“Ma, you’re kidding, right?” I asked.
Beckett looked on in giddy disbelief.
“One happy island!” she repeated, a little louder this time. “Please, sir, have a taste of this delightful food! We don’t want it to go to waste.” This, she said to a delivery boy heading for his bicycle with a bag in his hand. The young man shrugged. “Okay,” he agreed, and picked up the small dish with two soup dumplings in it. “My aunt makes these. They’re the best.” He slurped one down, right out of the bowl. Beckett was dumbfounded.
“Yes!” Mom went on. “They are delicious. Enjoy, enjoy!”
“What is happening?” Beckett whispered to me.
My grin filled my face. “She’s nuts, and I love it.”
The theatrics didn’t stop there. Mom closed her eyes and listened to the band’s music play. “Ah, ‘Despacito,’ of course,” she said. She sat there for a few bars and then opened her eyes and began to sing the tune with her own words in place of Luis Fonsi’s lyrics: “Free Chinese food / We ordered too much and we don’t want to be rude / Come and try the beef, the chicken, and the seafood / We have enjoyed every single bite that we chewed… / Free Chinese food!”
Beckett’s jaw dropped as he watched my mother’s brilliant mind rewrite the lyrics to the popular tune. And it worked! A father with twin girls in a stroller stopped and asked, “Free? Really?” and I smiled and nodded. He grabbed a small dish of chicken and cashew nuts and a fork and had a bite. “Delicious,” he grinned. “You want some yumza?” he asked the little blondies, and the one on the left hollered, “Yumza, yumza! Daddy, yumza!” He laughed while feeding her a bite.
Mom continued to sing, and an older couple approached. The wife was visibly skeptical of what was happening, but the husband, oblivious to her disdain, tilted his glasses down to get a better look at our spread. “You got any steak?” he asked in a thick Brooklyn accent. Beckett laughed and handed the man in the pink, floral-print shirt a small plate of pepper steak. He took a fork from the glass.
“You can’t be serious,” the wife sneered.
“Stuff it, Arlene,” the man said, shoving a big hunk of steak into his mouth and chewing hard. “Don’t yuck my yum,” he continued, chomping on the meat with his mouth open as a bit of the marinade dripped onto the belly of his shirt.
“You don’t just go around eating strangers’ food,” she whined, crossing her arms over her chest. Her voice was uncannily reminiscent of Fran Drescher inThe Nanny.
The mariachi band returned, and the lead singer with the sombrero handed his microphone to my mother so that her angelic voice could be amplified. “Come and grab a fork and have a piece of giant egg roll! Tan sabrosa en tu boca, este es tu favorito!” Sombrero man’s eyes widened at my mother’s attempt at Spanish, and he gladly offered his backup vocals. “Favorito, favorito, baby,” he sang, as Beckett’s mouth hung open and he shook his head.
“You guys speak Spanish?” he mouthed to me, incredulous.
“Nope,” I replied, leaning across the table so that he could hear meover the music. “But she subbed a lot of Spanish classes back when she was a teacher. I guess she picked some up,” I laughed.
He pulled his head back. “She’s something else,” he beamed.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “To say the least.”
Mom enticed several more men in the area to come eat from our feast, no doubt angering many a wife and delighting the staff at Hung Paradise, whose tables filled up with patrons ordering this and that after having sampled our food. Soon, there were no more clean forks available, so she handed the microphone back to the mariachi front man and caught her breath as the wandering music makers headed toward the Five O’Clock Somewhere bar in the center of the square.
Mom took a lengthy sip of water, draining her glass. “Well,” she said, “I think that helped make a dent in our leftover situation.” She shimmied her chair back into place at our table.
I slung my arm over her shoulders. “You okay?” I asked.
She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, but her face was more radiant than it had been in months. Nodding, she replied, “I’m great.”
“Are you kidding me?” Beckett exclaimed. “Birdie, you’re amazing! How did you rewrite the song on the spot like that?”
Mom shrugged, smiling. “I don’t know, kid. My head does funny things.” She placed her palm on her chest and took a few deep breaths, likely trying to slow her pulse.
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m good,” she said. I handed her my glass of water and she took a sip. “That was fun.”
Fun,she said. As if it was just something any normal person could have done.
Birdie Paulson was a flash of lightning: dazzling, spectacular, one that shook the sky and made you sit up and take notice. She was fire-bright, too fast to track.
And she disappeared before you even knew what hit you.
Chapter 16
Harmony’s mother was something else.
