Page 73 of Angel of Thursdays

OPPA

Okay. Get some sleep.

Then nothing for a day. Then it was May again, mid-afternoon the day after. He didn’t remember sending it.

May

Hope work was okay!

And Cassiel:

OPPA

It was fine. Peter says howdy.

May knew Cassiel’s texts by now. The single-word replies meant amusement, the lone period meant You’re annoying but I like you. This was less than nothing. This was Cassiel choosing to give nothing except ‘howdy.’

The fact that Cassiel’s nickname was still set to OPPA was beyond stupid now, but he couldn’t summon the will to change it.

He typed What did you tell your mom and watched the cursor blink, then deleted it slowly, letter by letter, each backspace a tiny surrender.

May wanted to apologize to the Lims. He needed to. It wouldn’t be difficult, he knew the route. He would take BART to Fremont, walk the walk from the station, see the kumquat plant on the porch. Cassiel’s mom would see him arriving, probably, if she was in the kitchen. He remembered her smiling in the hazy golden light. He remembered her hands were soft and warm when she pressed the envelope into his hands that morning. Would she answer the door?

And Cassiel’s dad. SUNNY SUNGHO LIM, OWNER & PROPRIETER. He had the address for the dry cleaner’s on a business card in his wallet or maybe between the pages of the purple notebook. Then he remembered the car that had dropped Cassiel off that night while May was sitting on the step, remembered “My father drove forty minutes from Fremont,” and his heart was pounding again.

Then—he could text Minju, except he didn’t have Minju’s number, after months, after holding her baby and playing with her son who loved his red shoes and called him ‘hyung’ and God, just thinking about Jaewon⁠—

He had to leave it. He couldn’t do anything until he was good again.

* * *

Lau Kee reopened on the Tuesday after Chinese New Year. Auntie and Uncle had come back from Philly with hats. May showed up because his body needed to leave the apartment, and for the usual reasons that never changed.

The kitchen was steam and noise and it felt oddly calming to be with his friends the industrial sprayer and the scalding water. The rhythm was old, far older than Cassiel, older than the accident, and the sink didn’t care what his week was like. It cared whether the woks were clean, and they weren’t.

Close to lunch time, Auntie Tsang accosted him with a plate of cheong fun and said, “No standing.”

May grabbed the plate and went to find a tiny stool to sit on while he stuffed his face. The radio was playing something different, not Andy or Hacken or Leslie or even Faye Wong. Something not on the playlist. It was a woman’s voice, a ballad he half-recognized—maybe something his mother used to sing while grading theory homework.

His hands trembled around the chopsticks as he tried to place the tune. He knew what this was. The beta-blocker had been out of his system since Friday and his heart was messing with him—pounding when he bent over the sink, skipping when he stood up too fast, reminding him it was there. His body was pissed at him, because he deserved it.

Uncle Lau wandered through, brow furrowed.

“Ah-Mui,” he said gravely, using May’s Lau Kee nickname that he was not-so-secretly very proud of. “Auntie changed the CD.”

“Oh,” May said around a mouthful of cheong fun, trying for interested, though his heart wasn’t in it. “It’s nice though?”

“Old-fashioned,” Uncle Lau said, shaking his head. “I told her. She said, ‘You have same CD in there for twenty years!’ Then I can’t say anything. Ah-Mui, we change it back next week when Auntie’s busy.”

“Old-fashioned,” May repeated. “Uncle, I…”

Uncle waited for him to finish, but May couldn’t find the end of the bit. After a few seconds, the man sighed, gestured at the radio, and then moved back out into the front of the shop.

May finished off the plate and put it in the sink to wash, then got back to work.

When his next break came, he trudged out into the alley. Ah-Keung was already there, leaned against the wall, cigarette going. May sat on the milk crate. The crate was cold through his jeans and the ridges dug into his ass. Ah-Keung’s lighter clicked. The end of the cigarette flared and smoke went up into the alley air, which smelled like piss and grease so the smoke was, for once, appreciated.

May stared at the wall across the alley. It had a new tag on it in silver paint: YUNG.