A Cab Called Reliable Read Free Page A

stove, and brought out four potatoes from the cabinet under the sink. While scrubbing them, she told me to stay and eat something because my head looked too big for my body. Skin and bones, she called me. On the television set was a framed photograph of Boris’s father. He was smiling and waving, hello or good-bye, from the driver’s seat of a truck. Poor Boris and his mother were still waiting for him to drive the truck back to Arlington from somewhere in Texas.
    I told Boris’s mother I needed to eat by the window because my mother was coming soon to get me. Boris told her we were moving to Hawaii. She did not believe me; nevertheless, she smiled and said that Hawaii was a beautiful place, and I was a lucky girl. Then she left me with my bowl of potatoes with butter and garlic at the windowsill while she and Boris ate at the table.
    As I finished my food, I saw that the light of our apartment was turned on. My father must have come home. I asked Boris’s mother for another bowl of potatoes because they were more delicious than anything I had ever eaten, and she gladly took my bowl and filled it. Before giving me a second helping, she wiped my mouth with a corner of her gray apron, and puckering her lips at me—the way lips are puckered at poor strays—she called me a sweet girl. I quickly finished the potatoes, took my bowl to the sink, slipped the spoon into my sleeve, gathered up my belongings, and thanked Boris’s mother for a delicious dinner. I told Boris it was time for me to go because my mother was waiting.
    Outside, I crawled into the azalea shrubs that grew near our building and with the spoon dug a hole deep enough to hide my box and pillowcase. If my father saw my things, he would point his middle finger at the box, tell me in that voice my mean and greedy grandfather used to open it up, and then, seeing the four dollars in change, he would pocket it. Reading my poem, he would know that I knew it was because of him my mother cried into the toilet. The rock he would throw out the window because rocks were dangerous weapons in the hands of children. Looking at the lipstick, he would tell me that eight-year-old girls with color on their faces grew up to be whores, and I would tell him I was already nine. But I would never tell my father about the note and the cakes that had been left for me.
    When I walked into our apartment, I saw my father’s back. He was looking out the window, with the telephone receiver held between his shoulder and ear. One hand held the phone; the other was moving a cigarette from his lips to his side, where he flicked the ashes onto the floor. My mother used to yell at him for that. I quietly shut the door, sat on the arm of the sofa, and listened to my father trying to ask Mina or Hyun-Joo or Whan’s father or mother in a careful and polite way where his wife might be. My mother used to baby-sit for all of them.
    â€œYes, I know about that. She told me she would stop baby-sitting Mina,” he said. Turning around, my father saw me and said with a smile, “You have to excuse me. She just came in.” He set the telephone down on the air conditioner and walked toward me with his work boots still on his feet. He placed his large, open hand on top of my head, held it like a ball, then gently pushed it back so that he could take a good look at me while asking where I had been, and where my mother went.
    â€œI played at Boris’s house,” I said.
    â€œWhere’s your mother? Where’s your brother?”
    I shrugged my shoulders and told him Min Joo wasn’t in school all day; the door was locked when I came home, and with no place to go, I went over to Boris’s. I told him Boris’s mother gave me potatoes for dinner so I wasn’t hungry at all. My father removed his hand and walked into the kitchen where he kept bottles on top of the refrigerator. I followed him. With a drink in hand, he went into the bathroom. Following