Page 105 of Angel of Thursdays

May set the paper bag by the door and sniffed. His father was cooking. Something with garlic—probably spinach. His mother led them into the living room and May tried to recall if he’d been in here the night of Chinese New Year, or if he’d only passed through it. Had he walked the other way around into the dining room?

A tiny snap made him look up, and it took a moment for May to realize what it was. Cassiel’s hand in his pocket, fiddling with the hair clip. He smiled.

“Thank you for having me, Auntie,” Cassiel said.

“I’m very happy you’re here,” said May’s mother. “Dinner isn’t ready yet. You should sit. Do you want tea? Tie Guanyin, from⁠—”

“He doesn’t want tea,” May interrupted.

Cassiel was still looking around the room. May couldn’t imagine what there was to see other than the piano and the photographs on the wall. May took his boyfriend’s arm. His mother sighed the way she always, always sighed, and disappeared into the kitchen.

“You wanna see my room?” he asked Cassiel.

Cassiel looked at him.

“Upstairs. Come on.”

May tromped up the stairs, hand running up the wooden railing. His parents’ room was the end of the hallway. Anna’s old room was closest to the upstairs bathroom, a premium location, and had the window overlooking the front yard with a decent view into the street. His parents had turned that room into a study, which by their standards meant there were now three bookshelves and an exercise bike in it. To the left, Louis’s door was closed, a thin line of purple light creeping out from underneath.

“You’re impatient with her,” said Cassiel. May didn’t respond. The statement wasn’t wrong. Instead, he nudged open the door to his old bedroom.

May walked inside, expecting stale air but smelled something lemony instead. The windows had been open recently, the surfaces dusted. Nothing had changed about the room. No exercise bikes or extra bookcases. His posters from high school and college were still up, bed made as if he was going to be sleeping in it again. The corkboard he’d stolen from Anna and plastered with ticket stubs and polaroids was as he’d left it, a foul monument to the year 2018. His mother had kept it all.

“She annoys me,” May said. He knew he was impatient with his mom. He also knew that it was childish. Being in this house made him feel like a child. He could feel Cassiel raising an eyebrow. Cassiel did not talk to Miss Mary like May talked to Teresa Ma. He was a better son than that. “It’s like… I know I should be better but it’s hard, you know? I just regress around her.”

“I understand. I can be short, too.” Cassiel’s voice was soft. May tried to imagine what ‘short’ meant between him and his own mother and couldn’t conjure up anything.

“—Oh, check this out.”

May found the milk crate by the closet door where the handful of records he’d bought in college lived. He had tried to display them at one point, putting up a floating shelf that collapsed within a week. Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and Green Day’s Dookie.

“No record player,” Cassiel observed.

“None. I was manifesting. It was on my vision board.” May gestured at the corkboard, which was vision-less unless you considered a printed out AFI 100 Years 100 Movies List with less than ten entries crossed off to be a ‘vision,’ in which case nineteen year old May was a true luminary.

Cassiel ran his finger along the edge of one of the records and said: “It worked out.”

May grinned. He moved over to the desk to look at a note he’d tacked onto the corkboard, and his hand rested on the back of the desk chair, only to find it softer than expected. A dark orange puffer was draped over the back of the chair; the room’s only anachronism. He’d bought this thing at Uniqlo on sale a year or two ago, and he’d been looking for it for months now. Someone had arranged it here.

He stuffed it into his backpack while Cassiel watched. Probably he was just happy that May now had two warm jackets.

* * *

They came back downstairs with three records under May’s arm. He set them by the door next to the bag with his dad’s jacket.

May’s mother was in the kitchen doorway, murmuring something to his dad in Hokkien—low, fast, the dialect May had never learned because it was never for him. His dad replied in two syllables. She said something else, and he said nothing, and then she came back out.

“Wuyue, does your friend play piano?”

“He’s not my friend, Mama, he’s my boyfriend, and no.” He paused. Actually, he had no proof that Cassiel didn’t play the piano, he’d just decided this was so.

“What instrument do you play?” she carried on, turning to Cassiel, because she was determined to get a microaggression correct.

Cassiel, who was looking at the metronome on top of the piano from three feet away, said, “I took cello lessons. But I have sensory issues.”

“Ah.” Her hand went to the piano lid. She lifted it, the action habitual. The piano keys were yellowed at the edges, worn into shallow dips from decades of use. “I tried to teach him. Two years. Every week, screaming and crying.”

May’s voice pitched up in indignation. “Oh my God. I didn’t cry⁠—”