Page 11 of Signal No. Us

“Yeah.”

Allan shrugged, still sketching, not quite meeting his eyes. “There’s no job listing for ‘town artist’ in Manila. There’s a job for ‘person who’s good with a spreadsheet.’”

“I didn’t ask what the job was,” Robby said. “I asked why you stopped.”

The pencil stilled in Allan’s hand.

He didn’t have a clean answer for that, not one that didn’t involve ten years of trying to be someone easier to explain at reunions, someone with a title instead of a talent that felt too fragile to say out loud.

“I just didn’t want,” he said finally, quieter than he meant to, “everything I worked for to turn out to be for nothing.”

Robby didn’t push. He just nodded once, like he was tucking the answer away someplace safe, and said, “This isn’t for nothing.”

Allan looked up at him, and for a second, one unguarded, dangerous second, the old ache and the new one seemed to be the same shape.

“You’re annoyingly good at this,” Allan said. “The pep talk thing.”

“Comes with the barangay ID, apparently,” Robby said, deadpan, and the moment broke into something easier, something they could both survive.

“Everyone in this barangay has a job that happens to also be emotionally invasive,” Allan said. “Is that in the ordinance somewhere?”

“Maybe,” Robby said. “Ask Kapitan.”

Outside, a rooster crowed, an actual live one this time, off down the street, and Allan laughed before he could stop himself, the sound surprising him with how easy it came.

He looked back down at the sketch in his hand. The mountain. The sun. The storm he hadn’t meant to draw but had drawn anyway.

Ten years, and his hand still remembered exactly how to do this.

He wasn’t sure yet if that was a comfort or a warning.

CHAPTER 4

“You’re going to make me walk the entire municipality, aren’t you?” Allan said, already regretting his choice of slippers.

“Not the whole municipality,” Robby said. “Just our barangay. And half of the next one, since that’s where the health center is.”

“That’s still a lot of walking for someone whose only exercise in Manila was speed-walking to the elevator.”

“Wear the right footwear next time,” Robby said, entirely unsympathetic, and set off down the road at a pace clearly calibrated for someone used to walking everywhere, all the time, without complaint.

They passed the covered court first, where a group of kids was mid-scrimmage, and then the market, louder and more crowded than Allan remembered, awnings patched with a colorful, haphazard mix of tarpaulin from three different election years.

“This is new,” Allan said, pointing at a two-story concrete building that definitely hadn’t existed a decade ago, its ground floor lined with sari-sari stalls, its second-floor marked EVACUATION CENTER, CAPACITY 400 in stenciled letters.

“We put this up after the big typhoon, six years back now,” Robby said. “Before, the school was the only evacuation center. But when a storm dragged on, the kids couldn’t get back to class, a whole week sometimes, because families were still crammed in the classrooms. So we pushed for a separate building, not the school anymore.”

“You say ‘we’ like you personally built it.”

“I didn’t personally build it,” Robby said. “But I wrote the proposal. And I’m the one who followed up, four years, at the municipal hall, until it got approved. So, a little bit of ownership, yes.”

Allan looked at the building with new eyes: underneath the concrete and the stenciled paint, four years of one person’s stubborn, unglamorous persistence.

“That’s actually incredible,” he said.

“Thanks,” Robby said and looked, for a second, almost shy about the compliment, which Allan found unfairly charming for a man who could apparently out-argue an entire municipal budget committee.

They kept walking: past the chapel, freshly repainted; past the old basketball court, its ring finally replaced after what Robby called “years of committee meetings about a single hoop;” past a row of houses that Allan remembered as flood-prone, now raised a full meter off the ground on new concrete stilts.