Interlude: Miagao, 1966
The fiesta ran three days that year, the way it did every year, the whole town spilling out of its houses into the plaza in front of the old stone church, the one built so long ago out of coral rock and egg whites, according to every version of the story anyone ever told her, that the church itself had outlasted three separate town names. Perla Villanueva was twenty years old, home for the fiesta from her third year of nursing school in Iloilo City, and she was standing at her Tita Pilar’s food stall stacking bibingka into a wobbling tower when a young man in a shirt two sizes too big for him told her, with total confidence, that she was doing it wrong.
“You have to alternate,” he said. “Big one, small one, big one. Otherwise it falls.”
“It’s not going to fall.”
It fell. Six bibingka rolled off the table and into the dirt, and the young man, instead of looking smug about being right, dropped immediately to his knees and started rescuing what he could, brushing dust off the ones that had a chance, laughing the whole time in a way that made it impossible for Perla to stay properly annoyed with him.
“I’m Ramon,” he said, still crouched in the dirt. “I teach the little ones, over at the elementary school. Second year.”
“You teach children and you can’t stack cake.”
“I never claimed to be good at everything.” He handed her back a bibingka that had survived, mostly, holding it out like an offering. “Only the things that actually matter.”
She would tell this story for years afterward, quietly, to no one but herself, the exact shape of it worn smooth from private retelling the way a coin goes smooth from being carried in a pocket too long: the dust, the wobbling tower, a schoolteacher two years into his career with flour somehow already on his sleeve though he’d been nowhere near the cooking, laughing at himself before anyone else had the chance to laugh at him first.
By the second day of the fiesta he’d found an excuse to walk past her family’s stall four separate times. By the third, he’d asked her Tita Pilar for permission to walk Perla home, and Tita Pilar, who liked to say she could read a man’s whole character off the way he apologized for something, said yes before Perla had finished deciding whether she wanted him to.
There is a photograph from that fiesta, taken by somebody’s cousin, in which both of them appear at the edge of the frame without being the subject: a young woman rescuing a stack of bibingka and a young man on his knees in the dirt, both of them laughing at something the photograph does not contain.
Neither of them ever knew the photograph existed. It is in a box in a house in Miagao and has never been looked at closely by anybody.
They were engaged two years later, in a manner that felt, at the time, entirely unremarkable: no dramatic proposal, no single moment either of them could later point to as the beginning, only a long, ordinary accumulation of Sunday walks and letters passed between Miagao and Iloilo City during the school terms, until one day it simply became understood between both families that a wedding would happen, the only real question left being when. Ramon told her, the week it became official, sitting on the low sea wall where they’d taken to talking in the evenings, that he’d never once in his life been more certain of anything, including his own name.
“You say that now,” Perla told him, echoing, without either of them noticing it, the exact rhythm of the argument that had started the whole thing two years earlier.
“I’ll say it every day for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes to convince you.”
She believed him completely. She had no reason, that evening, sitting on a sea wall with the tide going out and a whole ordinary future laid out in front of her exactly the way she’d always assumed one would be, to believe anything else.
Interlude: Iloilo City, 1965
The dormitory at the nursing school held forty-two girls in rooms built comfortably for half that number, and Perla Villanueva shared hers with three others, including, from the very first week, a sharp-tongued girl from Janiuay named Nora Bacalso who announced within an hour of meeting her that she intended to be the best nurse in their entire batch and did not particularly care who found that ambition unattractive.
They were not friends immediately. Perla found Nora abrasive; Nora found Perla soft, in the way ambitious young women sometimes misread kindness as a lack of spine. What changed it, midway through the first year, was a night shift observation rotation on the men’s ward where a patient went into distress at two in the morning and the two of them, alone together in a corridor with no supervising nurse in sight, had roughly forty seconds to decide what to do and did it correctly, at the same time, without either of them needing to say a word to the other.
They walked back to the dormitory at dawn, shaking, and Nora said, staring straight ahead, “You’re better under pressure than you look.”
“You’re kinder under pressure than you look.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They were inseparable after that, in the specific way of two people who have been frightened together at two in the morning and have discovered they can rely on each other’s hands. Three years of a training that was, by any modern standard, brutal: twelve-hour clinical rotations layered on top of coursework, inspections where a supervising sister ran a white glove along a bed frame and could send a girl home for a week over dust, an English-language requirement enforced with a severity that had less to do with medicine than with the specific colonial inheritance of the entire curriculum, which had been built by Americans, taught in their language, and aimed, from its founding, at producing nurses who could work anywhere in the world.
Nobody said that last part out loud to the students. They didn’t need to. Every girl in that dormitory understood, by the second year, what the credential in their hands was actually for, and understood equally that the ones who eventually left would be envied and the ones who stayed would be, quietly, a little bit pitied, and that neither reaction had much to do with what any individual girl actually wanted from her own life.
“Would you go?” Perla asked Nora once, near the end. “If they offered.”
“In a heartbeat. Nothing here I’d be sorry to leave.” Nora had said it flatly, without self-pity, a girl whose family situation Perla knew enough about not to press on. Then, after a moment: “You wouldn’t. You’ve got the schoolteacher.”
“I could go and come back. Two years is two years.”
Nora had looked at her for a long moment with an expression Perla would remember for the rest of her life, decades later, in a country neither of them had seen yet on the day of that conversation.
“Sure,” Nora said. “Two years is two years.”
She said it in Hiligaynon, which is worth recording, because sixty years later, in a locked thrift shop in Daly City, she would say almost the same sentence to a granddaughter in English and it would not carry any of the same weight, and she would notice that it didn’t, and would let it go.
Neither of them cried at the graduation. Nora’s family did not come; Perla’s mother came and wept through the entire ceremony and then complained about the heat for the whole journey home, which is the correct way for a mother to attend a graduation and which Perla would find herself doing, decades later, at her own granddaughter’s.
Chapter One
The Lamay
The funeral home on Hickey Boulevard had a room they used for exactly this purpose, and Perla Bautista lay in it for three nights running, in the pale blue dress Liza had chosen because it was the one her mother had worn to Maya’s college graduation, the closest thing in the whole closet to an outfit Perla had ever actually loved wearing rather than merely owned.
The dress had been a fight. Not a large one, and not one anybody would have called a fight out loud, but Maya had watched her mother stand in front of the open closet for eleven minutes on the Tuesday after, pulling things out and putting them back, and had understood by minute four that this was not really about the dress.
“The green one,” Liza had said, finally, holding it up.
“She hated the green one.”
“She wore it to church.”
“She wore it to church because Tita Fe gave it to her and she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She complained about it every single time she put it on.” Maya reached past her mother and took down the pale blue, the one with the small covered buttons at the cuff. “This one. She wore this to my graduation and she kept the picture on the credenza for eleven years.”
Liza had looked at the blue dress for a long moment. Then she’d taken it out of Maya’s hands, laid it over her arm the way you’d carry something asleep, and said, “Fine,” in a tone that had nothing to do with agreement and everything to do with not being able to keep standing in that closet another minute.
Filipino wakes do not run quickly, whatever the funeral home prints on its visiting-hours card. The manager, a young man in a suit that fit him badly across the shoulders, had said seven to nine on the phone. By quarter past nine on the first night there were still thirty people in the room and a fresh tray of pancit arriving through the side door, and by the second night he had stopped mentioning the card at all and started simply unlocking the coffee machine at six and going home at ten, which Maya thought was the single most graceful piece of professional judgment she’d witnessed all year.
The first night brought maybe forty people through in polite waves. Parish women in cardigans. Two of Perla’s former colleagues, both retired now, both of whom told Maya the same story about a supervisor in 1994 without either of them knowing the other had told it. Father Santos led the rosary in his unhurried baritone, five decades of Hail Marys that Maya found herself mouthing along to out of pure muscle memory, the words arriving from somewhere much further back than her adult brain, though she could not have told anyone when she’d last sat through a full rosary before this week.
The second night brought closer to eighty. Somebody located a stack of folding chairs in a closet down the hall and the room absorbed them without ever quite feeling less full. By the third night the whole thing had turned into something closer to an exhausted family reunion, grief and gossip and foil trays sharing the same crowded space with nobody finding that arrangement strange, because it wasn’t strange, because this was simply what it looked like when a woman had fed several hundred people over fifty years and all of them showed up at once to say so.
She learned, over three nights, that a receiving line has a rhythm and that you can get good at it, which is a horrible thing to become good at.
Maya stood receiving-line duty beside her mother all three evenings, accepting the same condolences phrased forty different ways.
She’s with God now.
She’s with your Lolo now.
She lived such a full life, apo, such a full life.
Every one of them kindly meant. Every one of them true. And each one landing, by the third repetition, with slightly less weight than the one before it, the way any true thing said enough times in a row starts to feel like something recited rather than something felt. By the second night Maya had caught herself answering on autopilot, thank you, thank you for coming, she would have loved that you came, and had gone briefly cold with the horror of realizing she’d said it to four people in a row without looking at any of their faces.
She made herself look after that. It was harder and it was better.
Roughly a third of them cried. About a fifth said something Maya could tell they had prepared in the car. Two people told her, unprompted and in almost identical language, that her grandmother had lent them money and refused repayment, and neither of them appeared to know about the other.
A woman of about sixty introduced herself as somebody Perla had trained in 1991 and said, twice, that she had been terrifying, and appeared to mean it as the highest available compliment, which Maya eventually understood that it was.
An old man she didn’t recognize held her hand in both of his for a long time and told her, with total conviction, that her grandmother had once talked him out of leaving his wife.
“When?”
“Nineteen eighty-six.” He was maybe eighty-five, and his eyes were wet, and he seemed entirely unembarrassed about any of it. “I was standing outside the church having a cigarette and feeling very sorry for myself. She came out and she said, Boy, are you going to smoke that or propose to it. And then she made me tell her the whole thing.” He laughed, wheezing slightly. “She said I was being an idiot. Not gently. She said it exactly like that. We were married another twenty-nine years.”
He moved on down the line before Maya could ask his name, and she stood there with the vertigo of a woman learning, on night two of three, that there had been an entire population of people her grandmother had bossed into better lives without ever once mentioning it at a family dinner.
Liza held herself upright through all three nights with a brittle competence that worried Maya considerably more than open weeping would have. She greeted every guest by name. She thanked every casserole by the name of the dish itself, which struck Maya as both absurd and exactly correct, the way thank you for the kaldereta, Tita said something thank you for coming never could. She arranged the flower deliveries along the back wall by size, largest to smallest, and then rearranged them twice more over the course of the evening as new ones arrived, with the same brisk efficiency she would later bring to a hall closet.
Only once did Maya catch her doing nothing at all.
It was the second night, during the lull when most people had gone down the hall for coffee, and Liza was standing alone at the casket with one hand resting on the polished edge of it. Not praying, as far as Maya could tell. Not crying. Simply standing there, the way a person stands guard over something she is not ready to stop protecting.
Maya came up beside her and didn’t say anything for a while, which she suspected was the correct move and which she had learned, she realized, from the woman lying in front of them.
“You okay, Ma?”
Liza didn’t answer right away.
“She looks like herself,” she said finally. “I was worried she wouldn’t. Some people don’t, after. You go in and it’s a wax model of somebody you knew.” She adjusted nothing. Her hand stayed exactly where it was. “But she looks like herself.”
It was, Maya understood only much later, the truest thing her mother said out loud across all three nights, and Maya had missed it entirely at the time, because at the time it had sounded like a woman talking about a mortician’s work.