Page 89 of Bad Words

“City doesn’t exist in a world of pure, untainted ideas.” Her voice sharpened. “Like every other publication, it exists in the real world, which includes overhead costs and infinite online competition and a dozen other high-minded journals that are all eating into the same tiny demographic that’ll pay for the kind of writing you’re describing.” Hayden closed her laptop and rose to her feet, her eyes never leaving mine, and I had the sense of our arrival at the center of something. “Look around, Selina. You’re sitting in the most expensive city in the country, in a legacy office that’s just dying to be rented out to a tech company with millions of dollars of seed funding pouring out its ears. Do you want City to stay in business? Then you need to evolve.”

“But I thought that in December, everything was—”

“What you thought isn’t my problem.” Hayden shouldered her bag and went for the door. “Thanks for your input, but I wasn’t asking for a debate. I was breaking the news. I’ll send you the details by email.”

Chapter NineteenParker

Like every other house on our block, my mother’s place was a small, neat cube. The Walker house to our left was robin’s-egg blue, and the Vargas house to the right was the pale yellow of vanilla ice cream; ours was mint green. Side by side they looked like complementary paint chips. Duffel bag on my shoulder, I climbed our front steps from street level to the second floor, where our door was set back from the road, in the shadow of a terrace dripping with wisteria.

I hesitated on the square of concrete porch, looking at my phone. When I’d landed at SFO, my screen had lit up with delayed texts from the flight. A dozen had arrived from the Bay Area group chat, several from my siblings, forty from the Chan Pan Support Group, four from Arthur, and one—my eyes had fixed on it immediately, as though everything else were noise—from Selina.

Would it break our truce, said the message preview, if I came to your book launch?

What did this mean? We hadn’t spoken in over a week. I’d spent the time trying to parse my feelings about New Year’s, getting nowhere. Why was she asking about breaking the truce? Was this some threat for vicious articles to come? Did negative reviews of book launches exist?

Or was she—ridiculous, I thought, completely stupid—was she asking me to invite her?

I slipped my phone into my pocket and rang the bell. The sunset turned the roofs to black paper cutouts, and down the hall, the kitchen lights glowed. The faint strains of folk music probed through the door, joined by hurried footsteps, then the flip of the lock.

My mom threw open the door and exclaimed, “Pijay!” The rush of air, and her full-body tackle of an embrace, smelled so distinctly like my childhood—toasted bread, frying garlic, my mom’s lavender lotion, the air freshener with the blue bottle—that suddenly I was remembering the rest, too. The scuffed Adidas I’d worn to pieces through high school, and the family desktop computer in our living room where I’d worked on my unreadable preteen writing projects, but secretly, in the middle of the night, because during the daytime Christi and Justin monopolized it to use MySpace. When I opened my eyes and drew back from my mother, looking down at the deep wrinkles in her beaming face, it was like being struck in the face with my adulthood.

“Come in, come in!” she said.

“Thanks.” I toed off my shoes in the hall. “Wow, it’s so clean.”

“Had to get ready for your visit! How was the flight?”

“Pretty good. I wrote for a while.” I followed my mother into the kitchen, set my duffel bag against the wall, and sat down at the narrow table across from the oven. “Feels sort of liberating to get out of New York.”

“Is it the book release? Or what’s been happening online?”

“Not the book. The book’s okay.” I watched her unload the last few wineglasses from the dishwasher. “Have you been following the stuff online?”

“Well, not all the time. Puts my blood pressure up. I just want to sit some of these people down and set them straight. And that woman, egging them all on.” She kneed the dishwasher shut, looking much more like an MMA fighter finishing off an opponent than you’d really expect from a woman who was sixty-six years old and five foot zero. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

“Yeah, I—I don’t know. I was in a weird spot over the holidays.”

“Well, you’re here, now. You don’t have to think about any of that. Here, you must be hungry.” My mom opened a cabinet, climbed onto her stepstool, and took down enough of my favorite snacks to last a year, Oreos and polvorón and dried mango strips and tortilla chips with a jar of green salsa.

I laughed. “Mom, I’m only here for three days.”

“You can take it back with you!” She spread the bounty on the table. “Here, eat, eat.”

“Thanks. You’re the best. How’s the hotel been?”

She sat opposite me. “Oh, you know the holidays. Booked solid. Third-party reservation problems, guests destroying the place…”

As she described a couple who’d wrecked their room and blamed it on the staff of the Harbor Inn, I watched her silver-lacquered nails drum against the plastic tablecloth and felt my contentment fade. Four years ago, I’d assumed that if I paid off this house, she’d retire early and never waste another second of her life worrying about hotel guests who vomited on their bathroom floors. But my mother sent part of every paycheck back to the Philippines for my grandfather, to the care facility where Lolo had lived since a pair of minor strokes, and as a fixture at the local Catholic church, she was generous to a fault, always contributing to funds for new immigrant families or buying baby clothes for single mothers.

Trying to find a more cheerful subject, I asked, “Have you seen Kevin since he got back?”

She sighed. “I haven’t. Didn’t he tell you? He lost his job.”

“No. Seriously? Is he okay?”

“I don’t think so. Hard to tell. You know Kevy. He mopes, he lashes out.”

“That’s awful,” I muttered. “I really thought this one would work out.” After San Francisco State, Kevin had spent most of his twenties in sales positions, getting bumped from company to company around the city. Two years ago, he’d sunk his meager savings into a data science boot camp, and a few months ago he’d finally gotten his first job as an analyst at a security firm.