Scene 5
Dad is doing that thing where he starts talking before he even unmutes himself. I laugh.
“Your mic is off, Dad!”
He does this every time: gets too excited to start talking and forgets to follow the steps. Mom says that’s where I get my “zest for life” from, but I’m not sure how forgetting to hit a button is the same thing as a lemon. Anyway, once he finally hits the button, my mom starts asking him all sorts of boring questions that only parents care about. Like taxes or something. I look around the room a bit, distracted by this one fly that keeps zooming in and out of the open window in our kitchen.
“Alright, Maya, he’s all yours,” Mom whispers, tapping my shoulder and pushing her chair out from the kitchen table. She picks up a few of her papers and walks out of the room to go study.
“Hey Dad,” I say. There’s something that feels off about my chair today, like one leg is a bit higher than the other, and I wish I could fix it. I sit on my right hand to see if that helps balance things out. Now that I know that I don’t have to follow all the stage directions, I’m not really sure how to talk to anyone. Not even my dad.
“Hey, M, focus,” he says gently. “Tell me about camp and how your mother is doing.”
“Right, yes,” I say, even though half of my brain is thinking about whether I will lose function in my hand from sitting on it. Calls with my dad aren’t usually very long, since the signal is kinda wobbly. But still, what if I lose all function in my hand and then I have to cut it off and then I can only play a pirate—
“Maya, here, right here,” he says again.
Snapping to attention, I say, “Camp is so good. Like, really cool. But a lot of the other campers are kind of intimidating, and they don’t actually want to talk about musical theater all the time, and Jules can’t be there and she also doesn’t even want to talk about it anymore. Also, Mom is hardly around because of her studying all the time. You said that it would only be for a short time. But with all those books . . . it feels like she’s going to be studying forever. She told me why it’s so important to her, why it’s her dream job, so I know I have to be patient but . . . I feel like everything’s changing and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I take a breath and listen to Dad as he also takes a big breath in and out.
“Okay, M, what have we practiced?”
“That I need to take things one day at a time. But it’s so hard and there’s so many things that are going wrong this summer, and you’re so far away.”
“I know, M, and if I could be there, I would. And why am I so far away?”
“You’re working to make sure that Mom and I can live okay here. And I’m happy that I can go to camp and I’m really super appreciative. I just think things would be better if they were exactly like I wanted them to be.”
Dad laughs but cuts it short. I think I just surprised him. “Yeah, I know, M. You always want things to be just so. I feel like that sometimes too. You get that from me. But we can’t always have things the exact way we want them to be. Sometimes we have to accept that things are going to be different because people around us change. Circumstances change. And we change.”
I scrunch my nose at that. “I’m not changing. I’m never changing.”
“Oh Maya-papaya!” His laughs come tumbling through the screen. It’s the one thing that made me prepared to have phone calls with Jules all the time: knowing that the people who are super important to you can be far away from you, but you can still be connected to each other. “Of course you’re changing. You just can’t always tell.”
“Well, I’m only going to change a little bit.” I cross my arms and lean back.
His smile tugs at his face. I can almost feel his happiness through the computer screen. Even though he’s thousands of miles away, I remember what it feels like to be next to him when he’s laughing. It’s something that always makes me feel at ease. Most of the time my dad doesn’t laugh like a volcano or a clap of thunder, his laugh is quieter and calmer and almost like he’s told himself a joke. His face crinkles like tissue paper, all the creases filled in with happiness.
So, I can’t even be mad that he’s right, because I can tell he’s happy. And that makes me happy too. I unfold my arms.
“I’m going to be the assistant director.”
“Maya! That’s incredible!” He asks me all these questions about what it means and how I got the part. I tell him about Irene Brown and the audition and it feels really good to be honest with him too.
“Okay, you know I have to sign off now. But I can’t wait to hear all about how it goes,” he says, the happiness crinkles receding. “And next week you’ll have to call me on the landline because the wi-fi is kinda . . .” He grimaces.
I nod. “Okay. Bye now!”
“Bye now, Maya-papaya.”
The screen goes black after he logs off. This part is always the hardest. Mom walks back into the room and reaches an arm around me, pulling me into a side hug. Even though it’s not as tight as I would like, and it feels kinda weird being squished into her side like this, I stay there. Because it’s nice that even though a lot of things are changing, my family is still here for me.
That evening, after my call with my dad, even though it’s way off schedule, I call Jules.
But the phone just rings and rings.
No one answers.
Not even Bà Linh.