Coe Review

I don't think Maria would have thought much of you. Too conventional,
she'd snort, and too young. Well, you are young, genuinely young, not an old
baby like me. Yet you know things I don't; you live in the world in a way I
never could, treating it as though it was yours to play with, not the other way
around—as if you represented the permanent, it the transient. But that's
one thing I've seen that you haven't. Your baseball-capped swagger, the
same thing I saw twenty years ago, the same thing I'll see twenty years from
now if I haven't been cut down by then. If one of you doesn't cut me down.
But I didn't tell you any of that about me; I only told you about Maria.
You listened, and then you told me about Pauly. Turned out you'd just been
to a funeral, too. What a coincidence, you said, as if there could be anything
surprising about two deaths on the same day. Pauly, a friend from way
back, once as close as a brother. Time took care of that, though—eventually
we went our separate ways—and then took care of Pauly, young as he was, as
you are. Burying him was like burying a piece of me. You meant to show me you
understood. You did understand a little, about Maria, but you couldn't ever
understand the rest of it, the part about me, because after a moment (meant
to be reflective, the two of us humming with shared emotion) you imagined
a door opening for you. You decided to make the move.
six.
Let's go somewhere.
I couldn't. I had to go see my mother.
Where does she live?
She's living, she's dying, across the street. Oncology. Visiting hours at
I'll go with you.
I tried to warn you, and not just as a tactful method of turning you away:
This is not someone you want to see after you've been to a funeral. If you
tell her you've just buried a friend, she'll say I'll be next. Then you will.
Ruth. She didn't used to be this way. Ruth had once—most of her
life, in fact—been steadfastly positive. She was privileged, she would say
humbly, and so she felt it was her mission to try to make the world a better
place. She was so privileged she actually believed she would make the world
a better place.
When Ruth first found out that I was one of the Lao babies, she was
ecstatic, as though she'd found out she were one of them. Reporters sought
her out and she gave intense, glowing interviews. I always knew she was special,
from the day I saw her, she would beam beatifically at me. J had always wanted to
adopt a little Chinese girl, of course, because I wanted to be able to take her from a culture
that to this day refuses to value women and show her that she is valuable and important. I
wanted to show this to her from day one, in the very act of being a single mother.
The reporters nodded, faces and fingers twitching impatiently: get to the
30 Redwood