In the fall of 1988, not long after I’d turned seventeen, I began boarding with the family of a man who worked for my father. His name was Jack Donaldson and he lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in San Jose with his wife, Pauleen, five-year-old daughter, Lauren, and a small dog. That June, I’d gotten kicked out of the all-boys Catholic high school in Los Angeles where my own family still lived. My parents were waiting for a new house they were having built to be finished before moving themselves and my four younger siblings up to San Jose, where my father’s regional vice president’s office was being relocated. The house was scheduled to be finished in January, but my parents thought it would be best if I started my senior year in the place where I would complete it, so that was the main reason for renting the room. That, and the relative peace of mind it would give my mother to have me out of the house for a few months.
My room at the Donaldson’s had been a den, so it was small, just enough space for a twin bed, a stand-up lamp, a tiny desk, and a little chest of drawers moved in there for my clothes. They insisted I call them by their first names, which took some getting used to because they were both almost twice my age. Pauleen was French-Canadian, spoke with a delicate accent, and was quietly beautiful. Jack travelled a lot with work, so he was gone most of the week. He usually got back on Friday afternoons, changed out of his suit, and took up a position on the living room recliner in front of the television. With a short glass of Early Times over ice never far from his reach, he rarely left the recliner except to sleep, . My father paid him a nominal amount for my rent, which I was expected to augment by doing chores — mow the lawn, wash their cars, do odd jobs around the house, and walk their dachshund, Tag, in the morning and at night.
It was on one of those evening walks with Tag early on that I met Angelo. He was the night custodian at the elementary school that Lauren attended a few streets away. When we passed the school, he was almost always sitting on an upturned bucket outside his custodial closet taking a smoke break. We exchanged nods the first few times. Then one evening as we approached, he made kissing noises to Tag and held out a dog biscuit in his cupped palm. Tag pulled me up the thin strip of grass that separated us and licked the biscuit up. Angelo chuckled and scratched Tag on the head as he crunched on the treat.
He asked, “What’s his name?”
I told him, and watched his eyebrows knit.
“What kind of name is that?”
“The owners told me it means ‘handsome’.”
“Well,” Angelo said, “he is that. I had one like him back in the Philippines growing up.” He looked at me, extended his hand, and said, “I’m Angelo.”
“Ben,” I told him, and shook it. He looked fifty or so, about my father’s age.
“How come you’re walking someone else’s dog, Ben?”
I briefly summarized my living circumstances. He just nodded and kept scratching the top of Tag’s head. The dull light from the custodial closet washed over him and lengthened his shadow across the grass in the gloaming.
Finally, he said, “I was on my own, too, about your age. Came to this country and lived with my older brother who’d immigrated earlier.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the grass, stood up, and dropped it in a coffee can inside the closet. “Well, better get back to work. And you finish your walk.” He bent down and gave Tag a last scratch behind the ears.
* * *
The school I’d enrolled in was near the house my parents were building, but was a couple of towns and a dozen miles away from the Donaldson’s. I rode my bicycle there each morning, and then back again after basketball practice in the early evening. By that time, dinner was finished, but Pauleen kept a plate warm for me in the oven. When I first moved in, I ate alone at the kitchen table and listened to Lauren singing “You Are My Sunshine” to herself from the bathtub down the hall. Pauleen went back and forth, always dressed nicely in a blouse with slacks or a skirt, busying herself and giving me her small, tentative smiles when she drew near. By the time I was putting Tag on his leash for his walk, I could hear her reading stories to Lauren and see them stretched out together on her daughter’s bed, her shoes on the floor and the darkened heels of her nylons crossed at the ankles.
* * *
Angelo would wait for us with a dog biscuit every night. Tag started pulling me in his direction a block away and whined in confusion on the weekends when Angelo wasn’t there. Our conversations grew lengthier. He asked me about school, my family, basketball, and shared a good bit about his own life. But several weeks had passed before he told me about having died.
“Five years ago,” he said. “I was on an operating table and my heart stopped. Somehow, they got it going again a minute or so later. One in a thousand chance, they told me afterwards.”
I shook my head. “When it was happening, could you tell?”
He nodded. “They’d just given me anesthesia, but I wasn’t under yet. I remember seeing a yellow line and random scenes from my life. Then there was this feeling of incredible peace.” He paused, sucked on his cigarette, and looked out into the darkness. “Next thing I know, I’m in a hospital room and someone in a white smock is trying to feed me chicken soup with a big spoon.”
He looked at me. I shook my head again.
“Hard to believe, huh?” he said.
“How’s it been afterwards?”
He shrugged. “Well, I could never taste anything again. Steak is the same as lima beans.” He took another drag from his cigarette, tipped it up, and looked at it. “Can’t taste these either, but I keep smoking them. And my mind doesn’t work right… I can’t do anything that requires concentration.” He gestured towards his custodial closet. “I was a carpenter all those years until then, but can only manage a job like this since. I don’t know. Life isn’t the same, that’s for sure.” He scratched Tag on the head and looked over at me. “I guess everyone is sort of waiting to die.” He chuckled. “But for me, right now, I’m just waiting to do it again.”
* * *
My new school was okay, much bigger than my old one; I could basically disappear into the crowd, which I appreciated given the experiences I’d left behind. When my guidance counselor asked why I was living on my own during my senior year, I explained that I wasn’t able to return to my prior school.
She glanced over my transcripts and said, “I don’t see any indications here about expulsions or suspensions.”
I shook my head. “I was asked not to return.” I explained that the principal had been my advisor as editor of the school newspaper and told my parents it was in both the school’s and my best interests not to. It wasn’t misbehavior exactly. I’d written editorials that challenged authority. Things like criticizing America’s military presence abroad, calling for more gun control, the need to de-emphasize sports at school.
“You played on the basketball team.”
“Yeah, but jocks ruled the place. It wasn’t right. I knew another student who was gay, and they sent his clothes up the flagpole one day during PE. The administration thought I was a rabble-rouser. When I organized a boycott of classes for the start of the new school year to demand more meaningful curriculum, that was the last straw for them…adios.”
She sat looking at me for a long moment. Finally, she said, “Well, I hope you don’t have any plans for things like that here.”
* * *
On the weekends, I often took Lauren to the park, pushed her on the swings, and watched her run around on the playground equipment with other kids her age. I usually took Tag along. If we were there when the ice cream truck came by, I bought one for each of us; Tag licked his down to the stick on the grass. When we got back home, Jack was always in his recliner, and Pauleen was elsewhere: at the kitchen table doing needlepoint, puttering with the plants she kept in clay pots on the front porch, lying on their bed napping — or trying to, I suppose. The only times I saw them interact was when he’d shake the ice in his empty glass. She’d come get it, refill it with new cubes, bring it back to him, then leave as he was refreshing it from the bottle he kept on the far side of the recliner.
One afternoon late that first month, Lauren and I were sitting on a bench in the park eating our ice cream bars. Suddenly, she said, “Mom sleeps with me most nights.” She said it like she was commenting on a car going by. “She usually comes in after they’ve gone to bed when the rest of the house is all dark. She thinks I’m asleep, but I’m usually not. I can hear her crying. Sometimes it lasts a long time. Then she leaves early before anyone else is up except the birds.”
She looked at me with her big eyes. I said, “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true.”
A dollop of ice cream fell from the bar in her hand onto her jeans. I took out a tissue and wiped it off for her. I thought about what she’d told me, about my own mother, about trying to make sense of our lives.
* * *
Angelo had never been married and had no family left after his brother died a decade earlier. He told me he lived in an apartment over a bar downtown; I’d been through the neighborhood, and it was pretty shabby. He revered his own mother, who’d also passed away and had raised the two of them as a single parent. He often told me stories about her, how she’d struggled to save enough money to send them to America. Sometimes when he talked about her, he’d stop to turn away and I could see his lower lip trembling.
When he asked about my mother, I shrugged. “When I was still at home, I didn’t treat her well,” I told him. “I thought she was stupid, the things she cared about trivial: having nice things, social status, nothing about the larger world. I wasn’t nice to her. Usually, when she talked to me, I just ignored her. Even when she asked a direct question.”
He stared at me for a while, then said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”
I tried to make a gesture of nonchalance, but felt myself grimace instead.
“It’s not too late to change.” His voice was quiet. Then we were silent. I was aware of a siren winding off across town.
* * *
Sometime in the middle of October, Pauleen began sitting with me for a little while at the kitchen table while I had dinner and Lauren was taking her bath. She worked on her needlepoint while I ate. At first when I asked her questions about her life, she seemed almost embarrassed to talk about herself. But eventually, her answers grew longer and more self-assured. She seemed to enjoy telling me about her happy childhood: growing up in a big house on a river in Montreal, riding her horse that was kept at a stable outside of the city, taking ballet lessons, attending operas and symphonies, vacationing each summer for several weeks at a cabin her family had on Lake Ontario.
When I asked her how she’d met Jack, she grew quiet again, then said, “I came to San Francisco one summer during college to work as a nanny for an aunt. He lived in the house next door.” She looked past my shoulder into the hallway. “We got to know one another. He was very good-looking…big, rugged, strong. He charmed me.”
She pursed her lips and lowered her eyes to the needlepoint on her lap. I watched her fingers move rapidly with the thread. There were finished needlepoint projects of hers throughout the house, on virtually every end table and bureau, and some in frames on the wall. From down the hall, Lauren sang, “You make me happy when skies are gray”, and I could hear her splashing in the tub.
* * *
One night a little before Halloween, Angelo had a lunch pail on his lap when Tag and I came up to him. The days had grown shorter, and it was completely dark.
He said, “Evening. Brought you both a treat.”
After he’d given Tag his biscuit, he opened the pail and took out two small packages wrapped in aluminum foil. He handed me one; it was warm. “Eat that,” he said. “Tell me what you think, what it tastes like.”
We unwrapped the packages. Inside were strips of cooked meat covered with some sort of marinade. We ate in silence for a minute until he said, “Well?”
“It’s good.” I licked my fingers. “Really good. What is it?”
“Lechon. Pig roast. From a Filipino celebration over the weekend.”
I took another bite and made a humming noise as I chewed.
“Tell me what it tastes like,” he said. “The flavors.”
I thought for a moment, chewing. “Well, there’s garlic. Soy sauce, I think. Something lemony.”
He closed his eyes, raised the packet of meat under his nostrils, sniffed, and said, “Go on.”
“Maybe a touch of something sour like vinegar. Pepper. Some herb I recognize, but can’t name. All mixed together. The outside skin might be the best, crackly and tart.”
He nodded, smiling, and seemed lost in thought. I dropped a few pieces of meat on the grass for Tag.
* * *
A couple of weeks later, when Lauren, Tag, and I came back into the house after a Sunday walk to the park, the volume was up a little higher than usual on the television. Jack was pushed back in his recliner watching golf, his tumbler resting on his stomach. It was a cold, gray, late afternoon, and the light in the house had already begun to fall, but I could see one of Pauleen’s needlepoints ripped in half near him on the carpet; his bottle stood in the space on the end table next to him where the needlepoint had been. I walked into the kitchen to hang Tag’s leash from the back of the garage door, and saw two more framed needlepoints cracked in half on top of the trashcan in the corner.
To avoid Jack, I went to my room through the kitchen, and saw Lauren peeking through the crack of her bedroom door. The door to her parents’ bedroom was ajar, their big bed empty. I sat down at my desk. After a moment, I heard Lauren say, “Mommy, what’s wrong? Are you all right?” I got up and closed my own door.
No one called me for dinner that night, and I’m not sure if the rest of them ate. Jack left early for work the next morning before I’d gotten up. I grabbed a granola bar for breakfast while Pauleen was helping Lauren get dressed for school and ate it while I walked Tag. I was able to return through the garage door, rehang the leash, and leave again on my bicycle to school without encountering either of them.
That evening, Pauleen didn’t join me for dinner. I ate alone, took Tag for his walk, then sat on the couch watching a documentary on television about the African safari. No sound came from the bedrooms in the back of the house for a long time until Pauleen finally came into the living room. She wore one of her usual skirts, a pink blouse, and nylons, but her hair was mussed from lying with Lauren. She stood with her arms folded staring at the television for several minutes, and then sat down next to me on the couch. A moment later, she lowered her head onto my shoulder. A scent like lilacs rose from her.
“I just want to rest for a bit,” she said. I could barely hear her. “Just a moment to rest my weary head.”
I sat very still and tried to concentrate on the television. I willed my heart to slow. Perhaps five minutes passed before she whispered, “He makes me do things.”
I dared a look her way. Her eyes were shut, her hands clasped in her lap, her breathing slow and deep.
* * *
Shortly after that, on a night following our first basketball game of the season, Angelo gave Tag his biscuit, put out his cigarette, stood up, and said, “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He led us into Lauren’s elementary school.
We followed him through the outdoor corridors, the long stretches of cinder-block buildings lit dimly only by occasional low-voltage globes tucked into the eaves. Crickets called softly. At the end of the last row of buildings, he turned and led us to an adjacent storage shed and then stopped abruptly.
“Better hold Tag’s leash tight,” he said.
I did, and he continued to the back of the shed where he stopped again. The eave light from the corner of the nearest building was just bright enough to show a feral cat lying on her side against the shed’s foundation with a litter of kittens sucking at her teats. Patches of her mottled fur were gone and burrs were tangled in other places. Tag gave a low growl, and I shortened the leash further so he was against my foot. The cat looked up at us and made a wide motion with her mouth as if to meow, but no sound came; she cradled the kittens closer with her paws. There was an empty can of cat food next to her head.
“Found them a few nights ago,” Angelo said. “Been feeding her since, but I’m not sure what to do next. Afraid if I call Animal Control, they’ll just put them down.”
We stood looking at them, while Tag continued his low growl. The kittens made tiny, slurping sounds.
“Maybe they won’t,” I said. “Maybe they’ll put them up for adoption.”
Angelo shrugged. “I hope so. Guess I don’t have any other choice.”
“But, you don’t have to do it right away. They’re not hurting anything here.”
“No,” Angelo said. “No rush, I suppose.”
I shook my head, but he didn’t see it because he’d squatted down for a better look at them.
* * *
My father came up for meetings with Jack and some other work associates during the week before Thanksgiving. It was a Tuesday, and after I returned from basketball practice, he was sitting in the living room with Jack sharing a glass of Early Times; the bottle wasn’t in its customary spot on the far side of the recliner. My father and I embraced awkwardly, and then he piled us all in his rental car and took us out for dinner at a steakhouse nearby.
It was an old restaurant, dark inside with lights in sconces on the walls, candles in jars, lots of wood, and big maroon booths. My father was in the middle of the one we sat in, Jack and Pauleen on one side of him, and Lauren and I seated across from them. Lauren colored on a child’s placemat. My father ordered wine and then made toasts, several of which praised Pauleen for her character, charm, and warmth.
Afterwards, he gave Jack a playful tap on his upper arm with a fist. “So, what genie’s bottle did you rub to get this sort of wife?”
Jack glanced once her way. “I don’t know,” he said. He reached over and put his hand on hers. She didn’t move it. “Luck, I guess,” he continued. “Dumb luck.”
“You’ve got the dumb part right,” my father said. Pauleen took a sip out of the small amount she’d allowed my father to pour into hers.
* * *
Two nights later, Angelo’s custodial closet was open and lit, but a different man stood inside it in the same sort of custodial uniform arranging cleaning supplies on a cart. Tag stopped where he usually did, cocked his head, and began whining. The man turned our way.
I said, “Where’s Angelo?”
He looked us over and asked, “You a friend of his?”
“Sort of. Yes.”
The man paused and then said, “He passed away, I’m afraid. Last night in the doorway of his apartment, from what I’ve been told.”
A shiver passed through me. Tag continued to whine. I stood blinking and shaking my head.
“I’m sorry,” the man said quietly. “Probably a heart attack, so at least he went quickly. He was a good guy.”
I nodded once and continued up the sidewalk. The world on all sides of me seemed to fall away. For a while, Tag kept whining and pulling the leash back towards the custodial closet, but then settled in next to me. I felt numb. I walked to the end of the school buildings and around the last one to the storage shed. The cat and her litter were gone. There were no cans of food in the depression against the base of the shed. I didn’t know if Angelo had taken care of that before he died or not. Standing there, I thought about how little I knew about anything.
When I got back, the house was silent and both the bedroom doors were closed. It wasn’t yet eight-thirty, but I turned out the lights in the house and sat at my desk with the lamp on. I took a stack of postcards that my mother had given me from the desk’s lone drawer. They were already stamped and addressed to our house in Los Angeles. I hadn’t yet sent one. I wrote a message to her telling her I missed her and was looking forward to being home for Thanksgiving; I left it at that, but added “Love, Ben” at the end.
I went out to the foyer and put it in the mailbox outside the front door. I locked up and looked around the house, still in the darkness. Moonlight lit the empty recliner, framed needlepoints on the wall, and the kitchen table in shadow. Tag’s paws clattered softly across the kitchen linoleum from his basket by the garage door. He stopped at my feet, looked up at me with hopeful eyes, and wagged his wiry tail.
