Emmanuel squeezes my hand in a rare show of affection.
I look at my team.
My summer flashes through my head. Breaking up with Mike. Working… all the fucking time. My mom. The small box of my apartment, recently aired out of old weed smell. I catch a glimpse of a tattooed forearm across the yard.No, Lina. Everyone is right. I need to get out of here. Out of Brooklyn.
“Fine,” I concede.
Cheers from around the yard. I glance around at Oliver’s apparently very nosy family members. Someone starts playing the guitar?
“Don’t mind them,” Oliver says, chuckling.
A flash of perfect teeth, a smile, from someone who stands far taller than his relatives.
I find that I don’t mind them at all.
TWO
Dominic
I stepover my daughter’s limp body lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.
“I’m dead,” she declares, eyes closed.
I grab some soy sauce from the far cabinet, wishing we didn’t see that dead rat on the way home from school yesterday. Now marks the fifteenth hour of obsession over it. I step over her again on the way back to the garlic rice cooking on the stove. “If you stood up and helped me, we would be able to eat faster.”
“But I’m dead.”
I use my foot to gently shift her corpse a few inches over towards the utensils drawer. “What if you were a zombie?” I try. “You’d be dead, but you could also set the table.”
“Zombies don’t eat on the table.” She reaches out and grabs my foot, uses her arms to pull herself towards me, then?—
“F—ouch, Frankie, fu—” I inhale slowly, rubbing at the teeth marks embedded in my shin. The zombie thing was a bad idea. “Get up and set the table. Now.”
My five-year-old daughter does not get up. Instead, she barrel-rolls with limp appendages and exaggerated lifelessness towards the drawers. Then, she slowly melts upwards.
“Frankie.”
She grumbles, then swings the opposite direction and begins aggressively removing spoons and forks.
I look at her feet, vaguely wondering where her other sock went. “Can you taste the garlic rice after you put that down?”
Frankie sighs in five-year-old teenager, but I know she loves tasting while I cook. “Fine,” she says. She puts the utensils down and scurries over. She takes the spatula from my hand, climbs up the step stool I have for her in front of the stove, then carefully takes a small scoop of the garlic rice. I watch her closely, filled with pride when she remembers that it’s hot and to blow it cool instead of just shoving it in her mouth and screaming in agony then throwing a three-hour long fit, which is what we were doing only a few months ago. She looks up diagonally at the ceiling while chewing, and I blink at her, surprised. I’m not sure why I’m still so shocked when she looks identical to me when making certain faces. “More soy sauce.”
“Not salty enough?”
“You try,” she says, scooping more onto the spatula and holding it towards me.
I blow it cool and taste. “You’re totally right. Not enough soy sauce. Wanna add some?”
She puts the spatula down and picks up the soy sauce, uncapping the bottle and slowly tilting it down instead of tilting too much and too fast, which she was also doing just a few months ago. Many batches of garlic rice have been lost this way. She stirs one more time, then tastes. “Perf,” she says.
“Awesome. Do you wanna do the egg, or do you want me to do it?”
She brushes off her hands and climbs down from the step stool. In the span of ninety seconds, she’s somehow managed to get several grains of rice firmly caked into her hair. “You do it, please. I’m feeling over it,” she says, with an introspection and self-awareness that seem well beyond her five years. “I’ll get thesuka.”
We switch spots with a routine coordination and finish our breakfast set up.
“Yum,” she says, after munching on thelonganisain the way I image a rabid, dying rat would. “You got the spicylonganisainstead of the sweet kind?”
