“I remember Sari Tomas.” Santi winced. “She hated me.”
“She hated you because you figured out a way to beat her team at patintero,” Kira pointed out, going to the front of the store where you could order hotpot, smiling good-naturedly at the employee manning the counter. “Her little sister Sam runs the Tomas Coffee Co. farms in Sta. Cruz now, and they just found an entireforestof cacao. It’ll take a while before any of that is ready, but it could be something. So I thought I would look at what Chloe Agila was doing. I just wanted to know what my business will end up being like, because you know how terrifying it is, to start something yourself?”
He didn’t, honestly, but he supposed that was the curse of the grandchild-of-the-owner status he used to enjoy.
“I mean, I know the basics, since I started this family business in—you don’t want to hear about that.”
He was actually interested, but decided not to press her on it.
The next few minutes were focused on Kira pointing at various hotpot items on the menu and the server nodding and smiling. Santi was sure neither of them really knew what the pictured balls were made of, but the hotpot soup itself was warm and fragrant, the kind of scent that made you hungry just by being around it.
“Still impatient,” Santi noted.
“Bunso, eh.” She shrugged, like that explained everything. “And I know what you’re thinking.”
“You’re psychic now, too?”
“Oh sarcasm! That’s new.” She laughed, like she was absolutely delighted to hear it. “But you were thinking, ‘what would I, a fine arts major, know about running a brand and making chocolate?’”
“I wasn’t thinking—”
“Sometimes people just have to accept that their destiny lies in places outside where they expected,” she continued, a defiant tilt to her chin as she said that. “We were eighteen when we chose our future careers. How can you make any solid decision at eighteen? And I already had the dream job, but it wasn’t...um, itreallydidn’t pan out for me, and as much as I love running the Laneways, it’s notmineper se, but—”
He didn’t know what the Laneways was, but it didn’t seem to matter so much, because Kira had more to say.
“Basta! This, I can do this well. This, I can make myself, you know? I just need someone to believe in me. I already believe in me. Like really, truly, I can do this. But I don’t want to fail at a dream again.”
He should say something. He knew he should. She was much too wonderful, both now and in his memory of her, to be this upset. Kira was the kind of person who could conquer the world if she wanted to, and that look in her eye told him that she very much wanted to.
“Order?” the person manning the hotpot asked, looking at Santi.
“Yes,” he managed to say, ordering the same items as Sari by pointing and nodding. When he turned to Kira she was looking up at him again, his scarf around her neck and her eyes still studying him. Her food arrived then, piping hot and waiting for her to eat, with a separate bowl of the soup that the balls were cooked in, and another bowl of an unidentifiable brown sauce that might be satay-based, but looked delicious.
“You know I always wondered what happened to you after you moved to Manila,” she said, letting her balls cool on the counter as she sipped the iced (in this weather?) milk tea she ordered. “We never figured out how to get in touch. I would have looked for you on social media but it didn’t seem like your thing.”
It wasn’t. He didn’t even have accounts, just a vague awareness of social media’s existence. Messaging apps for work matters were his limit. Not that he needed those apps at the moment, but they were all still on his phone. He couldn’t quite bring himself to delete them yet.
“One of your cousins said years ago that you got into Ateneo for college, but I didn’t see you there, so I just assumed—”
“I studied in Canada,” he explained, because he remembered getting into Ateneo, remembered taking the exam with those 25 math-based word problems you had to finish in 25 minutes. He remembered how excited he was to continue his education in the school he’d attended from prep to high school. But then, that didn’t happen. “My parents stayed in Van for a while, just long enough so Miro and I could go to UBC. But my grandfather didn’t like his grandsons being so far away, so I went to AGS for my MBA, and...here we are.”
“That’s...a lot of letters.” Kira chuckled. “What a shame, though. I think we would have been friends again, if you went to Ateneo with me.”
He could almost picture it. He’d seen college kids walk up and down the campus in perfect stride, holding on to their books and their laptops like they had all the time in the world to cross from Xavier Hall to Bellarmine. Kira would talk, because she always had something to say, and he pictured himself smiling and nodding along, content just to listen to the way she saw the world.
Just like when they were kids.
But that wasn’t how their lives had turned out, and now here they were in a completely different country, caught up in nothing but a coincidence, a bag of convenience store snacks between them. It was five minutes to midnight, and they were supposed to be in different places—Kira ringing in the New Year with her family, and Santi sitting through another sermon. But neither of them seemed to want to leave this place, this moment.
“Are the Villas still running the hotel?” Santi suddenly asked. And he knew he should know the answer to that—he was a Villa too, after all—but he didn’t. When his family moved, his mother had cut herself off from all communication to her relatives, like she’d stripped off a coat and revealed someone much shinier and elegant. Santi hadn’t been close enough to his cousins to reach out, or at least that was his excuse.
Kira’s face changed then, like he’d managed to find something that she would rather not say out loud. He knew thatsheknew that he hadn’t spoken to that side of his family. That was just the way things worked, like Santi knew the Luz family was one of those families that could trace their roots to before the first coffee and cacao trees were brought to the Philippines (yay, colonization).
“They closed their doors last year,” she said, and in those few words he knew how she felt about it. He had memories of that place too, sliding down the bannisters, having Villa family gatherings at their restaurant in front. “Lally Villa’s kids had their own businesses, and most of her grandkids—including you, and your brother, obviously—moved on to work in Manila or abroad, and nobody was left to run the place. Last I heard, they were looking for someone to take over.”
Anton Santillan did not believe in signs, or in the universe. To him, his life was a sprint, a series of hurdles he had to learn to be fast enough to leap over. There was no all-seeing being that helped him along or told him how things could be; there was what is, and what was. There was the divine, and there was intervention. Two very different things.
But if he did believe in signs, he would point to tonight as the one time he was the closest to believing in it. And it wasn’t because out of the fifty thousand convenience stores in Japan, they both walked into this one. It wasn’t because it was nearly midnight, and for the first time in a long time, Santi wished for someone to be waiting for him at a nearby temple to ring in the New Year. He wanted that normalcy so bad that it almost hurt.
