“This coffee is not warm, at best lukewarm, sah? Needs to be hot. Everybody knows this. When it comes to coffee, hot is good. Where’s your manager? I want to speak to him.”

She works in the restaurant next to the bakalah at the end of Mubarak Street, her home away from home, so she can send monthly money to her mom and dad who are providing for her three-year old son Santos in a village north of Manila. When asked about this terrible way of raising her son, this long-distance mothering, she agrees, answering with a smile, “But what to do?”

“But where is the father? Where is he in all of this?”

She swats at some invisible fly. “Never mind him. He has his own problems.” Waving again at that invisible fly. “Never mind.” And that was the last she ever spoke of Santos’s father.

She does her restaurant duties, 12 hours a day, six days a week to get the money to make sure her son has all that he needs until the next month. Truth be told, the money she sends is nothing—not really—but there, in the village north of Manila, it is a big something. Every Christmas her mother and father tell her it is time to come home—‘Enough is enough; your son needs you. Come home. Never mind the money, we will find a way,’ and so on. And every Christmas she cries and says, “Yes, maybe…”

But, in the end, they all know that it is simple Christmas talk and nothing will come of it, and yet it has to be said.

The last Thursday of every month, the manager, Nizar, a Lebanese, who thinks nothing of smoking three packs of cigarettes daily, who wears the same pointy black shoes, will call them one at a time into his backroom office, an office that is nothing more than a big closet with boxes full of paper cups and napkins and plastic forks, and once at the door, he hands each of them their sealed monthly-salary envelope. And like always, she will say ‘Thank you,’ and he will answer ‘Of course,’ not once looking up, and they are done with each other until the next pay period. Her name is written on the envelope: Maria, even though everybody calls her Joy because that is what her nametag says.

Truth be told, Maria’s restaurant at the end of Mubarak Street, next to the harbor, is in need of desperate repairs. The owner, a slim dishdasha with prayer beads, almost never visits his own restaurant, but when he does he is only concerned with examining their fingernails, to see if they are short, clean, because, “as we all know, short clean fingernails are best for working in a restaurant, sah?” His ownership duties done, he quickly leaves, prayer beads in one hand, cellphone in the other, with Nizar hovering, grinning, at his side like a friendly shadow. But never mind, because the restaurant still needs fixing: the kitchen pipes are leaking, the toilet only flushing sometimes, the lights blinking off and on when it is windy, the grease on the grill sparking mini-fires when you aren’t looking, and so on. The owner says yes to all of these problems, and that yes again, they need to be looked into. “No doubt about it, and next Ramadan we’ll do it right. We’ll close the place next Ramadan and fix everything, just you wait and see.” And of course the Ramadans come and go, and by now the air conditioner has decided to stop, the front door mysteriously falling off its hinges one Thursday morning in April.

Meanwhile, Maria’s Santos north of Manila has grown five inches since the last time she saw him. His teeth are bigger and better, and when they talk on the computer every Sunday, he smiles as Maria reminds him to be good, to mind Lola and Lolo, and of course Santos says yes to everything because his friends are at the screen door, urging him to come out and play. Santos thinks of nothing but playing with his friends while thousands of miles away his mother says she must go and I love you, bye-bye, . . .

And so, all done for another Sunday with Santos, Maria turns off the computer, and looking up at the backroom clock sees that her 30-minute break is over, she steps back into the restaurant just in time to take an order of cheeseburgers with extra pickles and French fries and, ‘Oh, by the way, no onions, and the fries must be crispy, last time they were not; crispy is important, you understand? And the milkshake needs to be thick. You know how to do that, right? And another thing….’

Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash.