Jay, Mara and Luna gasped. Even Irene looked surprised at herself, blinking up comically at them.
“Mama said a bad word!”
“Exactly, and that’s why we’re going to go na.” Jay picked up his inaanak and pretended to shield her ears as Luna laughed hysterically. Irene gave her brother an exasperated look, but she still took the camera from him.
There was a brief moment where Mara thought the look the Montinola siblings exchanged was wistful. Like they were missing each other while they were both on the same beach. But it was gone before she could find a way to ask about it.
“We’ll be right back.” Jay turned to Mara, swinging himself and Luna toward her. “I’m going to need to approve any story you’re going to post. For the integrity of the hashtag.”
“Just go.” She was going to say more, but Jay beat her to anything else by swooping down, fully supporting Luna with his hand on her back as he gave Mara a quick kiss on the lips. So quick that his lips were slightly stained with her color, Make A Mauve. Well. Impressionist Cosmetics did advertise it as a lipstick for kissing.
Mara was still in slight shock as Jay and Luna headed toward where the rest of the wedding party was assembling. It felt like her lips were tingling, her toes curling in her sandals. She couldn’t seem to remember where she was, forgot what day of the week it was, what time. None of that seemed important at the moment, not even whatever it was that Irene just asked her.
“—like him, Mara?”
“Ha?” Mara asked, confused.
“Nothing!” Irene laughed, her chic bob shaking as she shook her head. “Jay just seems really happy.”
“Of course he’s happy, we—”gave each other hand jobs last night“—we’re in literal paradise, and nobody has to work.” Mara chuckled. “The conditions are ideal. Never mind that we didn’t speak for three months before that, andthatwas the first time we actually got along, ever.”
“Really? He was so mopey for those three months, though. Always sighing and talking about Girls’ Generation.” Irene shrugged. “Also, any kind of happy day is a good day. God knows he could use some of those.”
It occurred to Mara that regardless of if she wanted to hear it or not, Irene was about to tell her something very private and intimate about the man she was definitely not dating. She didn’t want to be rude, so she settled instead for saying a very vague, “Hmm?” to get Irene to continue.
“We both hate it, but it wasn’t easy that the eldest-born son was the youngest child,” Irene began, both of them barely noticing that everyone was starting to take their seats. “It was a thing. People expected things of him that I was already doing, or I was held back from certain things because he had to do it first.”
“Like what?” Mara was genuinely curious. As Jay explained it, he and Ate Irene were a few years apart. Certainly there were some things Ate Irene had to do first.
“I didn’t get a driver’s license until I was, what, twenty-five? Because my parents insisted it wasn’t safe for a single woman to drive around the city by herself. So Jay had to drive me around for most of college, until I put my foot down and got a license for myself.”
Mara winced. She could understand the feeling. One where you didn’t want to be the burden on any of your siblings, because it was your job to do things first. As well as the reality that, knowing as much as your parents loved you, they could also be absolutely irrational and ridiculous. That sometimes, you needed to ignore their shit to get what you needed.
“Well, I don’t totally regret it, because we got pretty close because we kept getting trapped in traffic.” Irene chuckled. “But you get what I mean? He feels a big amount of responsibility that I personally think is undue. When our parents separated, he was the one who spoke to the banks and the lawyers, because I had to be the one to manage them emotionally. When I got pregnant and the pandemic hit, he stayed with me. We had swabs up our nose every week, went to the doctors, and he was in his PPE for the whole time I was in the hospital.”
“It must have been scary for both of you,” Mara sympathized. The Barrettos were lucky none of them needed serious medical attention at the time—more than lucky, really. But she remembered the string of weddings, wakes and other family events all over Zoom too well. Even then she couldn’t imagine the risk of having a baby in a hospital at the time.
“He made me feel less scared. Jay’s a scaredy-cat most times, but give him something to focus on and he’ll power through with flying colors.”
That felt oddly reassuring.
“Our parents needed money so they could move as far away from each other as possible, so when they sold the house, he was the one who bought a place in Pasig for us all to live in.” That made Mara’s mouth widen in surprise. It was no easy feat to outright purchase a condo, especially if it was a recent purchase. “When Luna started day care and needed someone to pick her up, he renegotiated his job with his Hong Kong firm to scale back his hours, because my job declared a return to office.”
“That sounds…” Mara tried to think of how to respond. It all sounded like good things. Great things. Things that would have been major hurdles for other families, the kind that would require bigger sacrifices or adjustments. Quite frankly, it was incredible that Jay had done all of that for his family, and definitely made her respect him more. But the way Irene said them made them sound like they weren’t great things at all.
“He’s never complained, and if he ever felt pressured, he has never, ever shown me,” she continued.
Suddenly she knew why Ate Irene wasn’t happy about it. Becauseshewas the older sister. The panganay in Mara knew that it wasn’t a good feeling, needing to rely on your sibling so much. That feeling of thinking,This should be me!and feeling guilty knowing your sibling was having a hard time, while also feeling guilty about needing them more than they needed you. “And he keeps finding more to do, when I never asked him to!”
And it was no one’s fault, really. Certainly no one’s character flaw, loving their family. But it did add a lot of pressure to an already complicated situation, she could only imagine.
“It’s like he’s trying to meet someone’s inflated expectations. All while fully convincing himself that he can never meet them.”
What did it take to convince a guy so good at making people love him that he was terrible at love? She hadn’t fully believed that it was just the Selena Guerro thing. But add to that separated parents, a jilted older sister and a family that needed him more? She understood. It felt like she was standing outside a tower of Jay’s boundaries. She was in his territory but not quite fully inside his court.
The music started to play from a string quartet, all of whom were wearing rainbow scarves in various ways. That was cute, and clearly a signal that the ceremony was about to begin. But Irene was too deep into her story to stop.
“I’m getting married in two months,” Ate Irene said, turning to face the altar, her arms crossed and her shoulders slightly defeated. “It took a while for my fiancé and I to figure out that we really loved each other, what it meant that I already had a kid with someone else. So all of a sudden Jay has a three-bedroom condo to himself when he never really wanted one, he has all this free time, and I…” Her voice caught, and Mara remembered the wistful look that the siblings had exchanged earlier. “I just want him to be happy. I want him to live his own life. Luna and I will still be in it, but…”
