At work, Ximena asks where I think Mitsuko heads during the day. We’re looking at photos of the reception venue. She’s opting to skip the actual wedding. A while back, Ximena told me that she’s already walked down the aisle, and it didn’t do much the first time around, so why the fuck would she try that again?
Mike’s mother goes wherever brokenhearted mothers go, I say.
The laundromat, says Ximena.
The mall, I say.
The dog park.
The spa.
The market.
The gym.
The bar.
No way.
What, says Ximena, you think you’re the only one who needs to fuck?
I try not to think of Mitsuko like that at all, I say.
And that’s why you’re stuck, says Ximena. She’s not human to you. Go figure.
As opposed to an angel, I say.
As opposed to anything else, says Ximena.
You’re really calling me a misogynist.
I’m calling you a man, Benson.
Before I can open my mouth, Barry sprints around the corner with Ahmad. He’s got the kid by his shoulders, and Ahmad’s hanging tight to Barry’s stomach.
Barry is actually married himself, to the woman he’s been with since high school. She’s a surgeon. And here he is, cleaning playpens with us. Whenever his wife drops by the building, she smiles at nearly everyone, but one day Ximena told me that she never actually touches anything. To just watch and see if she did.
And Ximena was right. It never happened.
When Ahmad tugs Barry’s neck, he nearly drops the kid.
Your son is having a day, says Barry.
He’s not my son, I say.
Benson’s son needs a haircut, says Ximena.
Stop, says Ahmad. I’m not his.
* * *
Here’s the running joke: as the most child-ambivalent employee in the building, the one who thought he’d only be flipping through paperwork, it turns out that they don’t much mind me at all. That most of the kids we take care of actually like me. And I’m the only one, really, that Ahmad tends to bother with. So whenever Ximena and Barry had an issue they couldn’t handle with our charges, I was their last resort. And then things usually worked out. I still don’t know how I feel about it. But one day I told Mike about this, and he said it made sense and that I just couldn’t see it myself, that this was a part of the appeal.
* * *
Eventually, I ask Ahmad what’s happened, what is the problem, and he tells me that Marcos slapped him.
You mean Marcos slapped you back, says Barry. You started it.
He started it, says Ahmad.
You hit him first, says Barry.
Yeah, says Ahmad, but he started it.
* * *
I could tell Ahmad that, in his own way, he’s right. You don’t have to hit first to start it. And I’d like to tell him that, as young as he is, it doesn’t get any easier.
But instead, I pick him up and flip him over my shoulder. And he looks around at me, a little suspicious. He lets out a grown man’s laugh.
* * *
• • •
At one point, Mike started staying out. Heading who knows where after his shifts. Or maybe he was still at work. Or maybe he sat in his parked car, biding his time, chewing his fingernails. But, in any case, I started camping out on the sofa, which is a thing I probably picked up from one telenovela or another.
* * *
One night Mike stumbled through the door, drunk. He set his phone on the counter. I leapt from my blankets and threw that shit against the wall.
The cell cracked clean in half. We watched it pop in silence. Then it started ringing, and before it stopped, Mike looked at me and asked if he should answer it or what.
* * *
When I told Ximena about it afterward, she wouldn’t stop shaking her head. We were at her place. Her mother was out. So we watched Ximena’s kid, Juan, sprint from wall to wall, giggling at nothing, waiting for the delivery guy. Her fiancé was out of town, at a conference for incisors, and we’d ordered pad thai with some cash he’d left behind.
It’s like we’re in some fucked-up rom-com, I said. It’s like we’re both fucked-up rom-com villains.
Juan ran into the coffee table, bounced off, and careened into a bookshelf. I thought Ximena might stand to check on him, but she just sat there until he jumped up.
Way back when she was still with Juan’s father, Ximena drove herself and the kid to me and Mike’s place. She was crying, a mess, with a half-stuffed backpack for Juan. Mike made her tea while I sat with her on the sofa. Ximena told me she wasn’t ever going back, that this was the last straw, but it was still another month before she finally broke up with the guy.
Now we watched her son attempt a crab-walk across her carpet.
Ximena said, Everybody’s somebody’s villain.
5.
Mitsuko and I form something like an evening routine: She cooks. I set the table. We both eat at the counter. Later, I wipe it down while Mitsuko hits the dishes.
Otherwise, we mostly keep to ourselves. It’s probably better that way.
But I’ve learned a few things. Little things.
Like how, back home, she works at a jewelry store in Shimokitazawa.
Or how she flies to LA three times a year, to meet a man, or to meet a friend, or to meet a man who is also a friend.
And she’s hardly flashy, but all of her clothes are nice. Every sock and skirt and earring is clearly part of a larger, varied whole.
Mike, meanwhile, wears the same three things seven days a week.
He has no patience for schedules, routines, or patterns of any kind.
Before me, he saw whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, fucking them however he wanted, and then he’d leave when he got bored.
Living with Mitsuko is, in other words, entirely unlike living with her son, whose gayness she is comfortable with, or at least not entirely uncomfortable with, or at least less disagreeable toward than my own parents, probably.
* * *
When Mitsuko asks about laundry detergent, I tell her it’s in the cupboard under the sink.
When she asks where we do laundry, I point to the laundromat across the street.