Page 81 of Wham Line
From upstairs came the sound of the front door, and then the familiar timbre of Bobby’s voice, although the words were indistinct.
“I’d better go,” I said.
“Give Bobby my love,” Indira said.“And let us know if he needs anything.”
“Will do.”
“We’d like to come to the service if that’d be okay.”
“I think that would mean a lot to him.I’ll let you know once they have it all arranged.”
Pocketing the phone, I trotted up the spiral staircase.
Bobby was crouched next to a cardboard box in the living room.His dad was draping a red cloth across the small table I’d noticed the night before.Mr.Mai nodded at me.Bobby glanced up, smiled, and said, “Morning, babe.”
“Morning.”I joined him next to the box and scritched lightly at the back of his neck.“Where have you guys been?”
“Storage unit,” Bobby said.He lifted out a frame and displayed it for me.It held a faded photo, with the saturated colors of another era.The woman in it was young and slender with a bob of black hair and sensible bangs.Her expression was serious, but she looked happy.And even in the slightly yellow cast to the photo’s colors, her eyes were an unmistakable burnt bronze.
A matching pair was looking up at me.
“It’s for the ancestral altar,” Bobby said.“Although Eric threw a fit, so we’re splitting the difference and calling it a memory table.”
For the second time that day, my throat was tight.“That’s a nice picture.”
He looked at it as though seeing it for the first time.His thumb rubbed the corner of the frame.
Then his dad held out a hand, and Bobby passed him the picture and went back to rummaging in the box.
I was lowering myself to the floor to help him when my phone buzzed with a notification that my three (count them: three) breakfast bowls had been delivered.Along with approximately an oil tanker’s worth of coffee.Which I would now have to carry in from the porch in front of Bobby’s dad.
I only groaned a little.
“Everything okay?”Bobby asked.
“Peachy.”
When I came back from the porch with the bags loaded with food, Bobby got that huge, goofy grin again.He must have seen something on my face, though, because he ducked his head and got very busy looking inside that box again.
“Mr.Mai,” I said, “I got us breakfast.”
Honest to God: Bobby broke up laughing.It only lasted for a second, and then he burrowed even deeper inside that box.
“Thank you,” Mr.Mai said.
“We’re going to keep working, babe,” Bobby said; he was still rummaging around, finding excuses not to look at me, but I could hear the edge of laughter in his voice.“You go ahead without us.”
And that was how I ended up eating my breakfast bowl on the couch.(For the record, I went half-and-half with the Ham-ster and the Bacon Breakfast or whatever it was called.) I drank coffee.I checkedCrime Catson my phone.(There was one about a Siamese who had concocted apurrfectplan to sleep inside a box in the sun, and it was honestly so heartwarming that I forgot about my plans for revenge on Bobby Mai.) I moved on to an exposé about cats sitting in things that weren’t boxes.One was a kitten in a mug—God, it was so cute I almost died.
Bobby and his dad worked silently while I ate.Their interactions were minimal: they handed things back and forth, held things up for inspection, moved around each other without needing to say anything.The memory table was slowly coming together.On it, now, there was the red cloth, and the framed photo of a young Mrs.Mai, and an incense burner.A vase held lilies and chrysanthemums, and Bobby was unpacking plastic containers of the lotus flowers I’d finally managed to track down.
“Dash found these,” Bobby said to his dad as he set the first one on the table.
Mr.Mai said, “Thank you, Dash.”
And then the two of them went back to their silent work together.As Bobby started rooting around inside the box again, his dad stepped out of the room.Bobby pulled a small wooden painting of a dragon out of the box and smiled as he showed it to me.“She did this in eighth grade.”
“That’s amazing you still have it.”
