He told Vivian about how his mother had remarried but hadn’t told her husband about him. “I still don’t know where she went after she left New York, if she went to Florida.”
Vivian flipped the pieces of meat with a pair of metal tongs, then removed them onto a plate lined with a paper towel. “I don’t think so. Here, give me those.”
Daniel gave her the cutting board and she slid the garlic and ginger into the pot with the edge of the knife and stirred them with a wooden spoon. The room grew fragrant. “But why did she end up in China, then?”
“I don’t know, but she wouldn’t have left without you. You were all she could talk about, all the time.” She returned the cutting board to him, now piled with carrots. “Chop these into small pieces.” She put the beef back into the pot, filled it with water, clapped a lid on top. “We would talk about the plans we had for you and Michael. She’d be smoking—” Vivian mimed taking a cigarette from her lips and holding it out with her elbow, gaze to the side, like his mother used to do. “Always smoking, and she had that big old voice. And we’d have these giant mugs of tea in front of us in that little kitchen. We’d say Michael was going to become a doctor and you were going to work on TV.”
“TV?”
“She saw you working with the sound on TV or movies. Because you liked music. And TV. We weren’t so wrong, were we?”
“You were pretty close.” Daniel sawed away at the carrots. An orange disc flew off the cutting board. He got up, hunted for it at the other end of the table.
“Here,” Vivian said, taking the knife from him. “Cut like this.”
He angled it the way she showed him, slicing the carrots more loosely. She checked on the soup, adding salt and pepper. “There was that nail salon. You remember the name?”
“Hello Gorgeous.” He’d looked it up, too, but it was no longer there.
“You remember your mother’s friend there? Woman with a high baby voice.”
“Didi.”
“Right, Didi. So after your mother disappeared Didi called Leon. Turned out someone ratted their boss out to ICE. Immigration. They came and arrested a lot of people at the salon. Your mother was supposed to be at work that day.”
He could remember overhearing Vivian and Leon talking about Didi, a lawyer. But not this. “Nobody ever told me anything.”
“It happened to a woman I knew who worked in a restaurant. Someone crosses the wrong person, makes a call to ICE and they come take the workers away.”
“Take them where?”
“Deport them. Or they have these camps, these jails, for immigrants. We always heard rumors about them. I knew a lady whose husband had been sent to one, though. He went out driving to the grocery store and never came home. She found out he was in a jail in Arizona or someplace like that, and then he was on a plane back to their country, somewhere in Central America.” Vivian shook her head. “So your mother’s friend Didi figured out the restaurant in Florida where that job was and called them. They said your mother was buying a ticket for Florida, but never showed up. But Didi and Leon called ICE and they said she wasn’t there either.”
She bought a bus ticket to Florida, but had told him they weren’t moving. It made no sense. “So she wasn’t in jail? I always thought it was another man. Though she was going to marry Leon.”
“I don’t know.” Vivian picked up the junk mail and tossed the flyers into a plastic bin. “We waited and waited for her. You remember, all those months. I wouldn’t have paid off her debt if I knew she was coming back. I wouldn’t have given you away.”
Had his mother been in jail while he was listening to records in Ridgeborough, when he and Angel had taken the cab to the old apartment? But she’d also known about his adoption? Daniel put the knife down. He had once stood with his mother and Leon on the Staten Island Ferry, both of them with their arms around him, their love sure and shining, the kind of gesture Kay and Peter tried to offer up but he could never bring himself to fully accept. He had lost so much, and he was lost. The distance between then and now felt enormous.
Now he was nervous that Michael and Timothy’s arrival home would puncture the unexpected calm he had felt, being alone with Vivian all day. But when Michael did come home, after Daniel had taken a shower and a long nap, Daniel’s dread disappeared. It felt good to be with people who didn’t know him as a fuck-up.
After dinner, after his second helping of soup, then a third, Michael said, “Want to play pool? There’s a place in Bay Ridge.”
At the pool hall they got beers and played eight ball. Daniel made the break and called solids. “I spoke to my mom again, by the way. Your mom thinks maybe she got caught up in an Immigration raid and thrown in jail and deported and that’s why she ended up in China.”
“Damn. Did you ask her about it when you talked to her?”
“I didn’t have the guts. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.” He aimed for a side pocket and missed. “Thanks, though. You helped me get in touch with her.”
“Yeah, of course, of course. So are you going to talk to her again?”
“We’ll see.”
Michael leaned onto the table and into his cue stick. “Twelve to the ten. Corner pocket.” He made the shot.
“You’re good,” Daniel said. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”
“I play a lot with my friends. Some of them like to bet, but I don’t. Hey, remember that research assistant job I was telling you about? I turned the application in. I decided to go with the project I wanted to do, the riskier one. Guess I have you to thank.”
There were video games across the room but Daniel didn’t see video poker. “What did I do?”
“You inspired me.”
“I don’t know anything about science.”
“I mean, you’re doing music, you’re in this amazing band, you’re living with your friends in the city. I can’t even afford to move out of my parents’ apartment unless I get this grant. I have to commute three hours to school and back and my mom grills the hell out of me if I stay out late. Instead of doing the safe thing, you’re like—free.”
After Michael knocked down four balls in one round, Daniel managed to drop a solid ball. “I’m not an inspiration. I got kicked out of the band. I owe my friend ten thousand bucks and she won’t talk to me anymore. I got kicked out of school.”
“You did? Why?”
“You know how you said some of your friends like to bet? I guess I do, too.” Daniel finished his beer. He told Michael about the poker, the expulsion.
“Shit,” Michael said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“I kind of wanted to leave anyway.”
“Are you going to go back?”
“My parents want me to transfer to the school where they teach, upstate.”
“Do you want to go there?” The kindness in Michael’s question gave Daniel déjà vu.
“No. Though sometimes it seems like I don’t have a choice.”