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There were three of them sitting around the table.
Three, not four.
Alex was at a Chinese seafood restaurant in Scarborough with his father and his brother, who was in town for work. Even though Alex was keenly aware that his mother wasn’t there, it was nowhere near as awkward as it would be if it was just him and his father.
“The Chinese food here is better than in Calgary,” Stuart said as he reached for the scallops with vegetables. “The other day, one of my colleagues told me he liked Asian food. ‘What kind?’ I asked him, and he seemed totally confused by the question, as though Asia was all the same to him, one big continent with a few billion exotic people.” He smoothly moved the conversation to a new topic. “What’s new with you, Alex? What project do they have you working on now?”
“An addition to East Markham Hospital,” he said before stuffing a shrimp in his mouth. “Been there for a few months now.”
“Going okay?”
“Sure. It’s fine.”
He’d been to East Markham Hospital many, many times in the months before his mom’s death. At first, he’d grimaced when he’d learned he was being put on this project, but he’d pushed those feelings aside. It was work. He could manage—and manage he did.
He didn’t mention his mother now, nor did he mention Iris. It was Thursday, and he hadn’t seen her in almost a week. He wondered when she’d be coming back to site—probably early next week. They’d sent each other a few text messages since she’d left his place on Saturday morning, but not many. He wanted to ask her to come over again, but he felt awkward about it and feared she’d say no. She seemed to have her own set of rules for her life, and he wasn’t entirely sure what they were. Yet she’d stayed all night and even tried to make him breakfast the next morning.
He couldn’t help but smile at the thought of her screwing up scrambled eggs.
“What’s up?” Stuart asked. “You don’t just smile for no reason. You got a girl?”
“Sort of,” Alex said, before he could think better of it.
His father had probably noticed him randomly smiling, too, but Dad wouldn’t ask about such things. Stuart was more like their mother in this respect. In most ways, actually.
“Oh? This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Dad perked up. “And I just saw you on Sunday.”
Yes, Dad had stopped by again on Sunday with another box of food. He hadn’t brought any frozen wontons or pomelos this time, but apparently apple pies had been on sale, and he’d gotten two for Alex.
“Like I said, I sort of have a girlfriend. It’s not very serious. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But somebody”—Alex slapped his brother on the shoulder—“is nosy.”
Except, in a way, it did seem serious with Iris, even if she’d only slept over once.
“What’s her name?” Stuart asked.
“Iris.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s an engineer.”
“Did you meet her at work?” Dad asked.
“Um, it’s complicated. We first met at a bar. And that’s all I’m telling you.”
Dad seemed to accept this.
Stuart, however, grabbed Alex’s phone off the table and found Iris’s contact information and picture. “She’s pretty. Shall I send her a message and say I’m excited to meet her?”
Alex wrestled the phone out of his brother’s hands and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Fine.” Stuart held up his hands in surrender before picking up his chopsticks again. “No text messaging, but next time I’m in town, you should invite her to dinner with us.”
Alex was about to say he didn’t know if Iris would still be in his life at that point. He had no idea how to define their relationship.
But he couldn’t get those words out of his mouth because the thought of not having Iris around caused him too much pain.
“How’s Ericka?” Dad asked Stuart.
“Oh. About that.” Stuart put down his chopsticks again.
Shit. Was something wrong with his sister-in-law? Alex dropped his shrimp and stared at his brother. He couldn’t bear it if something else was wrong.
Stuart had a stupid grin on his face, though. “She’s pregnant.”
Silence.
“Well, come on,” Stuart said, gesturing toward himself. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
Mom would have spoken in the silence. That was the problem. She was always the first to react, usually with ear-splitting volume. Like when Stuart had announced he was getting married.
They’d had their first Christmas without her. Chinese New Year. Her birthday—she would have been sixty-two. They’d gotten through those milestones, but this type of big news was different.
Alex glanced at the empty chair at the four-person table before turning back to Stuart. “Congratulations. How far along?”
“Twelve weeks. We’re hoping to move back to Toronto before the baby comes. I’m not here just for the conference—I also have an interview tomorrow.”
His brother was thirty-one, but Alex was having trouble wrapping his mind around the fact that Stuart was going to have a kid.
He was glad they planned to move back to Toronto. Ericka’s family was in the Toronto area, too, and it would be good for them to have family around when there was a baby.
Alex would be an uncle.
And his father...
“You’ll be a grandfather,” Stuart said, smiling at Dad.
* * *
The rest of the dinner went reasonably well, but when Alex got home, he didn’t feel like himself. He sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a scowl.
This wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all.
His mother was gone, and yet the world kept on going, and that shouldn’t be possible. She’d never get to hold her grandchildren. She’d never get to spoil them rotten and sneak them extra sweets, and God, she would have been such a wonderful grandmother, and this just wasn’t fair. She used to talk about Stuart and Alex having kids one day, in a joking way—it wasn’t like she’d pressured them—and now that time had come and she wasn’t here.
He rested his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands, but his hands were shaking.
“Dammit.”
He wanted to go to the gym. He wanted to beat his body down physically, and maybe that would give him some respite, but it was nine o’clock at night. He had to be up early tomorrow, and he didn’t feel like driving anywhere.
There was also a nearby coffee shop that he liked. It was rarely busy—much to his surprise, since it was a nice place—and sitting on the back patio was soothing, somehow. Unfortunately, it closed at six o’clock.
Instead, he ran up and down the residential streets in the Annex, finding the smallest amount of solace in the activity. The pounding of his feet on the pavement, his heavy breathing. Forty minutes later, he returned home and had a shower, and then he was back to sitting at his kitchen table, feeling like he couldn’t stand to be in own his skin, not when the world was the way it was.
He wasn’t used to feeling like this.
In the months since his mom had died, he’d always felt like he had some semblance of control, despite the grief. But there was just something about Stuart’s news. Happy news, but it had been a punch to the gut, and he couldn’t seem to separate himself from it the way he normally could.
He picked up his phone to text Iris, then dropped it back on the table.
Like he’d told Stuart, she was only sort of his girlfriend. Asking her to come over now and stay the night, when he was in a foul mood—that didn’t feel like something he could ask of her.
He didn’t want to talk to Jamie or another friend.
He wanted Iris.
Alex knew he’d feel better with her company. She could distract him better than anyone else. Even when she couldn’t completely take his mind off things, somehow she made everything okay. He could feel things with her, and yet it was safe at the same time.
It felt like too much of an imposition to ask her to come over tonight, but he could ask her to come over tomorrow after work. Tomorrow was Friday, and if she slept over, maybe she could burn his breakfast again. Or maybe he could simply hold her as the morning light filtered through the curtains.
He texted her, then he stared at his phone for ten minutes, unable to do anything but wait for her response. When she said she was free tomorrow, he let out a sigh of relief.
Tomorrow, he would see her.
The thought calmed him enough that he was able to get some sleep.
* * *
As soon as Iris came through his door on Friday evening, they were upon each other, kissing each other, undressing each other, hurrying to the bedroom. Alex needed to feel every inch of her, to lose himself in the physicality of it all.
After he’d found his release inside her, they lay curled up in bed together, his arm around her. They stayed there for a long time without talking, and then he made her wonton soup with bok choy and chicken stock, chopped green onions on top.
His mother had made the chicken stock. She would make a big batch every few months and freeze it in glass jars in the downstairs freezer at their house. It was weird to think of it as Dad’s house now, not Mom and Dad’s house, and it was only two months ago that Alex had changed the contact in his phone from “Mom and Dad” to “Dad” and deleted her cell number.
There was still chicken stock from the previous summer in the freezer. She’d made it just after she’d been diagnosed with cancer, and Dad had brought over a few jars in his last box of food, her handwriting marking the date on each lid.
Had his father been using the chicken stock? Or was it too painful for him?
Somehow, jars of frozen chicken stock had taken on unbearable significance in their lives. Yet another thing they never talked about.
“This is delicious,” Iris said. They were sitting at his kitchen table, eating out of blue-and-white porcelain bowls with matching Chinese soup spoons.
“The wontons are store-bought,” he said. “And the stock...my mother made it.”
She leveled a gaze at him. “I thought your mother was dead.”
“She is, but this was in the freezer. She made it a year ago.”
He tried to feel his mother’s love in each bite he took, but although the soup was tasty, it was nothing more than simple food.
Iris put down her spoon. “I feel like I should say something deep and meaningful now, but I’m better at snarky comments.” She patted his thigh under the table.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”
Iris was not the sort of person who made people pour out their hearts and spill their deepest secrets. At least, he doubted other people saw her that way, but there was still something about her that made him comfortable in a way he wasn’t with anyone else.
“My brother’s wife is pregnant,” he said. “He told us at dinner last night, and all I could think was that my mother would never get to meet her grandchild. It was happy, but it wasn’t, not really. I felt like shit when I got home, and nothing I did helped at all.” Except when you said you’d come over today. That helped a little. “Which isn’t like me. I can usually push things aside and go on as usual, more or less. In the days following her death, I was so damn functional. Now, I don’t understand how I did it.”
“You did it because you had to, and it felt better than falling to pieces. But you don’t have to be strong all the time. You can let yourself feel the way you feel now. You don’t have to force it away.” Iris shook her head. “Don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“No, it makes sense.” He reached across the table and covered her hand with his.
I can only let myself feel this way when I’m with you.