“His back’s screwed up. His shoulders are busted. Men don’t work in nail salons. You don’t finish school, you end up cutting meat like Leon, arthritis by the time you’re thirty-five.”
It seemed disloyal to talk like this about Yi Ba Leon, who was so strong he’d do one-arm push-ups for Deming and Michael and their friends, let them punch him in the gut for kicks, though Deming stopped short of punching as hard as he could. “Do it again,” Leon would say. “You call that a punch? That’s a handshake.” Even if Leon wasn’t his real father—on this topic, his mother was so tightlipped that all he knew about the man was that he’d never been around—he made Deming proud. If he could grow up to be like any man, he wanted to be like Leon, or the guy who played the saxophone in the subway station, surrounded by people as his fingers danced and his chest heaved and the tunnel filled with flashes of purples and oranges. Oh, to be loved like that!
Fordham Road was unusually quiet in the snow. Ice covered the sidewalk in front of an abandoned building, a reddish piece of gum clinging to it like a lonely pepperoni atop a frozen pizza. “This winter is never-ending,” Deming’s mother said, and they gripped each other’s arms for balance as they made their way across the sidewalk. “Don’t you want to get out of here, go somewhere warm?”
“It’s warm at home.” In their apartment, if they could just get there, the heat was blasting. Some days they even wore T-shirts inside.
His mother scowled. “I was the first girl in my village to go to the provincial capital. I made it all the way to New York. I was supposed to travel the world.”
“But then.”
“But then I had you. Then I met Leon. You’re my home now.” They started up the hill on University Avenue. “We’re moving.”
He stopped in a slush puddle. “What? Where?”
“Florida. I got a new job at a restaurant. It’s near this Disney World. I’ll take you there.” She grinned at him like she was expecting a grin back.
“Is Yi Ba Leon coming?”
She pulled him away from the puddle. “Of course.”
“What about Michael and Vivian?”
“They’ll join us later.”
“When?”
“The job starts soon. In a week or two.”
“A week? I have school.”
“Since when do you love school so much?”
“But I have friends.” Travis Bhopa had been calling Michael and Deming cockroaches for months, and the impulse to stick a foot out as he lumbered down the aisle was brilliant, spontaneous, the look on Travis’s face one of disbelief, the sound of Travis’s body going down an oozy plop. Michael and their friends had high-fived him. Badass, Deming! Detention had been worth it.
They stood in front of the bodega. “You’re going to go to a good school. The new job is going to pay good money. We’ll live in a quiet town.”
Her voice was a trumpet, her words sharp triangles. Deming remembered the years without her, the silent house on 3 Alley with Yi Gong, and saw a street so quiet he could only hear himself blink. “I’m not going.”
“I’m your mother. You have to go with me.”
The bodega door slammed shut. Mrs. Johnson, who lived in their building, walked out with two plastic bags.
“You weren’t with me when I was in China,” he said.
“Yi Gong was with you then. I was working so I could save money to have you here. It’s different now.”
He removed his hand from hers. “Different how?”
“You’ll love Florida. You’ll have a big house and your own room.”
“I don’t want my own room. I want Michael there.”
“You’ve moved before. It wasn’t so hard, was it?”
The light had changed, but Mrs. Johnson remained on their side of the street, watching them. University Avenue wasn’t Chinatown, where they had lived before moving in with Leon in the Bronx. There were no other Fuzhounese families on their block, and sometimes people looked at them like their language had come out of the drain.
Deming answered in English. “I’m not going. Leave me alone.”
She raised her hand. He jolted back as she lunged forward. Then she hugged him, the snowy front of her jacket brushing against his cheek, his nose pressing into her chest. He could hear her heartbeat through the layers of clothing, thumping and determined, and before he could relax he forced himself to wriggle out of her arms and race up the block, backpack bumping against his spine. She clomped after him in her plastic boots, hooting as she slid across the sidewalk.
THEY LIVED IN A small apartment in a big building, and Deming’s mother wanted a house with more rooms. Wanted quiet. But Deming didn’t mind the noise, liked hearing their neighbors argue in English and Spanish and other languages he didn’t know, liked the thuds of feet and the scraping back of chairs, salsa and merengue and hip-hop, football games and Wheel of Fortune spilling from the bottoms of doors and through ceiling cracks, radiator pipes clanging along to running toilets. He heard other mothers yelling at other kids. This building contained an entire town.
There was no mention of Florida over dinner. Deming and Michael watched George Lopez, followed by Veronica Mars, as Deming’s mother folded last week’s laundry. Leon was at the slaughterhouse, nightshift. Leon’s sister Vivian, Michael’s mother, was still at work. Deming lay against one side of the couch, legs stretched out to the middle, Michael on the other side, a mirror image, still recalling Travis Bhopa. “He went down hard!” Michael’s heels pounded the cushions. “He had it coming to him!” What if the rooms were so big in Florida they could no longer hear one another?
His mother was rubbing lotion into her hands. “You’re my home now,” she said. Earlier, he had volunteered to get her cigarettes at the bodega and shoplifted a Milky Way, then gave half to Michael when she wasn’t looking. “Badass, Deming.” Michael chomped his half in one bite and looked at Deming with such admiration that Deming knew it would be fine. As long as Michael came with them, as long as he wasn’t alone, they could move. His mother wouldn’t find out about detention, and he and Michael could make new friends. He pictured beaches, sand, ocean. Wearing shorts at Christmas.
Late at night, early in the morning, Deming woke to a smack on the mattress across the bedroom, Leon and his mother whispering as Michael snored on his back. “Go fuck yourself,” his mother said. The snow shovel trucks rolled down the street, scraping the pavement clean.
Despite his efforts he fell back asleep, and when the alarm rang for school Leon was still sleeping, Michael in the shower, his mother in the kitchen in her work clothes, black pants and black shirt, half-smoked cigarette on the edge of an empty jar. The ash grew soft and long, collapsed.
“When are we moving?”