Uncomfortable Questions
43. Every question either of them asked was really about herself.
The cafe was a short walk from the block. Striped awnings over a row of outdoor tables, a chalkboard specials list, oat milk as the default rather than the ask. Amandha had already claimed a table outside when Wen arrived. Beside her chair sat Yogi’s pram, its back folded flat into something closer to a bed than a seat, and a small metal bowl of water set on the pavement next to it.
As Wen sat, Yogi climbed out on his own, unhurried, no lift required, turned twice, and settled at Amandha’s feet.
“He does that himself now,” Amandha said, following Wen’s glance. “Took him a while to trust the ramp. Now he’s insufferable about needing anyone’s help.” She nudged the water bowl an inch closer to him with her foot. “The pram’s less about carrying him and more about giving him somewhere to be included from. He doesn’t love travelling in it. Hates being left at home more.”
Wen crouched briefly. “Hi, Yogi.”
Yogi raised his head, looked at her once, and put it back down on his paws with a long sigh.
A laminated card sat propped against the napkin holder, its QR code gone soft at the corners from other people’s thumbs. Amandha scanned it without fuss.
“I’m getting the eggs. Sunny side, the sausage, the works. You?”
“I’ll get the same.”
“Two coffees, then.” Amandha tapped through the order, thumb quick and certain. She frowned. “It’ll take a bit. Sunday.”
“My mother told me you’ve been writing,” Amandha said, turning her cup. “Properly, I mean. Not just journaling. No offense to journaling. Something like a blog?”
“I’m not happy in my job,” she said. “My-“
Partner. The word came, and Kaia came with it, uninvited. She said it anyway. “My partner knows that much. Not the rest of it.”
Amandha let the pause sit, watching, and didn’t reach for anything to make it easier.
Wen looked at the table. It took her a second to come back to it. “HR is fine. It’s not a bad job. It just doesn’t ask me anything. The writing does. It’s the only place I get to answer a question that’s actually mine.”
“What’s the question.”
“What my life is supposed to mean. Not whether it’s stable. Not whether it looks right on paper. Enough CPF, enough progression, the boxes my parents needed ticked because not ticking them nearly killed them. Survival was their question. They answered it. I’m grateful, genuinely. But survival is half a life. Nobody told them that. Nobody told me either, until I wrote it down and saw it in my own handwriting.”
Amandha didn’t say anything right away. She was looking at Wen.
“That’s not a small thing to say before the eggs arrive,” she said finally.
“I know. I didn’t want it to be a big thing.”
“Too late for that one, I think.”
A server set two plates down between them: eggs glistening, toast leaning against the sausage, everything a little too hot to touch yet. Amandha didn’t start on hers right away.
Under the table, Yogi sneezed, got up, and crossed to Wen’s side. He lay back down against her ankle, chin on her sandal, uninvited.
Amandha looked down. “He doesn’t usually do that.”
“No?”
“He’s suspicious of everyone. It’s practically his whole personality.” She watched him a second longer, then chuckled. “He clearly has opinions about you.”
“Good opinions, I hope.”
“Well, he hasn’t left. That’s basically a testimonial.”
They ate for a while without saying much. A fork clinked against a plate. Somewhere behind them the espresso machine hissed. On the pavement beyond the awning a jogger passed, then a woman walking two dogs who glanced at Yogi and kept moving.
Amandha turned her cup. “My sister called Friday. I was at work, clearing out the pantry fridge, holding an apple like an idiot.” A small, dry laugh, more breath than sound. “She did the usual. Worked through all the family news before she got to the actual thing. You’re still young. Meet people.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing useful. ‘I know. Not now.’ The usual deflection.” She turned the cup another quarter-turn. “A colleague was in the room, caught the whole thing, then told me exactly what she thought of it after. Which was more than I wanted at the time and probably exactly what I needed.”
“What did she say?”
Amandha pursed her lips before she answered. “That ‘not now’ is what you say when the real answer is no and you don’t want the argument that comes with saying so.” A short pause. “She wasn’t wrong. Unfortunately. She’s rarely wrong. It’s very annoying, actually, now that I say it.”
“You don’t have to tell me the rest,” Wen said.
“I know.” But Amandha’s phone buzzed on the table before she could say anything else. She turned it over and went still for half a second reading it.
“Speak of,” she said. “Christine. Ma keeps asking when you’ll bring someone home. I told her to leave it. She won’t.” She read it once more, thumb hovering, then locked the screen without replying. “Aiyoh. It’s not even Christine’s question. She’s just carrying it for my mother. Ma doesn’t ask me directly. She asks Christine to ask, and Christine asks me, and somehow nobody has to be the one who actually said it out.”
“That’s a lot of relay for one question.”
“Very efficient. Nobody has to hear no to their face.” She set the phone face-down, hard. Yogi got up from under the table at the sound, crossed back to his pram, and scratched at the flattened bed a few times before dropping into it. Amandha exhaled. A few strands of her fringe fell loose across her face, and she left them there. “She wants me married. That’s the actual ask under ‘meet people’ and ‘you’re still young’ and all of it. Married. Specifically. Not just seeing someone. The whole shebang.”
“And you don’t want that.”
“I used to think I did. I don’t think I do anymore.” She waved a hand at the whole idea of it. “The registry, all of that. I’m not sure I ever wanted that part, if I’m honest.” Her voice dropped, quiet and level. “I wanted someone who’d know which day had been hard. I thought that came with the paperwork.” Amandha took a sip of her coffee. “It doesn’t.”
Wen turned her fork over without eating anything on it. The question arrived before she’d decided to ask it.
“Why did you marry him? In the first place.”
Amandha considered, unhurried. “I think I married him because it was the next correct thing. I loved him, I want to be clear about that, whatever the word meant to me back then. But there was something I wanted underneath it that I couldn’t have named. So I asked the question that had an answer. Does this make sense. I should have asked, do I want this. I could not answer what I did not know I wanted.” A small pause. “Those weren’t the same question. But I didn’t know that yet.”
“Do you know it now?”
“I know it very well now.” A small, dry laugh. “It’s an expensive way to learn a definition.”
Wen reached for the toast, then left it. Anything true she could say would have been about herself, and she wasn’t going to say it. Amandha watched her not answer, and didn’t ask.
“There’s something else, though,” Amandha said. “A different question. I don’t think I’ve said it to anyone.”
Wen waited.
“Who do you want next to you when you’re old,” Amandha said. “Not who signs anything. Who’s actually there. Who you’d let see the body failing, who you’d trust with it.” She turned her cup a quarter-turn, her grip tightening on it. “There’s someone I keep thinking about when I start with these questions. But I’ve not gone further.”
“Someone you know.”
“Someone.” She didn’t offer more for a moment. Then, quieter: “Older than me. A little.” She turned the cup again. “It’s not the age. It’s that I knew him a long time ago, then not for years. Not enough to know who he is now. Just enough to feel who he was.”
Wen didn’t say anything.
“Which is the actual question, I suppose,” Amandha said. “Not whether I want him. Whether the man I remember and the man he is now are even the same person to want.” Amandha shook her head. “It feels wrong. Too soon. And maybe the only real thing I’ve asked in years. Both at once.”
Wen thought of Han Qin, the bedside table at the right height, the accounting that had stopped working without her deciding it should. “I don’t think those are two different things,” Wen said slowly. “The wrong-feeling. And the real one. They can be the same chair.”
Amandha looked at her then. No words in it. The stare narrowed, not like a scold. It took her a moment. “That’s an uncomfortably good sentence for eleven in the morning.”
“I’ve been practising uncomfortable sentences. It’s been a whole week.”
Amandha almost answered that lightly, and didn’t. Whatever she’d been carrying since Friday was still in her, and now it felt like she could say it out loud. “You know, there’s a TikTok,” she said. “Half the ward watches it. A woman, sells bags, does a live most Fridays.” She turned her cup. “I watched it properly for the first time on the bus this Friday. There were two men in the background. Not her sons… I don’t think. I don’t actually know what they are to her.”
“What did it look like?”
“Chosen,” Amandha said. “Not inherited. Whatever those two men were to her, nobody in the frame was there because they had to be. She wasn’t being humoured. She was the reason the room was full.” She shrugged and looked down. “It’s not what my sister means when she says settled. But it looked more settled than anything Christine’s ever described to me.”
Wen set her fork down. “Is she older? Eurasian?”
Amandha looked up. “Yes.”
“And the man tall?”
“There are two, actually. One of them, yes.” Amandha’s cup paused. “You know them?”
“I know that cafe. Two streets from my office. First time I sat in it, my shoulders dropped for no reason I could name.” She turned the fork over. “I went to her at a fair once. For an astrology reading. Years ago.”
“Astrology, huh?” Amandha said. “Small world.”
They stayed until the cafe thinned toward lunch, the tables around them turning over to the next round of families and their pancakes.
Amandha looked down and found Yogi flat out in the lowered pram, chin over the edge, snoring softly.
“He’s been on duty the whole time,” she said. “He always is. He doesn’t go down like that unless he’s decided somewhere’s safe.” She didn’t look up from him. “Took him a long time to be able to sleep like this. I didn’t think he’d get there.”
Wen smiled. She didn’t press it, and she didn’t ask.
Wen took out her phone. “Here,” she said, and sent the link across.
Amandha’s phone buzzed against the table. She turned it face-up, saw the title, What the Survival Was For, and didn’t open it yet. Just looked at it a moment.
“I’ll read it properly tonight,” she said. “When it’s quiet.”
“You don’t have to say anything about it after.”
“I know.” One corner of Amandha’s mouth lifted. “But I probably will anyway.”