Chapter Text
Mateo woke her at two-ten, and again at four, and the second time she just stayed up.
There was no point. She knew the shape of it by now. If she lay back down at four she would be dragged out of something deep and terrible at five and spend the whole day paying for it, whereas if she stayed vertical she could at least be tired on her own terms. So she carried him back to the mattress, settled him against the wall where he couldn't roll off, and went to the kitchen with the particular silent gait of a woman who has learned exactly which floorboards in her own house are loyal to her.
Outside, the roof was doing its thing.
There was a specific sound corrugated GI sheet made when the nail holding it down had gone loose. A low, patient rattling, like something was out there thinking about coming in. She had been listening to it for eleven months. She had a whole relationship with it. Some nights she lay in the dark and told it, silently, not yet, please, not yet, and so far it had agreed.
She put the rice on. The window over the sink faced east, and at that hour the sky was the color of the inside of a shell.
This was the part of the day that belonged to her. Twenty minutes, if she was lucky, before the house woke up and started charging her rent. She made coffee, three-in-one, cheap brand, in a mug with a chipped handle. She didn't fry herself an egg. Eggs were forty-two pesos for six now, and she had done the math on it, and the math had said coffee.
Anyone looking in through the window would have seen a woman in a men's undershirt standing very still in a kitchen at four-thirty in the morning with both hands around a cup. Not thinking. Just standing there, buying herself thirty seconds.
She got about fifteen.
"Ma."
"Anak, ang aga mo."
"Gising na si Mateo."
"Hindi. Tulog si Mateo."
Maya considered this, standing in the doorway in a shirt that went past her knees, hair on one side of her head pointing directly at the ceiling.
"Gising na siya," she said, with the enormous patience of a four-year-old correcting an idiot. "Kasi ginising ko."
From the bedroom, on cue, came a sound like a small ambulance.
"Maya."
"Sabi ko na sa'yo."
---
Maya was four and had recently discovered rules. Not following them. Administering them. She had a firm position on which slipper was the left slipper. She would report her brother for crimes he had not yet committed. Somewhere in the last six months she had appointed herself deputy of the household, and Mikha found this both very funny and, at a level she preferred not to look at directly, unbearable, because a four-year-old only starts helping that hard when she has noticed her mother is outnumbered.
Mateo was one. Mateo had opinions and no vocabulary, which is a combination that will make a person shriek. He had four teeth, an unshakable belief that the electric fan was alive, and a preference for being carried on the left hip so exact that switching sides constituted a human rights violation.
By five-forty Mikha had one of them fed and the other one wearing most of a meal. She had a wet nappy in the pail and a dry one on the baby. She had brushed Maya's hair and produced two braids that were only slightly uneven. She had drunk none of her coffee.
"Ma," said Maya, from the floor, where she was putting both her legs into one leg of her shorts. "Tignan mo."
"Anak, hindi ganyan."
"Ganyan!"
"Isa lang ang paa sa isa."
"GANYAN," said Maya, and stood up, and fell over immediately, and lay on her back on the floor laughing like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the province of Zambales.
Mateo, who understood none of it, joined in. He laughed with his whole body, head back, four teeth, absolutely committed.
Mikha stood there with a spoon in her hand and let it happen for a second. Then another second. Then she put the spoon down and got on the floor with them.
Twelve seconds. That's what she gave it. She timed things like that now, not consciously, not cruelly, just the way a person with no margin learns to price things.
Then she got up and loaded them into the truck.
---
The Ranger was a 2010, silver once, now a color best described as effort. The paint had gone chalky on the hood and was flaking off the driver's door in a pattern that looked, if you squinted, like a map of an island nobody had named. The left headlight had been out since February. The tires were bald enough that Mikha had developed an entire driving style around them, a gentle anticipatory braking, the way you'd handle a horse you loved that was getting old.
But it started. Every morning it started. She had a superstition about it, hand flat on the dash, one beat of silence, then the key, and she had never told anyone about it, not even Maloi.
Mateo's car seat was second-hand from Maloi's cousin and the buckle had to be pressed at a particular angle or it lied to you about being closed. Mikha checked it twice. She always checked it twice. She had checked it twice every single day for a year and would keep doing it for as long as it took, for reasons she also did not discuss.
"Ma," said Maya, buckled in beside him, holding his sock, which he had removed. "Yung ilaw."
"Ano'ng ilaw, anak?"
"Yung ilaw ng kotse. Sabi mo aayusin mo."
Mikha's hands were on the wheel. She looked at her daughter in the rearview. Four years old, repeating something back at her that she had said out loud maybe once, weeks ago, into what she had assumed was an empty room.
"Aayusin ko," she said.
"Kailan?"
"Soon."
"Bukas?"
"Soon, anak."
Maya accepted this, because she was four, and put the sock on her own hand.
---
She dropped Maya at the barangay day care at six-forty, which was early, but Ate Bebang who ran it opened early for the mothers who worked and had never once made anyone feel like they were asking for something. Maya got out like a small executive. Mikha crouched, got her kiss, watched her all the way in through the gate (forty seconds, every morning, never skipped, not when she was late, not when it was raining), and then got back in the truck with the baby and drove ten minutes the other way, to the store.
Mateo came to work. Mateo had come to work his entire life. There was a playpen behind the counter with a towel over one corner for shade, and a fan angled at it, and a laminated sign taped to the wall above it that said, in Maloi's handwriting, BAWAL PISILIN ANG PISNGI NG BATA. It was widely ignored.
---
The 24/7 Mini Mart sat on the highway shoulder between a vulcanizing shop and nothing at all. A squat concrete box with a rolling steel door and a hand-painted sign her father had commissioned in 2009 from a man in Olongapo who did jeepney lettering. 24/7 MINI MART, white block capitals, red drop shadow. It was the only thing on the property that still looked like money.
Except that the fluorescent tube behind the 4 had gone out in 2023, and Mikha had never replaced it.
So at night, from the road, it read 2 /7, which had become a running joke in the barangay, and which Mikha had decided to find funny rather than sad, because those were the only two available options and she had a policy.
Maloi Hernandez was already there with the door half up, sitting on an upturned crate, eating something.
"Ang tagal mo."
"Six-thirty ako lagi."
"Six thirty-four."
"Anong kinakain mo."
"Wala."
"Maloi."
"Wala!"
"Chippy ba 'yan?"
Maloi swallowed. "Expired na kasi."
"Kailan?"
"Friday."
"Maloi. Tuesday ngayon."
"Oo. So ma-eexpire na siya." She stood, brushed orange dust off her shorts with enormous dignity, and rolled the door the rest of the way open. "Preventive. Nagse-save ako ng inventory loss. Wala kang utang na loob sa akin."
Then she saw the car seat, and everything about her changed frequency.
"HOY. Nandiyan ang boss ko." She had Mateo out of the truck before Mikha had the handbrake up. "Good morning po, sir. Good morning po. Kumusta po ang pagtulog niyo, sir? Hindi maganda? Ganoon po talaga sa negosyo."
"Wag mong pisilin ang pisngi."
"Hindi ko pinipisil."
"Nakikita kita, Maloi."
"Sinusuri ko. Quality control."
They had met when they were nine, in a school corridor, over a disagreement involving a slipper. Maloi had been Mikha's best friend through Mikha's family being rich, and then through Mikha's family ceasing to exist, which is a much harder thing to stay someone's best friend through, and she had never once made it feel like a favor. She was also, technically, the store's only employee. Mikha paid her badly. They both knew it. Neither of them said it out loud.
---
The morning went the way mornings went. The bread came late. Aling Tessie bought two Tide sachets, a Marlboro Red, and gossip. A tricycle driver bought a Sting and stood in the doorway to drink it, because the store had no chairs on purpose. Mateo fell asleep at ten in the playpen with his face against the mesh, which could not have been comfortable, and slept for an hour and a half like a man who had earned it.
At half past ten, Maloi opened the chest freezer, put her hand in, and made a noise.
"Mikha."
"Hm."
"Halika nga."
Mikha came. She put her hand in. It was cool, the way a room is cool. It was not cold, the way ice is cold. The hotdogs at the bottom had gone soft at the corners, and there was a shallow, ominous puddle under the tub of ice candy that Mrs. Delos Santos consigned to them every week.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Kanina pa ba?"
"Kagabi siguro. Umuugong siya nung isinara ko."
"Bakit hindi mo sinabi?"
"Akala ko normal na 'yun," said Maloi. "Everything here makes noise, Mikha. The door makes noise. The lights make noise. Ikaw, maingay ka rin."
Mikha lowered the lid and stood there with both hands flat on it, the way you'd stand at a hospital bed.
Here is what the chest freezer was. It was the ice candy and the ice and the hotdogs and the frozen tocino and the sale of cold Coke in a barangay where the average brownout ran four hours. On a good week it was maybe thirty percent of what came through the till. It was also fourteen years old.
"Magkano kaya," Maloi said.
"Kung compressor, twelve. Baka fifteen."
"Thousand?"
"Oo."
"Ay."
"Yeah."
"Ipapa-check muna natin, baka."
"Ipapa-check ko," said Mikha. "Pero alam ko na." She rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. "Alam ko na, Loi."
And then her brain did the thing it always did, the thing that could not be switched off, which was to lay the whole list out flat where she could look at it. Fifteen for the compressor. Three-five for the washing machine, dead since March, quoted and never called back. The roof, which she had been pricing in the dark at four in the morning for eleven months, eight if she did the labor herself and twenty if she didn't. Mateo would need shoes with actual soles by December. Maya was starting big school next year and there was a list, an actual printed list, that Ate Bebang had handed out to the mothers in June and that Mikha had folded twice and put in the drawer without reading past item four.
Total, running: a number she did not let herself finish.
"Ano," said Maloi, watching her.
"Wala."
"Nag-i-spiral ka na naman."
"Hindi ako nag-i-spiral."
"Mikha. Kilala kita. Nakatingin ka sa freezer pero sinusuma mo na 'yung buong buhay mo."
Mikha laughed, once, with not much in it. "Hindi buong buhay. Hanggang December lang."
Maloi hopped up and sat on the counter, which she was not supposed to do, and swung her heels against the cabinet, which she was really not supposed to do.
"Tawagan mo si Rico," she said.
"Loi."
"Tawagan mo si Rico."
"Wala siyang project ngayon. Sabi niya nung."
"Nung June. June niya 'yun sinabi. Ilang buwan na, Mikha? May pumasok na bagong barko doon, sigurado ako. Nakita ko sa Facebook ng pinsan ko, may malaking puti na dumaong last week. Ang laki. Parang gusali. Tapos ikaw, nandito, nakatingin sa freezer na parang tatawagin mo siyang anak."
"Ayoko kasing manghingi."
"Hindi manghingi 'yun. Trabaho 'yun. Ikaw yung pinakamagaling niyang painter at hindi ka nala-late at hindi ka nagrereklamo." Maloi pointed a finger at her, orange with Chippy dust. "Yung ibang tao doon, ang gagaling ma-late. Ikaw, hindi. That's your whole personality."
"Wow. Salamat."
"Walang anuman."
They looked at each other. The fan turned its head slowly, back and forth, like it was watching a tennis match it didn't care about.
In the playpen, Mateo woke up and announced it.
"Tatawagan ko bukas," Mikha said, going to get him.
"Ngayon."
"Bukas, Loi. Wala akong load."
That was a lie, and Maloi knew it was a lie, and let it go, which is the entire skill of being someone's best friend for twenty-one years.
---
She closed at nine. Maya had been picked up at four and had spent the afternoon behind the counter arranging the candy jars by a system she refused to explain. Mateo had been passed around the barangay like a collection plate. The drawer counted out to what it always counted out to, which was enough. Not enough for the freezer. Enough for the day. That is a distinction most people never have to learn, and Mikha could have taught a course in it.
Outside, she pulled the steel door down and locked it, with Mateo on her left hip and Maya holding the hem of her shirt, and she stood there for a second in the wash of light from the sign. The sign stayed on all night. That was the entire point of the name, her father's one great idea, back when the family had money and ideas were free. We never close.
2 /7.
Two out of seven. Which, if you thought about it, was roughly her success rate lately.
"Ma," said Maya, looking up at it, because she looked up at it every night. "Yung apat."
"Oo, anak. I know."
"Sira pa rin."
"Sira pa rin."
"Kailan mo aayusin?"
Mikha shifted the baby to her other hip, which he objected to, loudly, and on principle.
"Soon," she said.
Then she got in the truck, put her hand flat on the dash for one beat, and it started.