Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“Oh, fuck you, Peter!” Marisa said.

“Fuck you,” I mumbled, already getting a mop from the supply closet. The closet doubled as Buddy’s office; he was sitting on a box of syrup pumps, talking frantically into his cell phone. “ Oui, oui. Merci beaucoup. Pas aujourd’hui, si possible. ” I shut the door behind me.

“Six burgers!” the other girl shouted, even though she was right next to us.

I would have to cook the burgers one by one in a pan on an electric hot plate. I leaned the mop against my side of the counter and bent down to pick the big pieces of glass out of the mess. “Who comes to a coffee shop for burgers?” I said.

“They’re on the menu,” the girl said. She sounded hurt, as though I had insulted her personally.

Marisa tried to get past with a tray full of water glasses. She let out a shriek of frustration. “Get this mop out of here!”

“Just step over it!” I yelled.

“There’s no room for it in here!”

“Are you going to start on those burgers?” the girl asked.

Buddy burst out of the supply closet. He ran up to the counter. “The health inspector is coming back this afternoon for our follow-up. They’re going to let us off the hook if we’ve got our shit together this time. Ice! Hairnets!” He looked down. The vanilla milk shake had started to turn gray as it mixed with the dirt on the floor and the bottoms of our shoes. “What the fuck is this?”

We ignored him. I dumped the glass I was holding into one of the dish carboys and washed my hands. I put the first burger in a pan and laid out six plates with six open buns.

Marisa came back from delivering the waters. “You’re taking up the whole counter!”

“How else am I supposed to do it?”

“Hairnet!” Buddy repeated.

“In a second!”

“Peter,” the other girl said, “you have a phone call.”

I hadn’t even heard it ring. I ran along the line of buns, throwing down tomato slices. “Must be a mistake. Nobody has this number.”

The girl spoke into the phone. The customer she should have been helping let out a dramatic sigh. She held her hand over the mouthpiece and shouted at me, “It’s your mom!”

I grabbed the wireless phone from her and tucked it between my ear and shoulder, still moving along the line. Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. “Mother?” I said.

“Peter.”

Pause.

“When?” I asked.

“This morning.”

“Helen?”

“I called her. She booked a flight.”

“I’ll tell Bonnie and Adele.”

“No. Your father didn’t want them there.”

Pause.

“Okay,” I said.

“When can you come home?”

“I can leave now—”

“Do you have work tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“When is your next day off?”

“Monday.”

“Come then.”

“I will.”

Pause.

“I love you,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “See you Monday.”

Adele had gone on vacation somewhere. The pictures she sent were inscrutable: blue curtains over a train window, a photo someone had taken of her as a blurry wisp on a beach. Wherever she’d gone, the wind was strong and the sand was white. Enclosed with the pictures was a thin glass vial with a plain silver top filled with seawater. She’d attached a white label that said The Mediterranean in her tender cursive.

I told Bonnie that our father was dead and that Mother didn’t want to see her or Adele. We walked down to the Old Port together, looking for a place where you could reach the water. We poured out the vial. It vanished right away, indistinguishable from the St. Lawrence River. Bonnie knelt and refilled the vial. She gave it to me. I had that same Sharpie in my pocket. She stopped me before I could cross out The Mediterranean and write The Atlantic.

“It’s all one ocean,” she said. I passed her the pen and the vial. She wrote COME HOME in big, shaky, childish letters. We even have the same handwriting, I thought, remembering how HELP ME had come out in the photograph.

I sent everything to Adele’s address in Berlin: the cry for help from the back of my head, the vial of the St. Lawrence, two of her younger siblings in stripper wigs. I imagined her, still in some warm, sunny place, slowly pouring out the bottle onto a hot rock. The briny water forms shapes that quiver but retain their surface tension. It spells out a message. COME HOME.

On the bus to Fort Michel that Monday, the driver turned off the overhead lights to let the early-morning passengers sleep. There were no reflections in the windows.

The woman in front of me tilted her seat back as far as it would go, nearly touching my knees. She slept for the first couple of hours with her baby on her chest, her arms locked around it even in her sleep, like a bird’s talons.

The baby started to cry. It was a plaintive sound, like whimpering, searching for something lost. The woman undid a panel on her shirt and slipped out one of her large breasts. She was pale enough to catch the little light from the oncoming traffic. Her wide hips and buttocks squished by the seat armrests, she shifted around, trying to find a comfortable angle. Her nipple brushed the baby’s cheek. Still the baby’s face groped, nosing, a blind mole.

I watched her feed.

There was no funeral. Helen, Mother, and I watched as two men broke through the frost with jackhammers. The backhoe driver got upset that we were standing there in the cold with our red noses dripping. He shouted for us to come back later, after the hole was finished. Helen went over to talk to him. She wore a black pantsuit and a wool coat. Mother wore a white long-sleeved dress under her parka. The skirt trailed in the mud. It could have been a wedding dress. She had pinned a loop of black ribbon to each of our breasts and tucked white chrysanthemum blossoms into Helen’s hair.

The jackhammers vibrated on the frozen ground. It seemed loud and industrial, the cart beeping as it backed up to the grave, machines of all kinds churning; I had always thought of the Fort Michel Cemetery as a solemn, silent place, but every death turned it into a construction site.

Helen came back, her high-heeled boots crunching in the old, thin layer of snow. “They’ll let us stay.” No one refused Helen anything.

When we got home, Mother went straight to the bedroom. The skirt of her dress left a thin trail of dirt on the linoleum and the gray carpet. Helen and I waited by the door without taking our shoes off. The household gods had been moved to the kitchen table.

Mother came out holding a bunch of porcelain picture frames, her hands awkwardly full. She set them down on the table with the gods. She took a moment to arrange them. When she moved away, I saw that most of them were black-and-white pictures of people I had never seen before. The largest one was a family portrait. An old man with small, round glasses sat on a stool in the center. On each side of him was a woman, both women younger than him, each with big, circular curls pinned to her head, each wearing a high-necked cheongsam, each with one hand on his shoulder. Only their faces differed. About a dozen children were lined up in front of them. One girl, in overalls, had my mother’s features, even the same face-length haircut she had now, as an adult.

Here was the family I had invented. Our unknown aunts and uncles. Our grandfather with two wives, who would not have fit into the boxes on a worksheet. Mother added a photo of our father to the table, a recent picture in a cheaper frame than the others. She stepped back to examine her arrangement. Without looking at us, she said, “Come here.”

Helen and I took our time. I untied my boots. Helen unzipped hers. We kept our coats on. We came into the kitchen and stood together before the table of photographs — dozens of unsmiling faces; faint, implacable reflections of ourselves. Mother stepped back.