“Me and Lucia? Why not just Lucia?”
“Yeah, well, you know, her mother’s not going to let her go out with me alone.”
That was true.
“What would we do?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Go to a movie? Go to the mall?”
I thought of sitting in a dark theater with the two of them. Didn’t relish the thought of being a monitor.
“Lucia’s not interested in you like that,” I said. “She’s a sweet girl, you know that.”
“I know that!” Russell said, offended. “Sheesh, it’s not like I’d do anything anyone would disapprove of. I just want to hang out with her.”
“That sounds like a bad idea. The more time you spend with her, the more you might want to do something to her.”
“What are you? Her keeper? I’m not good enough for her?”
“Go ask her mom, then,” I said, acting like I didn’t care at all. “Do whatever you want.”
“Jesus, China, you can be such a bitch,” he said.
“And proud of it,” I said, surprised I could stand up to him. But I could be brave when it came to Lucia.
I became friends with Lucia when I was seven, before I could even speak English. Language was no problem between us. We didn’t talk much. We just played. She had so many toys, it made up for the fact that I had hardly any. We played with her dolls and board games and baked with her toy oven, knit potholders, and colored hundreds of pages of coloring books that her family was always giving her. She had lots of books that only I read and I always read aloud to her at night if I sleptover, which was several times a week. We both went to sleep imagining we were Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The reason I slept over so much was to keep Lucia company. Lucia’s mother worked double shifts so she could keep her schedule to just three days a week. This meant she said goodbye to Lucia after dinner and didn’t see her again until she returned home from school the next day. She used to hire babysitters to sleep over but it was expensive and unreliable. One year she burned up all her vacation days staying home after the sitter fell through. She was so happy when we moved in next door.
But that was before Bobby.
One Saturday, he appeared with his pickup truck filled with boxes of stereo equipment, a big red Samsonite, garbage bags full of shoes and baseball caps, and a cooler of beer. Lucia’s mother, usually a cool, reserved woman, repeatedly stood on her toes in order to kiss Bobby’s vile, puffy lips poking out between his mustache and beard. She let him squeeze her ass whenever he wanted, and even seemed to enjoy it. I had never seen her like that with a man before. Normally, the men were awkward and a little bit pleading, and she was a queen with her subject. With Bobby she was a woman like the women I saw on The Love Boat: grateful, vulnerable. Like my mother.
Once my mother said to me, “In a marriage a man should always love the woman a little bit more. Never the other way.”
I stopped sleeping over, but then Lucia knocked on my door during dinner one night and asked if I would come over.
“Come in!” my mother yelled over my shoulder. “Eat!” She stood and shooed Lucia to her seat. She set a bowl of rice in front of her and put a fork in her hand. Lucia loved Korean food, especially the meats. She made a nest for bulgogi in her rice bowl and drizzled some of the meat’s juice on top. She ate in big, healthy forkfuls in contrast to my birdlike pecking while my mother looked on approvingly. My mother never thoughtI ate enough. She called me Skinny Mini. Lucia even ate kimchi, which endeared her to my mother forever. After she ate, she drank a large glass of barley water to finish the meal, and smiled at my mother, satisfied.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kim.”
“You’re such a good girl,” my mother said, standing behind Lucia’s chair and stroking her hair. “So pretty girl. So sweet.” My mother spoke English at a higher pitch than she did Korean so that everything sounded more cheerful.
I changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth while Lucia waited in the kitchen with my mother. I wondered if Bobby was going to be there or if he’d gone out, moved out.
“Is Bobby there?” I asked Lucia as we walked down the hallway to her door.
She nodded.
“Is everything all right?”
“I don’t like him!”
“Did he touch you?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, no. Not that. I just don’t like him.”
“Why?”
But Lucia couldn’t tell me why. Sometimes she had trouble explaining the why of how she was feeling.
“Has he yelled at you?”
“No.”
“Said something mean?”
“No.”
“Looked at you in a funny way?”
Her head shot up. “What do you mean, funny?”
I hesitated. What did I mean? “Like in a dirty way? Like Doc with the women on The Love Boat?”
She shook her head. “No, not like that. He just, he just doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t know why!” She began to cry.
“It’s okay,” I said, patting her back. I helped her wipe her tears and then said we should go in before Bobby came looking for us. Besides, it was a school night.
Bobby was in the living room watching Hawaii Five-O and smoking a cigarette. There were two yellow Miller cans next to his crossed feet on the coffee table.
“Sleepover?” he called out as we came in.
“Hi, Bobby,” I said.
“Two girls in a bed,” he said as we passed him.
Lucia and I got into her pink canopied bed.
“You need to talk to your mother about him,” I said. “You need to tell her he creeps you out.”
“Okay,” she said from under the covers, her back turned away from me. “I know.”
And to my surprise, she did.
Afterward, Lucia
