Speak up, Honey.

This is what they first tell you:

Someone is going to have to drive your mom from now on, so get a monthly pass for the train. Before you go to school, pour out the whole milk, and on your way back, buy a gallon of soy milk to replace it. When you get home, if your little brother asks, Where’s mommy?, tell him she’s had a day and needs a nap.

They say, your mother will be in the same place in the bedroom since you left this morning, like a fixture. Wan face to the eggshell walls. Her fingers, a month ago, had about twice as much meat in them, but now they’re shaved off to the circumference of  pencils.

This is what they tell you when your mom gets cancer. Now, what they don’t tell you is—how feverish she’ll get. Obsessive. At any given moment she will sneak your dad’s phone and shove it into your hands:

“Quick, before he finishes dinner.”

And you will know what to do. 

You lean against the edge of the bed, swarmed with unfolded laundry, and check his messages. Whatsapp. Facebook. WeChat. Viber.

“His emails, too,” your mom says over your shoulder. 

You’ve never met this woman but you know her face. And her hands and her chest and her stomach and her vagina. The veneers in her thin wine mouth. Her fried curls and powdered chin. The mound of middle-aged fat hanging over her panty line. There are about a hundred of her photos saved to your camera roll.

Last week you found an email receipt for a couple’s meditation retreat in Hot Springs, California. You know your dad hates California—hated it ever since he left. You can’t even imagine him on a yoga mat, with his eyes closed and his legs interlocked with another woman’s. But this, somehow, is not unlike being ten years old again, using your dad’s computer, and accidentally finding his porn tab. That would have been the first time you realized that bodies could move like that. That would have been the first time you’ve misplaced your faith in a man. Of course, you didn’t really know this—you were ten. You kept replaying it because you were too young to be disgusted, but too old to forget. 

His first act of betrayal. If only now you could tell your ten-year-old self: there will be many more times for that. 

 “There’s nothing,” you say, and you don’t know whether to feel relieved or not. Your mom closes her eyes and lets herself fall back against the headboard.

The doctors, they’ve got mammograms and pink brochures and Sunday talk groups to offer. What they don’t prepare you for is, when your mom gets cancer, your dad also cheats. When you tell this at the lunch table to Ari, who has been disillusioned with her father since birth, you feel a little behind when she steals a fry off your tray and says, “Well, what did you expect?”

What did you expect? 

“Honey!” Your dad calls for you. “Did you see it yet?”

You fumble for the phone and head downstairs. 

“Found it,” you say, and give it to him with trembling hands.

If only there were modules for this sort of stuff. If only you could tell your ten-year-old self to… take a deep breath… and imagine you are in the water, floating… Imagine this man on the screen is your father, and this woman on the screen is not your mother… 

And you will not fall behind your peers.

But here’s the thing about your dad: Dad is fun. Dad is cool. Dad spends money, even when Mom says no. And it is your dad who agrees to sit in the car with you as you prep for your license, not your mom. Sunday morning you’re shifting in the driver’s seat and he gets in shotgun, bagel still hot in his mouth. NPR on the radio. Tells you to follow the GPS while he makes some important calls. He’s very busy, always busy, and you should be grateful he is even here. 

So you shut your mouth so he can talk. Make a left turn, or change lanes without being told to. You back out of a parking spot, but don’t see the minivan in the rearview—

Beep! Beeeeeep!

—And you swerve and a noise searing against the tires tells you they’ve most definitely been scratched.

“Fuck—! Just stop, stop!—Listen, I gotta go,” Your dad hangs up. “What the hell was that? Did you even see that lady? What were you thinking?” 

“I don’t know,” you say, rubbing off the sweat from your palms on the wheel.

When he gets mad, really starts yelling—and it is usually mom who gets angry fast like this, not him—it’s a red-faced, foul-mouthed kind of anger. Because you are not used to this anger, you tear up, and when he asks why in the hell you’re crying all you can mumble is, “You’re supposed to teach me.” 

And he says, “Well, you never asked. God gave you a mouth for a reason.”

 

But still, you have to remind yourself that your mom used to be meaner. You call her Sergeant, because everything that comes from her mouth is an order. 

Sergeant doesn’t like it when money is spent. Sergeant doesn’t like half-assers. Sergeant doesn’t like people who don’t take care of their appearance. 

“You know,” she said when she took you school shopping, back when she was well enough to be able to flip through racks, “I used to be a size zero when I was your age.”

Sergeant doesn’t make you do the dishes, or clean your room, or the dishes and rooms of others, for the sake of building responsibility, discipline, or compassion. Instead, she throws a pile of everyone’s laundry onto your bed and says, “For when you have a husband of your own.”

Now she sleeps with fists clenched. Your dad moved to the guest bedroom in the basement two weeks ago. You don’t know whether or not to be grateful that the house is so much quieter these days. That your mom is weaker but softer. 

“Sounds kinda nice,” Ari says wistfully. “I wish my mom had cancer.”

That brings you out of it, and you realize, a little shamefully, that you’ve been ranting to her the entire day—from homeroom to skipping physics to well after school, where you’ve ended up at the park now.  The swings creak under your teenage brooding. 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ari quickly adds, even though you know she did. When her parents divorced at the beginning of the school year, she only said that it was like the beginning of a movie. That was how she likened most of her life to—always hoping tragedy would whisk her away to something great and adventurous, preferably R-rated. 

“But I do like the idea of my mom shutting up… Did I tell you? What happened last Friday, when I came back late and there she was, sitting on the porch waiting for me—”

A honk from behind us cuts her off. It’s Rafael, in his dump of a red sedan, smoke reeling out of his car. 

“You’re late, asshole!” Ari yells and shrugs on her backpack, before turning to you, sheepishly, “Gotta go.”

Rafael leans out the window, raising his chin at you. He’s grown out his hair since you’ve last seen him; it’s wild and choppy and he somehow manages to still look cool in it anyway. Ari gets in, slamming the door. You, standing awkwardly outside the window, not sure whether to go yet.

“Hey, kid,” he says. “Haven’t seen you in a minute. Where you be at these days?”

You shrug. 

Ari mutters something in the back like, “Busy at school, unlike your dropout ass.”

Rafael ignores her and lowers his voice, “Your mom doing okay? Heard about that cancer shit. Sucks.”

“She’s fine,” you say, because you don’t know how else to respond. “Thanks.”

“It’s good,” he says.

“Come by sometime!” Ari says, and then they’re off. 

 

When you get back home, your mom has just returned from an appointment, too. She’s too tired to wash her hair, so she has you do it. As you bring a stool to the bathroom, you see her frail body in the tub, clinging gauntly to the ceramic. You are almost afraid to touch her like this, but you scoot the stool closer anyway and try not to look at the scars branding the underside of her breast.

“Don’t half-ass it,” she says as you bring the showerhead to her scalp. Watch the water trickle down her wrinkles. Grab the shampoo, which knocks over your dad’s razor as you do. Your mom picks up the Gillette from the soaping pool beneath her. 

“He’s the only man I’ve ever known,” she says. “Your father.”

There’s a story she used to tell of how she was the prettiest girl in her village when she was your age. And you try to imagine this, as every girl does with their mother but fall short. Maybe—she was spritely and long-legged. Or her hair was thick and well-groomed but her fingers were hardened with discipline. But still with the same military loudness. And in her village, she’d be chased down by any boy brave or stupid enough to ask for her hand. The day before she came to America, an old classmate fell to his knees outside her doorstep and begged her not to go, to stay back in Long Xuyen and marry him. Even your dad knows there are still men in Vietnam waiting for her.

So does it even matter who? Why don’t you just leave? That question barely makes it off your tongue. Suds slew from your fingertips to the back of her skull, and you pull out a clump of fallen hair. Brittle and lifeless. You carefully dispose of it before she can notice. 

“Because now my body is nothing,” she says, “And he is the only thing I am tied to.”

But it’s your dad who won the American Dream. You’re talking about the man who was a child refugee, abandoned on the shores of Malaysia, and barely escaped on a boat. Who used to fear the sounds of English, whose lips trembled every time he spoke it. This is a man who had seen the world bearing nothing, knowing nothing, and still conquered it.

It’s your dad who was still the hero, even when he got robbed of his watch, or wasted a hundred’s worth of lotto tickets, or got a beer belly and gout in the same summer. “Every person has a sin,” he’d say. “Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. Gambling—not a single human you’d meet without one.”

When you ask him about his, he says:

“Oh, you know, I enjoy a drink now and then, but I never let it get in the way of what’s important. Making money, taking care of the kids… Not like your uncle, that guy’s a real drunk bastard.”

“What about mom?” you say. “What’s her sin?”

Your dad goes quiet, thinking. “I guess, she doesn’t have one. Women don’t have those things, actually. But men—every man has a sin. That’s what makes them men. It’s just how the world is.”

 

Ari lives with her dad and her brother now, after another big fight with her mom, but she warns you about coming over because—

“It’s so freaking dirty,” Ari says, laughing. The sound of it frays in the wind as you both walk back from school. “They don’t do anything in the house. I’m the only one who picks up after them.”

So you help her clear the living room couch a bit and watch some TLC show for an hour or so. Then her brother enters, kicking the door open. All that snow rushes in and Ari gets fussy, calling him a little cunt.

“Oh, fuck off,” Rafael says, and comes up to you, with this red-gum grin. Bloodshot eyes. “What are you doing here, kid?”

“Missed the bus,” you lie. Keep your eyes on the TV. Your dad sends you a text—Where are you? Are you at Ari’s? He can pick you up.

You toss your phone onto the other end of the couch and head toward the kitchen to find something to eat. Rafael follows you, and he’s taller than you, looms over you. And he’s trouble, always been—you buy your weed off him, for one—but this time you let him sling his arm over your shoulder. Let his hair tickle your neck and let him murmur, “Let’s go upstairs.”

It’s a mess upstairs because Ari’s the only one who cleans. In the hallway, their caged dog yaps wildly at the sight of you. Rafael throws his hoodie over the cage and slams the door. His room reeks of mildew and bud and clearance deodorant. 

There was a time when Rafael was the same age as your brother—you’ve known him and Ari since you were practically babies, now you think of it. He once was the ruddy-cheeked, undiagnosed-ADHD sort of boy. Loved video games and soccer, and made you and Ari switch between defense and goalie whenever he wanted to practice.

“I can’t believe you even remember that,” he snorts. And after you take another hit of his pen, he says, “That’s enough. Put it down so we can start.”

“…I don’t know about this,” you finally say. “If I want, um, to do it, I mean.”

“What d’ya mean? Everybody wants to do it,” he says. 

“But do you even… like me?”

“I like your body,” he says. “Sure, I like you.”

But can you be the only man I ever know? 

Rafael says, “You can’t know me. You can’t know anything. Jeez.”

So he tugs off his jeans, kicks them down to the ankles. Then tugs at your wrist. Brings your hand to his clothed dick and grins when you flinch at the hardness. And Ari’s calling you from downstairs now—

“Your dad’s here!”

“Shit.” The color drains from Rafael’s face a little. “Your dad—?”

“I’m in the bathroom!” you say. “Just give me a minute!”

“You sure?” Rafael says, but he’s already looking at you like that. And you think, this look is not unlike the one of the woman on your dad’s phone.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say, and you kneel.

God gave you a mouth for a reason.