Page 28 of Signal No. Us

His mother was on the back steps a few days later, shelling mung beans into a chipped basin, radio murmuring an old OPM ballad from the kitchen counter behind her. He’d come out to escape the BEBES’ latest round of wedding logistics warfare, someone had strong opinions about centerpiece flowers, and the debate had gotten, unnecessarily, personal.

“Tara dito,” Cora said, without looking up, which was as close to an invitation as she usually offered.

He sat. Took a handful of beans without being asked, because some habits from childhood never fully left the body.

They worked in silence for a while, the radio filling the space neither of them seemed inclined to fill themselves.

“You can spill the beans, you know,” Cora said eventually, “if you’ve got something on your mind. Figuratively, of course.”

“I’m not⁠—”

“Allan Joseph Talan Reyes. Talk.”

He exhaled. “Just everything behind me. My whole life. I keep thinking, if I’d been braver back then, if I hadn’t run, if I hadn’t hidden behind spreadsheets and HR trainings. Maybe I would’ve figured out who I really am sooner.”

Cora shelled another pod, taking her time, before she answered.

“Did you know I used to draw too?”

Allan blinked. “You never told me that.”

“There was never a reason to,” she said. “When I was young, I wanted to be an artist too, live in Manila, splash color over everything. Then I had you and Ver, and I chose to become a teacher, because the salary was steady, and steady is what you need when there are two children who need to eat every day.”

“Ma—”

“I’m not saying this out of regret, or so you’ll pity me,” she said, sharp but not unkind, the old teacher’s instinct to cut off a wrong answer before it went further. “I’m saying this because I want you to understand. My job was to make sure you had food, shoes, fare for the jeepney. It was never my job to starve while martyring myself for art. I chose that, and I’ve never regretted it.”

“But—”

“There’s no ‘but,’” Cora said, flat. A beat. “There were nights, yes. I wondered.” She didn’t finish that thought out loud—some things, apparently, still don’t get said, even now. “But you. Ver. I won’t trade the two of you for anything. Bahala na, sabi ko noon. Good enough for me.”

She set down the basin, finally looking at him directly, the same assessing look she used to give a struggling student right before she told them exactly what they needed to hear, whether they wanted it or not.

“You know, when you were small,” she said, “I never asked you to be perfect. All I asked was that you be alive. Alive. Safe. That was always my only real standard.”

“But you always said⁠—”

“‘Better than most,’ yes—I know, I said that. Because it's true. But I never once said, ‘you have to be successful for me to love you.’ Iba yun.” She reached over, and, with the same brisk practicality she used for everything, tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear like he was still nine years old. “You’re the one who put that standard on yourself, anak. Not me.”

Something in Allan’s chest cracked open, slow and total, the grief of realizing you’d spent a decade punishing yourself for a rule nobody but you had actually written.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I did tell you,” Cora said. “In the way I knew how. But sometimes showing isn’t enough. You need to hear it plainly, without dressing it up.” She shrugged, a small, rare softness in it. “So I’m saying it now, in the plainest words I have. Maybe that’s the only language that actually reaches you, anak, not all those English certificates you keep pressed against your chest instead.”

Allan laughed, wet and unsteady. “That’s oddly specific.”

“I know I’m right,” Cora said, completely unfazed, and went back to her mung beans like she hadn’t just rearranged the entire architecture of his self-worth in four sentences.

“One question,” Allan said, after a while, testing something he’d wondered about since the folder of old photographs first came out. “If you had the chance now, not back then, would you change it? Would you stop being a teacher and draw instead?”

Cora considered this with real seriousness, not the brisk dismissal Allan half-expected.

“No,” she said finally. “Because choosing that back then didn’t mean I gave up on myself. I found out there’s art in teaching too. How to explain a hard lesson without hurting the child. How to shape a mind without breaking its trust. My canvas was just different. Not paint. Children.”

“That’s a very poetic way to look at thirty years of grading exams.”

“Not everything has to be suffering to count as art,” she said. Then, almost to herself, still shelling beans: “I think that’s your mistake. You think if it isn’t hard, it isn’t real.” She glanced up at him, briefly, back to the beans just as fast. “You’re happy when you’re painting. I’ve seen your face. Don’t argue with me about it.”