, his jaw turning into Colin’s palm, and Lola Joy let out a laugh so delighted that the cardinal beside her looked up from his wine.
Colin kissed Diwa’s temple, left him at his grandmother’s feet where he belonged, and let himself be pulled away.
Mutya had taken ownership of his elbow. She steered him through the ballroom and into a circle of cousins who closed around him with the inevitability of a tide coming in.
Their names arrived in a torrent. Pedro, who was Lakan’s eldest. Peter, who was Tito Bong’s second son and not to be confused with Pedro.
Pietro, who was someone’s husband and Italian and apparently the source of ongoing family debate about whether he counted as another de la Vega Pedro.
Kuya Len, whose handshake nearly dislocated Colin’s shoulder.
Baby, who was forty-six. Goldy, who pressed a plate of lumpia into Colin’s hands before he’d finished saying hello.
Pinky, who asked him three questions about Stephen in under a minute and then vanished to relay the answers to a cluster of aunties by the dessert table.
Colin ate the lumpia, shook hands, and submitted to being steered from group to group by whichever cousin had most recently claimed his arm.
He answered the same questions — where in London did he live, how long had he been with Diwa, how many children did he have — patiently, because every single one of them genuinely wanted to get to know him.
Then a man appeared at his side with a Tom Collins in each hand and a moustache so immaculate that Colin had to step back to properly admire it.
It was thick and dark, waxed to two gleaming points that extended a full centimetre past the corners of his mouth.
Colin had seen less care go into the restoration of listed buildings. The man beneath it was beaming.
“Tito Bong,” he said, handing Colin a glass. “Diwa’s favourite uncle.”
Colin took the drink, because refusing anything from anyone in this family had long since ceased to be an option.
From across the ballroom, Diwa caught his eye. He was still at Lola Joy’s side with one hand on the back of her chair, his cheek still faintly pink. He raised his eyebrows, asking: you all right? And Colin lifted his glass in reply. A definitive yes.
He’d never been further from home. The noise pressed in from every direction.
Tagalog he couldn’t follow layered over the sound of the band, the laughter, and Tito Bong’s detailed rundown of his karaoke set list. Somewhere behind him a child shrieked, and a tray of something crashed to the ground.
His alpha was fifty feet away on the other side of a room full of strangers whose names he was still learning.
Colin took a sip of his drink and let Tito Bong talk. He had never felt more safely ensconced in noise.
Three Tom Collinses in, and Colin became fairly confident that he’d cracked Tagalog.
Not fluently, but the words had stopped being a wall of sound and started arranging themselves into shapes he could nearly follow, the way a radio station comes in clearer the longer you drive towards the source of the signal.
Pinky was telling him something about her daughter’s school, or possibly her daughter’s boyfriend, or possibly her daughter’s boyfriend’s school, and Colin was nodding at what he was certain were the right moments, because Pinky kept patting his arm and refilling his glass from a pitcher that seemed to replenish itself endlessly.
He’d eaten his way through two plates of lumpia, a bowl of pancit that Goldy had pressed on him with the words “you’re too thin”, which, given that Diwa had spent six months fattening him up, was either a difference in cultural baselines or a challenge to his alpha’s authority, and something purple and coconutty that he hadn’t caught the name of but intended to have again.
His shirt was damp at the collar. The band had moved on from Whitney Houston to something with a faster tempo that was making the dance floor dangerous.
A hand closed around his elbow. One of the cousins was talking at him in rapid Taglish, pulling him sideways through the crowd with the determination of a border collie herding a stray sheep, and Colin went with it because his legs were doing what they were told and the Tom Collins had made everything seem like a reasonable idea.
The stage was closer than he’d realised. Tito Bong stood at its centre with a microphone in one hand and his laminated rota in the other, his moustache gleaming under the lights. He was conducting the karaoke changeover with the authority of a man born to the task.
Maria Lucia appeared at Colin’s other elbow. Her hand settled lightly on his arm, steering him back the way he’d come. “Colin, you don’t have to. You’ve had a long evening, and the flight, your throat must be —”
“I’m fine.”
Diwa materialised from somewhere in the crowd, his hand finding Colin’s shoulder, his body angling between Colin and the stage as though shielding him from incoming fire. “You don’t have to do this. Nobody’s going to make you do karaoke, Colin. I’ll handle it.”
Colin looked at his alpha, who was clearly already composing a diplomatic extraction speech in his head, and then at the stage, where Tito Bong was beckoning with the microphone, game-show-host style.
“I’ll have a go,” Colin said. “Why not.”
Colin took the steps up to the stage before he could think himself out of it, his legs still cooperating, the moment still feeling right.
Tito Bong pressed the song book into his hands; a battered binder, thick as a phone book.
Its pages were sticky with fingerprints and spilled San Miguel beer.
Diwa was beside him, one hand on the small of his back, flipping pages and pointing out the number pad on the MagicSing microphone where Colin needed to punch in the four-digit code for the song he wanted.
Colin found his song. He keyed in the numbers with his thumb and handed the book back to Tito Bong.
The opening bars came through the speakers. Colin’s mouth pulled sideways into a grin he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried, and he caught Diwa’s eye across the stage. Diwa was beaming at him as Colin wrapped both hands around the microphone and waited for his cue.