A Cab Called Reliable

by Patti Kim

  “What is it?” asked Yvonne.

  “Before the day is up—” I paused.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have a dog,” I answered.

  Keith said, “What kind?”

  “The one I saw had short hair.”

  “Von asked for a dog last year, and she didn’t get it,” said Keith.

  The others offered me their dirty palms, saying, “Read mine. Read mine,” but I walked slowly back to my seat and drank the rest of my melted ice cream. Mr. Greer clapped his hands near the garbage can, singing, “Let’s clean up, folks. Let’s clean up.”

  * * *

  When Yvonne saw me the next morning, she grabbed my shoulders, looked into my eyes, and demanded, “How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?”

  “My dog. How’d you know I’d get a dog?”

  I told her my mother had the gift of telling fortunes, so did my grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother. It was no surprise that the gift was passed onto me. When Yvonne thrust her open palm at me and told me to do it again, do it again, I saw her pretty apple face transform into a pumpkin.

  “I don’t give second readings,” I said, and walked away. Yvonne stepped in front of me, her beads violently hitting against each other, and told me to come over to her house after school because she wanted me to do it again and to see her new dog. I told her I had piano lessons, to which she burst out, “Oh Ahn Joo, I play the piano, too! Then tomorrow. Come over tomorrow.”

  Up close, Yvonne smelled like the zoo, and I started to wonder if cornbraids could be shampooed, and if they could, did Yvonne ever shampoo hers? I told her I had piano lessons every day and walked into the closet, leaving her behind. I took longer than usual hanging up my sweater because I was feeling ashamed, guilty, and triumphant all at the same time.

  When the rest of the class found out that Yvonne had received a dog for her birthday as I had foretold, they sat around me during lunch, and all throughout recess they followed me from the swings to the merry-go-round and back to the swings again, holding out their palms to me. I charged a quarter for a reading.

  The girls lined up at the foot of the monkey bar waiting for their turn to be called up one by one. To one I would ask if she played a musical instrument, and if she did, I told her to keep at it because her ring of Venus, which represented love and music, was the strongest I had ever seen. To another I said she should stop spending so much money and start saving before she became a bag lady because her line of fortune, faint and weak, looked as if it would vanish by the time she turned twenty. There were too many gaps between her finger joints, which meant money easily slipped through—something my mother had said about me. To another whose nails were bitten down, I told her if she kept biting them, demons would enter her body, strike her mute, then infest her intestines with white tapeworms. To another whose hands looked just like mine, whose line of fate ran right through her line of head and heart, I stroked her cheek to comfort her and told her to keep a sharp eye on her mother lest she run away.

  When Mr. Greer found out I was selling fortunes, he told me to put an end to it. He said getting money by lying was the same as stealing, an offense to my conscience, and I should stop before someone got hurt. I asked if he wanted his palm read as well. I told him I’d tell his fortune for free, and he hesitated before telling me he did not believe in such nonsense and should send me to the principal for tempting him. I told him it wasn’t nonsense, that I was gifted as my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother had been. My great-great-grandmother had told the fortunes of kings and queens in the royal court. Mr. Greer said this was not a royal court, and palm reading was an inappropriate school activity. So I arranged to meet the girls secretly in the bathroom, the boys in the back closet.

  To the boys, I told fortunes of becoming a zookeeper who kidnapped children and fed them to the animals, eating dog soup to get rid of nightmares, and kissing a girl’s private parts to grow hair on their chests. When Larry pulled down Julie’s pants and tried to kiss her private parts, Mr. Greer pulled him up by his collar and said, “You can’t treat girls like that. What’s your problem, boy?” Larry screamed that I had told him it was the only way to get hair on his chest. The class laughed out loud. They might as well have been laughing at their own selves because they all believed my stories and came back to me with their lunch and milk money to hear more.

  Yvonne and Keith were the only ones who did not follow me around like beggars with open palms. During lunch, when I saw them sitting alone at the far end of the cafeteria table sharing secrets and Yvonne’s thermos of apple juice, and ignoring me and my beggars, I began loving her again and wanted to play with her new beagle and give her a second reading for free. As I watched them, Lisa sat close to me, holding her palm under my nose. “Here’s a quarter, Palmer. What do you say?”

  Taking the quarter and glancing down at her palm, I told Lisa that she would have a long life—maybe ninety-five years. She was going to have three husbands—an astronaut, a surgeon, and a pastor. She would have two daughters named Kelly and Katie. I saw a lot of money, and she was to stay away from beaches because I saw water, sun, and sand with blood, which was an awful sign. And there was a good chance she would get straight A’s. Then, remembering Lisa had long legs, I told her her mount of Mars was extremely high, which meant she was very athletic.

  Lisa said, “It’s high, huh?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “Are they cute?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “My husbands.”

  “The astronaut is ugly. The surgeon is all right. The pastor is really good-looking,” I said.

  “What’s a pastor?” she asked.

  “A man of God,” I said.

  Lisa saw Yvonne sitting at the other end of the table, and with her palm open ran to tell her what Palmer had said. Palmer said this, Palmer said that. “Palmer said I was going to marry a good-looking man of God.”

  I saw Yvonne shrug her shoulders, throw away her lunch, and walk out of the cafeteria with her thermos hanging on her pinky. I decided to follow her.

  “Yvonne, I’ll give you another reading. You don’t have to pay me,” I said, walking quickly to catch up with her. She stopped, turned around, and with tears in her eyes and the beads on her braids hitting against her face, she pushed her open palm against my forehead, watched me fall back, then walked away.

  When I walked home from school that afternoon, I had a headache thinking about poor Yvonne alone with Keith, alone with her beagle, alone with parents who should have belonged to a circus. I was thinking about what fortune I would have told her if she had not pushed me so hard. Yvonne, your luck is changing. It’s changing colors, red, blue, green, yellow.… Why did she hit me? As I turned into our court, I plugged up my ears to keep myself from hearing voices. I wanted to pull out my eyes to keep myself from seeing pictures and cut out my tongue to keep myself from telling tales. I wanted to tell Mr. Greer that my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were not gifted in any way, and my great-great-grandmother farmed pickles in the springtime and milled rice in the winter.

  When I came home, Loo Lah was sleeping on the couch and the stereo was playing a sad Korean love song, which made my eyes tear. I went into my room, removed my white box full of quarters from underneath Min Joo’s bed, and sat with its weight heavy on my lap. How could I pay for each lie I told? How could I pay for each quarter I stole? I picked one up and said to myself that this one belonged to Jaime, who wanted to know if his dead grandfather went to heaven or hell. He had died from smoking too many cigarettes, and Jaime was once told that smokers went to hell. This one belonged to Scott, whom I told to eat a tablespoon of baking soda every morning because his breath stunk. This one belonged to the girl whose lines looked just like mine and whom I told to always always, no matter what, keep her mother in sight.

  I carried my box to my desk, and for each quarter wrote down the name and story I
had told, filling the back and front of a sheet of paper with words. I folded it into a small triangle and took it with me into the kitchen, where my mother kept candles underneath the sink. With my triangle, a book of matches, a steel bowl, and a candle in hand, I walked toward the sleeping Loo Lah and sat down on the floor in front of her. The woman on the stereo sang so sadly that I thought maybe she knew how I was feeling. I lit the candle and burned my triangle telling God I would never read palms again, praying that He would forgive me and change me, make me blind, deaf, and dumb.

  As I watched my writing turn to ashes, I sighed in relief and let the wax melt and drip into the bowl. I brought the flame close to my face, then held it to Loo Lah’s, when I felt her turn on her side. She was dreaming about something—about moving on, taking the next step, going on: First her distant cousin, then my father, then would follow another man she could use as a stepping stone to go on to bigger and better things. During the year she had lived with us, I had become thankful for the way she giggled to get out of trouble and put my father at ease moments before his temper blew. My mother and I never knew how to keep him from kicking things. Loo Lah had a way about her that made my father smile, even if she was telling him she had driven his car all the way to Baltimore and lost his muffler on the way home. Loo Lah’s arm dangled off the couch. I took her hand and held it close to my cheek, whispering to her how sorry I was for hating her, how beautiful I thought she was, how I loved the way she carved little boats out of apples. I turned her hand onto my lips and kissed her palm.

  I read Loo Lah’s palm by candlelight. Her mount of Jupiter was fleshy, which meant she was full of pride and ambition. She had no line of marriage, but a deep and beautiful line of the heart. I wondered how many men had taken her in, and how many she had left. As I began to trace her line of life, she moaned and pulled her hand away because the flame burned too close. When she opened her eyes and saw me with fire in my hands, she quickly sat up, turned on the lamplight, and called me a little bitch for trying to burn her to death. I blew out my candle, and Loo Lah slapped me across the face. She said she didn’t feel sorry for me anymore. She said she didn’t feel safe here anymore.

  8

  The summer I turned twelve, Boris asked me to go with him. “Go with you where?” I asked. He said, “Nowhere, you dummy. Go with me like boyfriend/girlfriend go with me.”

  For three days, Boris and I went together. The first day, he gave me a necklace strung with pearly buttons taken from his mother’s sweater. The second day, he called me at midnight to play a slow song for me over the telephone. The third day, he told me to close my eyes. He held my hand, walked me to the ABC Drug Store, and bought me a chocolate bar, lip gloss, and a bottle of shampoo that smelled like coconuts.

  The fourth day, Boris’s father drove his truck back to Burning Rock Court from somewhere in Texas. Boris showed me the photograph of his father’s new house in Houston. Two large trees grew in the front yard. Boris’s father’s truck was parked in the driveway. The windows had curtains on them; the shutters were green. Boris told me his mother and father were packing to move the next day. I asked him if he wanted me to return his gifts. He told me he wanted me to keep them.

  “I’m happy for you, Boris,” I said.

  Boris, his mother, and his father disappeared into the front of the truck. The truck then rolled out of Burning Rock Court, turned right on Wilson Boulevard, and disappeared as well.

  When I later told my father that Boris had moved away to somewhere in Texas and I was having a heart attack, he called me a stupid head for loving a one-legged foreign boy. “It’s just you and me now. We’re a team,” he said with a smile.

  My father was trying hard to be happy. Ever since Loo Lah left with the American man, who had long hair, a van, no children, and would help improve her pronunciation of English, help get her R’s and L’s straight, my father changed. He woke up an hour earlier than usual, jogged around the court, did push-ups in front of the television, and tried to read my schoolbooks. He told me to smile more. He told me jokes with punch lines that confused me.

  My father told me to cheer up because he had good news. Certain I would hear that Loo Lah had called and was coming back for good, I plugged my ears and told him I did not want to hear good news today. He stood up from the couch, held my head in the palm of his hand, tilted my neck back, and said that from now on, he would be working in the city near the Washington Monument.

  “Next to the pencil top?” I asked.

  “I’m right in front of it,” he said and inhaled on his cigarette. “But, Joo-yah, I can’t do it by myself. You have to help me.”

  My father had saved up some money from his welding job, but it wasn’t enough to buy a grocery store on 16th Street the way Mr. Kim did last year, or an AOK TV repair shop like Mr. Chun’s, which stood between a flower shop and a liquor store fifteen minutes away from where we lived, or a carry-out in Northeast D.C. like the one Yong Bin’s parents owned. Yong Bin’s parents used to be poor farmers in the most rural village in Korea, and Yong Bin’s three older sisters used to walk around the village wearing rags while Yong Bin played in the nude. They ate porridge and chewed on tree bark. If they were lucky, they got to feast on crickets, rats, and squirrels. It was also said that Yong Bin’s grandmother prostituted herself to black G.I.’s, who were known to love large lips and strong, radish-shaped legs. His parents never finished elementary school, and my father said that he doubted if they even knew how to read and write. They may have had bad blood, a bad name, and not known how to read and write, but they certainly knew how to count—count by hundredths, thousandths, tenths of thousands—because they now lived in a big brick house in Annandale, Virginia, and Yong Bin’s mother’s teeth were made of gold.

  Although my father did not have enough money to buy a store, he did have enough to buy a white vending truck with a crushed left headlight and windshield wipers that did not wipe. Hot dogs, half smokes—spicy or mild, donuts, pretzels—salted or unsalted, chips, sodas—regular or diet, candy bars, chewing gum, aspirin, King Edward cigars, and egg rolls only on Saturdays. Plastic containers of sauerkraut, chili, relish, and chopped onions, which made me think of Boris, which made me cry. Squeezable bottles for ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, and duck sauce only on Saturdays. My father had never been an ambitious man, but Loo Lah in one year had taught him how to make plans, how to set goals, how to aim high. When Loo Lah used to turn up one corner of her lip and say to him indignantly, “You’re not planning to live here forever, are you? You’re not planning to weld forever, are you?” he would shake his head, and a look of concern would come over his face; then for hours he would sit twisting napkins into long strips, not saying a word. Loo Lah had told him he’d better plan to save some money, move out, move up, buy a house, stop drinking, take care of me, and keep her from moving on to bigger and better things.

  But Loo Lah had left, and my father flashed me his I-am-such-an-unlucky-man smile, shrugged his shoulders, and told me it was all for the better because she was using too much of our hot water and electricity anyway. Minutes later, he was in the bathroom, running the faucet trying to hide the sound of his whimpering. I wanted to kick the door down, turn off the faucet, scream that he was wasting the water, scream that he was to blame for everything—“Why didn’t you kick her out? Why didn’t you kick her out before she could ever leave us? And what about my mother? What about my brother? Where’d you put them? Hand them over to me”—scream my hatred of him for loving Loo Lah, Lah-yah, whatever her name was, and letting her sleep on my mother’s side of the bed.

  Purchasing the vending truck was Loo Lah’s idea. My father never would have done such a thing on his own. He was content as long as he could go to bed with two bowls of rice in his stomach and a pack of cigarettes on his nightstand without the sound of my mother nagging him about going to church, going out of her mind, going back to Korea. Unlike most of the Korean families I knew, he did not bring us to America in order to make a million dollars
. He simply wanted to run away from his father, who used to beat his mother crazy until he kicked her out for being crazy, then he married a second and third time, and still would have smacked my father silly for talking back and running the family rice mill out of business.

  “Joo-yah, I need your help,” my father said. “You get good grades in handwriting, don’t you? And you’re good at spelling, aren’t you?”

  I told him I had the best handwriting and would have been the spelling bee champion last year if I hadn’t confused “truth” with “trust.” I told him the teacher asked me to write out the school rules on a large poster board to hang on the bulletin board in the fifth- and sixth-grade hall. The poster board didn’t even have any lines drawn on it.

  “That’s perfect. That’s perfect,” he said, and took out red and black permanent Magic Markers from his back pocket. My father wanted me to make cardboard signs for his vending truck. Yes, we’re open. Sorry, we’re closed. A price list of all the items we would sell. He patted my head and repeated, “That’s perfect, just perfect.”

  On the first Saturday that my father took me into Washington, D.C., in his vending truck, I sat underneath the window next to a box of hot dog buns with the top of my head touching the stainless-steel counter on which the exchange of food and money took place. That was the only spot where no one could see me and from which I could catch a glimpse of the pencil top from my father’s sideview mirror. I hoped no one from my school decided to visit the city that day because they might recognize my writing on my father’s signs.

  The cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and their scent came into our truck mingling with the smell of deep-fried egg rolls and roasting hot dogs and half smokes. I heard people passing by and began to remember the afternoon my mother had dressed me up in a yellow jumper with a pineapple-shaped pocket on my chest and Min Joo in red overalls, walking us around Washington, D.C. My father had walked four feet ahead of us, leading the way from one memorial to another. When we walked past vending trucks, I would see Chinese and Vietnamese torsos framed by large windows, and small bags of potato chips and corn chips that hung from clothespins; and whenever I caught sight of someone my age, I walked away feeling ashamed for her.