Page 31 of Angel of Thursdays

May smiled, tired around the edges but soft, and wrapped his hands around his cup.

They’d been talking about nothing—a video May had sent him about a woman who collected high-end Japanese stationery and organized it by hue, which Cassiel had found both impressive and somewhat beautiful. May had sent it with: could be you if you were a lady with cute stuff. The conversation drifted from there to the pen May used for his notebooks, a Pilot G2 07 which Cassiel had thoughts on but did not share, and then to the notebooks themselves, and then finally to a quiet that neither of them filled quickly enough.

May had been looking down at his phone, one brow raised, chewing the left side of his bottom lip in thought. He looked up, sensing Cassiel’s gaze on him.

“—My brother. Relaying a message from our mom,” he explained.

Cassiel nodded. He took a drink of his chocolate mint latte, lukewarm, and looked at the opposite wall while May tapped a volley of responses into his phone. He waited until the haptic sounds stopped before opening his mouth.

“I wanted to ask you⁠—”

“Do you wanna go to⁠—”

They stopped. The café sounds filled the gap—the espresso machine, a spoon against ceramic, the low hum of the fridge behind the counter.

“Go ahead,” Cassiel said.

“No, mine was stupid. You go.”

Cassiel folded his arms. The question he’d been carrying for a week was right there, and he was either going to ask it now or carry it for another week and another week after that.

“I wanted to ask you a question. About your job.”

May’s eyebrows shifted. “About… STDY? Or Lau Kee?”

“About Lau Kee. Specifically—” The sentence stalled. Why are you washing dishes was too blunt. Too close to an assessment of someone else’s life that Cassiel had no right to make. He tried again. “You’re good with people. Better than—You’re very good with people, but you wash dishes. You could be earning tips.”

He stopped short of saying elsewhere.

May looked at him. His hand went to the back of his neck and rubbed it.

“I used to be out front,” he said. “I was pretty good at it, actually.”

“Then… a few years ago, I was in an accident. Car thing. Not a lot of damage, but—head injury. Headaches and stuff, not a big deal, considering. But anyway, after that my brain just…” May made a flicking motion near his head. An explosion, or a magic trick. “I started losing things. Orders and names. I’d be talking and then would just—pshhh. Fall out from under me.”

“Auntie and Uncle moved me to the back. They didn’t make a big deal of it, they’re chill. They just—one day I was washing dishes and that was the job now.”

The notebooks and the phone alarms, the way May sometimes repeated things under his breath. The moment at the table on Chuseok when May had paused mid-sentence and his eyes had gone flat for a half-second before snapping back. Everything Cassiel had attributed to quirk or ADHD or May being May now looked different.

His mind ran the arithmetic. A car accident meant emergency room. Emergency room meant hospital. Hospital meant imaging, neurology, follow-up, and in the United States of America, that meant debt. It did not go away. It restructured and accrued and did not stop. So STDY was not pocket money. The rate May charged per booking was not supplemental income for somebody who washed dishes in Chinatown and rode a bus for thirty minutes to get to a café in the Inner Sunset.

There was more in what May had said and what May left out. Cassiel could ask. May had given him one answer. The rest—the accident itself, his family, whatever May’s life looked like on the other side of Thursdays—was not information he’d been offered. Why his nights were empty and not filled with friends, why he only ever talked about his siblings. Why someone who was so good at being liked seemingly had fewer people than Cassiel.

“The notebooks,” Cassiel said.

May looked at him. A flicker of something—surprise, maybe.

“Yeah.” May exhaled. “The notebooks.”

A silence opened between them and Cassiel let it stay open. He sat in the quiet and May sat in the quiet with him, and the light through the window moved a fraction across the table.

May’s fingers found his cup. The ice shifted. He took a sip and set it down and pressed his thumb against the scar on his hand once, hard enough that the skin there turned white under the pressure, and Cassiel just watched.

“Anyway,” May said, “that’s my whole deal. Sorry for the trauma dump.”

“You didn’t trauma dump. I asked.”

“It’s still weird. I just told you my brain’s broken at our regularly scheduled coffee appointment which you pay for.”