Chapter 3

3: 3

3.

My cousin, the one who was always the loudest and pushiest, said nothing.

She just pulled out the test strips and ran them on my father and my mother.

One line.

Negative.

No infectious disease. No virus.

Ulysses gave her a look, motioning for her to set the strips down on the table.

I snatched them up and clenched them in my fist.

I stared coldly at Bianca.

"So you're never going to stop, is that it?"

My father, who had been silent the whole time, grabbed me from behind.

His voice slipped into our hometown dialect in his panic.

"You finally got yourself a wife, finally have a child."

"She's still recovering from the birth. Let it go, for her sake!"

"If you turn on them now, you're saying I'm no father of yours!"

Deborah didn't understand a word. She clicked her tongue.

She turned to Bianca and said,

"From now on you keep an eye on Rod. He's not to speak dialect in front of the child."

"It's so backwoods. The kid picks it up and gets laughed at."

My phone buzzed with a message.

Linda had sent over a full year of my salary records.

At the end she'd added one line.

"Rod, if you ever get divorced, think about me."

Four years of college, three years of work.

Seven years as good partners.

We'd never once crossed the line.

When I was hospitalized with pneumonia, Bianca wouldn't come see me, afraid she'd catch it.

Linda brought me meals for a week.

Ulysses looked pleased with himself.

From behind his back he produced a big bottle of disinfectant.

He pressed the nozzle once, and a sharp, stinging smell filled the air.

"On top of the STDs and the AIDS, we've got to kill off the bacteria you people carry too."

Deborah nodded along beside him.

"Rod, I've seen the videos online."

"Out in the countryside where you're from, people don't wash their hands before eating."

"Wash your face and your feet in the same basin."

"Some of them have foot fungus growing on their hands."

Bianca looked up at me.

She reached out and took Deborah's arm.

"That's enough."

Not a rebuttal.

Not an apology.

Just a light, careless that's enough.

Ulysses aimed the disinfectant at my father and gave it two sprays.

The liquid dripped into my father's eye, stinging so badly it broke him out in a cold sweat.

It rolled down his cheek, leaving his neck raw and red.

My father said nothing. He raised his sleeve and wiped his face.

Covering the corner of his tightly clenched mouth.

When he was young he'd spent fifteen years breaking his back on construction sites.

He'd put me through college on money he'd bled for.

Never once said a word about how hard it was.

Years under the sun had given him a skin condition, so even water hurt his skin.

He wouldn't spend on a single bottle of water for himself, yet for my wedding he'd handed over two hundred thousand in bride price.

I lunged forward and wrenched the disinfectant away from him.

Just as I drew back my fist to bring it down,

my mother caught hold of my sleeve.

"Son, we've got all these relatives here."

"How are we supposed to go on living after this?"

She couldn't bear to lose her grandson.

Couldn't bear to see me lose the life I'd finally built, rooting myself in the big city and taking a wife.

Guests around the hotel hall were already craning their necks to watch the show.

That only fired Ulysses up.

He shouted at the top of his lungs,

"Isn't Bianca doing all this for the child?"

"You bunch of dirt-poor farmers, it took your ancestors' graves smoking with luck to land a girl like her."

"Nobody's even giving you a hard time here."

"We just want to kill off the viruses and bacteria on you. Is that really so much to ask?"

Bianca stood on the step, looking at me.

Her eyes full of disappointment.

"Rod, you promised me you'd never let me suffer any hardship."

I held it all in.

A dull, crushing ache pressed on my chest.

"Have I ever made you suffer?"

"Before we married, you and your parents and your brother, four of you crammed into a rundown three-hundred-square-foot place."

"You made three thousand a month, and you had to think twice about buying a pair of socks."

"You marry me, and you're living in a new place, buying a dozen new outfits and pairs of shoes a month."

"Answer me."

"Have you suffered any hardship?"

She said nothing.