I called my grandmother for the fifth time at eleven forty-one that night, and nobody answered.
I sat on my bed in Room 212 with the phone against my ear and listened to it ring.
Sol was asleep across the room, curled around her notebook like a cat.
Kalasag lay on my pillow with his tail over his nose.
The aircon rattled.
I counted fourteen rings, and then the line clicked and a mechanical voice said, “The number you have dialed is not answering.”
I put the phone down on the blanket.
Some voices answer on the fifth try, the Counselor had said.
I’d believed her.
I had stayed awake all week, rehearsing what I would say, with a lump in my throat.
Now I stared at the dark screen, and the lump grew heavy and cold, and I knew that I wouldn’t sleep.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Okay. That’s okay.”
Kalasag lifted his head.
He studied me with his yellow eyes for a long moment.
Then he stood, stretched, hopped down from the bed, and padded to the door.
He looked back at me over his shoulder and waited.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer.
He only waited.
I put on my cardigan and followed him out.
* * *
The campus was empty at midnight, and strangely beautiful.
The lamp posts glowed in long amber pools.
The quadrangle lay dark and silent, with the Acacias standing like sleeping giants.
A faint wind stirred the leaves.
I walked behind the cat across the grass with my hands tucked into my sleeves, past the fountain, past the Main Building, around the corner of the old gymnasium.
He led me to the canteen.
I’d expected it to be closed.
During the day it was loud and crowded, with plastic chairs and steam and the clatter of trays.
Now its metal shutters were rolled down to the knee.
The windows were dark.
A single strip of warm yellow light spilled out from under the side door, and a smell drifted through the crack that made my stomach clench.
Garlic.
Butter.
Something sweet, caramelized, slow-cooked, and the unmistakable scent of rice.
A small wooden sign hung from a nail on the door.
It was hand-lettered in red paint, in the same careful capitals as the menu.
*NIGHT KITCHEN.
Open after midnight.
Order by what you miss.*
I read it twice.
Kalasag scratched the door with one paw.
* * *
It opened before I could knock.
Mang Tonyo stood in the doorway in his stained white apron, with a dish towel over one shoulder and his iron ladle in his hand.
The hairnet had been replaced with a faded cap.
His face looked tired and kind in the yellow light, and he smiled at me as if he’d been expecting a visitor.
“Hija,” he said.
“I thought the cat would bring you.”
“Mang Tonyo. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“Nobody means to.” He stepped aside.
“Come in. Sit anywhere. Lights are low because the dishes like it that way.”
I stepped across the threshold and stopped.
The canteen had changed.
The long tables were still there, and the plastic chairs.
But the fluorescent tubes had been switched off, and in their place a hundred small candles burned in glass jars along the walls and counters.
Their light was soft and golden and moved with a gentle flicker.
The air felt warm and thick.
A radio hummed in the corner, playing an old Visayan lullaby so quietly that it was almost a memory of one.
Perhaps a dozen people sat scattered around the room, each alone at a table.
I recognized some of them.
Sean sat near the window with a bowl of champorado in front of him and his sash folded neatly on the chair beside his.
He was staring at the chocolate rice with an expression of deep, peaceful sadness.
At another table, Dom sat in front of five plates, shoveling food into his mouth with the dedication of a man in a competition.
A pair of upperclassmen I didn’t know shared a bowl of arroz caldo.
A girl with purple hair sat in the corner with a plate of what looked like suman, crying very quietly.
Nobody looked up.
Nobody spoke.
The whole room hummed with a hush as gentle as a prayer.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
“Everyone who’s paid a Footnote comes here sooner or later,” said Mang Tonyo, closing the door behind me.
“Not for the food. For the taste.”
“The taste?”
“A memory leaves the head fast. The mouth is slower. If you lose a story, sometimes you keep the flavor. I cook the flavors back.”
I stared at him.
“Order by what you miss,” he said.
“Tell me, hija. What is it?”
* * *
I didn’t need to think.
“Dried mango,” I said.
He nodded slowly, as though I’d confirmed something he already knew.
“Sit,” he said.
“Wait.”
I took a chair at an empty table by the wall.
Kalasag jumped onto the seat across from me and sat primly, as if he were my escort at a dinner.
I watched Mang Tonyo move behind the counter.
He opened a drawer, took out a small paper packet, and tore it open.
He laid several thin strips of fruit on a white plate.
They looked pale gold and slightly wrinkled.
He added a pinch of something from a jar, a spoonful of a dark syrup, and a thin curl of orange peel.
He carried it to my table with both hands.
“Eat slowly,” he said.
“Let it be what it is.”
I picked up a piece.
It was soft and chewy, a little tart at the edges, with a deep honeyed sweetness underneath.
It tasted of sun, and old paper, and the inside of a bag that had been carried in a suitcase for six hundred kilometers.
A faint trace of salt lingered at the end.
I hadn’t known I could cry so quickly.
Lola Pacita had packed it herself, the morning I left.
She’d tucked it into the side pocket of my bag, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, and pressed my hand over it.
She hadn’t said anything.
I had found it on the bus, somewhere along the long road, and eaten it in three bites.
I’d cried then, too.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“It’s all right,” said Mang Tonyo, very softly.
“It’s the right place for it.”
I nodded, and kept eating, and let it be what it was.
* * *
I saw him when I looked up.
He sat at the very back, in the corner farthest from the door, half hidden in shadow.
A gray hoodie.
A bent head.
A plate in front of him that I recognized from across the room.
Garlic rice, a fried egg, and strips of glossy brown tapa, steaming gently in the candlelight.
Aris.
He hadn’t noticed me.
He sat with his shoulders hunched and his hands flat on either side of the plate, as if bracing for a storm.
For a long time he only looked at the food.
Then he lifted his fork, cut a piece of tapa, and put it in his mouth.
His eyes closed.
I watched his face change.
It was subtle and slow, like a tide going out.
The lines around his mouth softened.
His brow smoothed.
His whole body seemed to loosen, a notch at a time, until he looked young and open and defenseless.
A tear ran down his cheek and fell onto the plate.
He didn’t wipe it.
He took another bite.
Then another.
He ate with great care, chewing each mouthful slowly, with his eyes shut, and the tears came and fell without any sound.
I felt my chest ache.
I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried.
* * *
The door banged open.
“Mang Tonyo!” Dom’s voice boomed from across the room, though he’d been sitting twenty feet away.
He had jumped to his feet with a spoon in his fist and a smear of sauce on his chin.
He’d just seen the corner table, and his whole face had gone slack with alarm.
“Mang Tonyo, Senior’s crying.”
“Dominic,” Sean said, from the window.
“Sit down.”
“But he’s crying! Look! That’s Senior! Senior doesn’t cry! He broke a rib last month and ate a sandwich!”
“Dom.”
“Is it the tapa? Is it poisoned?” He turned wildly.
“Mang Tonyo, did someone poison the tapa?”
Mang Tonyo set down his ladle, and crossed the room, and laid one broad hand on Dom’s shoulder. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
The hush in the canteen seemed to deepen.
“Hijo,” he said quietly.
“Sit.”
“But…”
“Forty years of orders, hijo.” The old cook’s voice was low and slow and entirely without hurry.
His eyes rested on the far corner, where a boy in a gray hoodie bent over his plate.
“His has never changed.”
Dom opened his mouth.
He closed it.
Something in his face shifted, and I watched the confusion drain out of it, leaving a look of quiet, puzzled respect.
He sat down.
He picked up his spoon.
And for the first time in my acquaintance with him, he did not say another word.
* * *
When I looked back at the corner, Aris was staring at me.
His eyes were red.
His face was wet.
The candlelight lay across his cheekbones, and his expression held something I hadn’t seen before, a raw, bare, stripped look, like a person caught on a roof in the rain.
I didn’t look away.
I picked up my plate of dried mango and walked across the room.
He watched me come, and he didn’t say anything.
I sat down across from him.
Kalasag hopped up onto the bench beside me and curled into a ball.
I set the plate of mango on the table between us, and for a while we sat in silence, listening to the lullaby on the radio.
“You followed me,” he said at last.
His voice was rough.
“The cat followed you. I followed the cat.”
“That sounds worse.”
“It’s honest.”
He huffed, a small broken sound, nearly a laugh.
He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and looked down at his plate.
“I don’t know why it does this,” he said.
“The tapa?”
“I eat it every morning. I eat it every night I can. It’s good, and it does something to me. It makes me feel as though somebody’s just walked into the room.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye.
“That’s the worst of it. I have no idea. There’s a kitchen, and a window, and somebody’s back. And then it’s gone. I can taste it. I can’t see it.”
“The taste stays,” I said.
“What?”
“Mang Tonyo says the taste stays after the story goes.”
Aris stared at me.
“That’s a very kind thing to say,” he said slowly.
“I’m saying it because I believe it.” I pushed the plate of dried mango toward him.
“Here. Try this. It’s mine, and I’m sharing it.”
He took a piece.
He chewed it slowly, with his eyes on my face, and I watched him taste the sun and the old paper and the six hundred kilometers.
Something flickered in his eyes.
Not a memory, exactly.
A kind of understanding, as if one door had cracked open in a house he’d thought was empty.
“Your grandmother,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t answer.”
I blinked.
“How do you know?”
“You have a particular look.” He swallowed.
“I’ve worn it myself.”
I couldn’t answer.
My throat had closed.
He reached across the table, picked up his fork, speared the last strip of tapa on his plate, and held it out to me over the candle.
“Try it,” he said.
I looked at the glossy brown meat.
I looked at his face, open and unguarded and wet.
I ate it.
It was sweet, with a dark crisp edge, and a heavy note of garlic, and a pinch of black pepper that lingered on the tongue like a whisper.
A warm gold light seemed to open somewhere in my chest.
I saw nothing.
I didn’t hear a name or a song.
But I felt, so clearly that my eyes filled all over again, the shape of a person standing at a stove with her back turned, humming to herself, glad of the morning.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Aris closed his eyes.
“Yes,” he said softly.
“That’s the one.”