Falling Together (42 page)

“Coming into my house, yelling!” raged the woman, walking toward Jason with remarkably steady steps. “Throwing yourself around like an elephant!”

Jason had stopped struggling as soon as he had heard the woman’s voice. Now, as the woman advanced upon him, he wilted inside Will’s grasp, and Will let go.

“Sorry about that, ma’am,” Jason said with hangdog politeness. “I-I didn’t know this was your house. I didn’t know you were here.”

“Where else would I be?” scoffed the woman.

“Lola,” said Armando softly, “it’s okay.”

He walked toward her and, with exquisite tenderness, took her hand in his. “I’m sorry we disturbed you.”

“Ehhh!” said the woman. “You should be sorry!” And she reached up and cuffed Armando across his head, but Pen saw that her eyes had grown soft. “No more yelling!”

He smiled, kissed her cheek, and turned her around. “No more yelling, Lola. I promise.”

“You, too, elephant!” said the woman, glaring at Jason over her shoulder.

“Me, too, ma’am,” said Jason.

When the woman was gone, Armando turned back to them and said, “My grandmother.”

“You live with your grandmother?” asked Jason. He didn’t sound hostile, just dazed.

“My grandmother, my parents, my brother, Rey, who is in medical school, two of my younger sisters.”

“Oh, so, they’re the family Ruben meant,” said Pen. “He said he was the driver for your family.”

“That’s right,” said Armando.

“No wife?” asked Jason with a hint of snideness.

“Not yet,” said Armando, chin up, eyes challenging.

“Jason and I are going out for a walk,” said Will. “Get some air.”

“I’m not leaving here until he tells me what he knows about Cat,” said Jason in a blunt but thankfully unpetulant way.

“You guys go check on Augusta. I’ll stay and talk to him,” said Pen quickly, “if that’s okay with you, Armando.”

“No problem,” said Armando amiably.

When they left, Armando slumped down onto the sofa, ran his hand through his hair, and gave a low whistle. Pen liked him for this open display of relief and vulnerability. A pattern seemed to be emerging: his aloofness and pomposity would push you away; his humor and humanness would pull you back—and just in the nick of time. Pen thought that she could only take this state of affairs for so long before it exhausted her, but she could imagine Cat’s finding it exciting. She had always had a soft spot for thorny men with soft underbellies. Behind their backs, she and Pen used to call them echidnas.

“I think that went well, don’t you?” said Pen.

“He’s big, isn’t he?” said Armando, widening his eyes. “You can forget how big and then he charges you like a bull and you remember.”

“I’ve thought that before, that he’s part bull,” said Pen, smiling.

Armando sat up, gave her his out-of-the-blue, disarming white crescent of a smile, and said, “Thank you.”

“For what? Showing up here with Jason so that he could disrupt your entire household?”

“For saving my mother’s bowl.”

Pen looked down at the bowl in her lap, which she’d forgotten she was holding, and laughed. “You’re welcome.”

“I should thank Will, too,” said Armando. “Has he always had those ninja reflexes?”

Pen placed the bowl back on the table as she considered this. “I guess he has. He just used to use them for jumping on people instead of for jumping on the people who jump on people. But he reformed a while back.”

“Lucky for me. I was surprised to find you and Will traveling with Jason. I didn’t think you liked him.”

“You know who we are?” asked Pen, startled.

“Of course. Cat and I talked a lot, and after I left, we e-mailed a lot. I’ve even seen pictures of you two. You’re the friends.”

“That’s right. We’re the friends. Jason’s the husband. And you’re the—?” She waited.

“I’m the guy who lives on the other side of the world,” he said.

On impulse, Pen leaned forward with clasped hands and said, “I wish you would tell me about you and Cat.”

She expected him to get supercilious and distant, to say it was none of her business, with which she really couldn’t argue except to say that she loved Cat and missed her and that collecting what she could of Cat’s story was her only means of feeling close to her. But instead, Armando’s eyes lit up with eagerness, and for the first time since she’d met him, he looked young. Pen realized, with a start, that he was young.

“From the very first day, it was like we’d always known each other. We talked about our families, our pasts. It was easy. We both noticed that, how easy it was.”

He was so boyish and warm and open-hearted.
Oh,
marveled Pen,
he loves her
. She hadn’t expected him to love her.

“You were friends?” she asked cautiously.

“Yes, friends. Real friends.” His tone took on a note of defiance, as he said, “It’s true that we were both lonely. I was a long way from home, working all the time, and she was unhappy in her marriage, in her work, but that’s not why we were together. We could have met under any circumstances and been—”

Pen watched him search for the word. His English was fluid, even formal, eloquent. It wasn’t his command of the language that was failing him, she saw; it was that when it came to love, sometimes language just failed.

“I understand,” said Pen.

“Thanks,” said Armando.

“What job was she doing that she didn’t like?” asked Pen.

“She was training to be a pharmaceutical rep. She thought it would be glamorous, the dinners, the parties. You must understand that she was much less happy than when you knew her. She found her life very drab.” He said it as though he was apologizing for Cat’s desire for glamour, as though glamour wasn’t imprinted on Cat’s DNA as firmly as her black hair, her tapered fingers.

“And it involved travel, of course,” he continued. “She was always wanting to be someplace else, away.”

“Away from Jason, you mean,” said Pen.

“Of course!” Armando knit his straight black brows in disgust. “She didn’t love him. How could she? He’s ridiculous, unsophisticated, a—bonehead!”

Even as Pen suppressed a smile at the word
bonehead
coming out of Armando’s mouth, and despite having known, for nearly a decade, the way she’d known that the sky was blue, that Jason was indeed a bonehead, she felt the unexpected urge to defend him, but she couldn’t figure out how.

“He loves her,” said Pen at last. It needed to be said.

“No, he doesn’t. He wouldn’t know how to love someone like Cat.”

Pen would not be deterred. “I’m sure you’re right that he doesn’t love her the way she wants to be loved, but he loves her,” she said. “Yes, he’s a bonehead. Yes, I spend most of my time with him wanting to strangle him. But he loves Cat. She’s the reason for everything he does.”

“That’s why you’re here with him? You want him to find her because he loves her?”

Pen faltered. “I don’t—know. I mean, no. We came because—” She made a frustrated sound. “It’s a long story, but now Will and I are here for ourselves. We miss Cat. We’ve never stopped missing her all these years.”

Armando’s face softened. “And she never stopped missing you.”

“But.” Pen hesitated. Why not just leave it alone? Since when was she Jason’s champion? Since never. Still. Pen sighed. “On this trip with Jason, I’ve come to realize that it matters that he loves her. I’ve tried to deny it, but I can’t.” Gently, she added, “And Cat did marry him, after all.”

Armando shut his eyes. When he opened them, he looked young again, young, conflicted, and even regretful.

“We shouldn’t have done it,” he said quietly. “It was a mistake.”

“Why?” asked Pen.

“Because, for one thing, I was never going to stay.”

“Couldn’t you have stayed? Did you try?”

“My city needs me,” he said, with a touch of the old pomposity. “The Philippines needs me. There is a brain drain in my country; those with talent and skills leave as soon as they get the chance. The United States has plenty of good surgeons. Not so many here. I swore from the beginning that I would come back.”

“I see,” said Pen, feeling awkward. “Well, that was good of you.”

“Also,” said Armando with a grin, “I promised my mother that I would.”

“Ah! If she’s anything like Lola, I can see why you’d be afraid to break that promise.”

“You got that right.”

“What’s the other reason?” said Pen. “You said ‘for one thing.’ Why else?”

Armando’s head dropped for a second. “Because they were married, as you said. I believe in marriage, in taking vows. We made a mistake.”

Pen felt suddenly annoyed at his ostentatious regret. “A mistake? You make it sound like an accident, like the two of you just tripped and—oops!—fell into bed. You must have discussed it. Even if you didn’t, it was deliberate. I’m not saying it was wrong or that I haven’t done things like that myself, because I have, sort of, but own up to it, for heaven’s sake.”

Armando stared at her. “What did you say?”

“Look, I didn’t mean to sound judgmental. Or maybe I did mean to. But I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“Why do you think we fell into bed?”

“Because you just said so, for starters.”

“We fell in love. That was our mistake. That’s what I meant.”

Pen felt flustered. “Wait. But you had an affair.”

“No, not technically. Not the physical part.”

“You mean, you didn’t have—sex?” Sometimes, a thing needed to be spelled out.

Armando looked embarrassed. “No. I wouldn’t.” He corrected himself: “I mean,
we
decided not to.”

We,
thought Pen,
ha!
She knew her Cat better than that.

“You should not assume,” said Armando, scolding.

“I didn’t,” snapped Pen, and then it hit her: Cat had lied to Jason. Women all over the world trying to hide affairs from their husbands, and Cat had gone and made one up and handed it to her husband, a mean lie dressed up as an act of humility and contrition, an act of trust.

“What do you mean?” asked Armando slowly.

“I mean that—” She tried to sort out exactly whom she would be betraying by telling Armando what Cat had done. Cat? Jason?

Armando watched her struggle with what to say and asked with bewilderment, “She told him that?”

Pen gave a resigned shrug. “That’s what he said.”

Armando looked like a kid trying to figure out a Rubik’s cube, turning his thoughts this way, that way.

“If Cat isn’t here with you, where is she?” ventured Pen, hoping to take advantage of his bemused state. “Can you tell me, please?”

“Will you tell Jason?”

Pen wanted to say no. “Yes. I have to. We’re sort of in this together, now.”

“In that case, why should I tell you? Why should I help him find her?”

“You would have every right not to,” said Pen. “But Will and I love her and want to see her so much.”

Armando folded his arms and looked at her. Her heart was pounding. They were so close; to lose Cat now, when they were so close, she would not be able to stand it.

“Also, you know that what she did wasn’t really right,” said Pen.

She may have said it in order to manipulate him into telling her, but as soon as she spoke the words, she realized that they were true. The more she spoke, the more she understood that she was speaking her own heart. “I hate to say that because I do love her, but it’s true. I don’t mean leaving him. That would’ve been all right. But leaving him the way she did. She tried to make him so angry that he would leave her or throw her out. When that didn’t work, she sneaked away, just disappeared.”

“Why would she do that?”

He asked it, but she could tell he knew the answer. She and Armando sat across from each other in his perfect house and in the same difficult spot, caught between loving Cat and admitting that she wasn’t as good as they wanted her to be, that she had done a thing she should never have done.

“Because she chickened out,” said Pen sadly. “She knew how he felt about her and she couldn’t stand to see him fall apart when she told him she was leaving, so she ran away. She should have faced it, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” Armando turned his face in the direction of the fan, let the cool air flow across it. It seemed to help him decide his next move because, afterward, he looked Pen in the eye and said, “That’s why she left the way she did,” he said. “But she could have run anywhere. She came here for a reason.”

“To see you, right?”

He shook his head. “I saw her. She had dinner here, at the house, with everyone. But I’m not why she came to Cebu.”

“Then why?” asked Pen.

“Yes, why?” demanded a voice. It was Lola, stepping from the shadows into the room.

Armando shook his head and smiled. “She came to find her family.”