Without Looking
11. The table stays the same. You don't.
Marina had left the food on the table and gone to her room by the time he arrived.
This was her Friday rhythm — cook, set out, disappear. She had her own television, her own hours, the particular sovereignty of someone who had learned how to live inside someone else’s house without being consumed by it. He’d heard the sound of her program through the door as he passed, something with a laugh track, comfortable and low.
The sweet pork was in the center. Dark and glossy, the sauce reduced to the consistency his mother liked, the meat falling off the bone the way it only did after hours on low heat. The curry was to the right, a smaller bowl, his father’s concession acknowledged and accommodated without comment. Vegetables on the left. Rice in the cooker on the counter, the keep-warm light on, the steam still faint.
His mother was already seated. She looked up when he came in and her face did what it did when she saw him — the particular warmth of it, immediate and unguarded, the look she’d probably been giving him since he was small enough to need it.
“You look thin,” she said.
“I’m not thin,” he said.
“Sit down.”
His father came in from the living room with the newspaper folded under his arm, the habit of a man who still read the physical paper every evening, who had never fully trusted information that didn’t come on newsprint. He nodded at David. Sat. Unfolded a corner of the paper to check something, then folded it again and put it beside his plate.
“Traffic bad?” he asked.
“Not bad,” David said.
His mother served him before he asked. Sweet pork, heavy on the sauce, the way she knew he liked it. She served his father next — curry, rice, the vegetables on the side. Then herself, last, the way she always did.
They ate.
The curry smelled of his father’s preference — something particular about the spicing, the way Marina had learned it over the years, adjusted it incrementally until it was precisely the curry his father wanted without his father ever needing to describe what that was. David watched his father eat it with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose preferences were known and accommodated.
“Alina called this morning,” his mother said.
“What time?” his father asked.
“Seven-thirty. She forgot the difference again.”
“She always forgets.”
“She’s excited about the apartment. She wants us to see the kitchen.” His mother looked up. “Nathan helped her find it. Very good location, she says. Near the park.”
“Nathan knows New York well?” David asked.
“He grew up there. His family is from Queens.” His mother said this with the approval of someone filing useful information. “He knows which neighborhoods.”
David ate his pork.
Nathan. Queens. Knows which neighborhoods. He’d met Nathan twice — once when Nathan came through Singapore with Alina two years ago, once when David had a stopover in New York and they’d had dinner near Alina’s old apartment, the four of them at a table that felt slightly too small for the occasion. He’d liked him well enough. Stable, his mind supplied. Lawyer. Ambitious. The words arriving in the same order they always arrived, forming the shape of a person he’d never quite looked at directly.
He put some vegetables on his plate.
“You’ll come?” his mother asked. “To New York.”
“When are you going?”
“Next month. Two weeks. You could come for part of it. Alina keeps asking.”
“I might be traveling,” he said.
“Where?”
He set his chopsticks down briefly.
“I’m going to see Godma,” he said. “Chiang Mai.”
His mother looked up. Something moved across her face — not alarm exactly. Her eyes went to his plate for a moment before they came back.
“Lina?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“When did you arrange this?”
“Tonight,” he said. “Just now.”
His father looked up from the curry. The same brief look as before. Not asking.
“She’ll be happy to see you,” his mother said, after a moment. Her voice had settled back into its usual warmth but something underneath it was still paying attention. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks.” She repeated it without inflection.
He felt hollow. He didn’t look for a reason.
“You’ll take something for her. I have her pineapple tarts. The ones she likes from Bengawan Solo. I was going to mail them but you can bring them.”
“Okay,” he said.
“She always asks about them. Every time I talk to her she says she can’t find them in Chiang Mai. The ones there are not the same.”
“I’ll bring them.”
His mother nodded and served him more pork and the subject moved on, back to Alina’s kitchen, Nathan’s family in Queens, whether two weeks was enough time to see the city properly. His father had opinions about the High Line, had read something about it, thought they should go. His mother wanted to see a show. They negotiated this with the ease of two people who had been negotiating for decades, who knew where each other’s edges were and how to work around them.
David ate.
He thought about his mother going to the tin tomorrow morning, counting out the pineapple tarts, wrapping them carefully in the way she wrapped things she was sending to people she loved. Her hands doing it without being asked. The small reliable continuity of it.
He noticed, without doing anything about it, that his weight wasn’t fully in the chair. He was sitting forward. Not leaning in — just not all the way down.
He thought about Lina receiving them in Chiang Mai.
The two women on either end of a tin of pineapple tarts, connected by the particular thread of a long friendship, and him the one carrying it between them.
Nathan. Stable. Lawyer. Ambitious.
He turned the words over one more time.
He had been approving Nathan the way he approved revisions.
Without looking.
The thought sat there. He let it sit.
His mother was asking his father about the aisle seat. His father was saying the direct flight was fine, Tokyo was unnecessary.
David ate his pork and listened to his parents negotiate the small logistics of a trip they were both looking forward to and felt the particular ache of a table you’ve sat at your whole life, the food always the same, the voices always the same, the light in the kitchen always the same, and you the variable.