The Pike: Ships In The Night (5 page)

I watched the seconds tick down on my cell waiting for precisely six forty.  That's when I went into the Kusina Ni Tala.  I pocketed my cell and stepped through the door of the little restaurant in the little strip mall.  My smile bloomed when mom called out to me in Tagalog from where she was placing plates of food in front of some customers seated near the corner, “Ligaya, ang aking magandang Anak.”

I stepped up to her, blushing, and looking around to the customers who had turned to look at me.  “Mooom, English, please.”  Then as a direct inverse to my request, I asked in a small voice, “Mano po?”  I took her offered hand and pressed the back of it to my forehead.

She switched to English as she responded with what I think was a sly smirk, “God bless you.”

I'm not sure since I've never been really good at identifying emotions and verbal cues of social conventions.  But I believe she always enjoys saying that to me because she knows that I cannot prescribe to the worship of any entity I cannot quantify using the available data set and empirical evidence presented to me to date.

I always felt like a little girl around my mother, and I just scurried off to the back kitchen to work on her books.  Most emotions are beyond my grasp, but I did know I loved my mom and dad with all my heart.  Well if a muscle which precipitates the flow of blood throughout the body, to oxygenate the cells, is the source of that particular emotion.

I paused on my way to the little desk in the corner and sighed.  We must have lost another kitchen assistant.  The dishes were piling up and not a person in sight.  I went through the list of assistants in my head.  This last one was Lisa Ives.  They only stuck around a month or two before moving on to more gainful employment opportunities.  I really wish we could afford to pay them more than minimum wage and mom would have more help.

I set my things on the little wooden chair by the desk and grabbed some rubber gloves and started working on the dishes and pans.  Mom didn't need to try doing everything herself.  She stepped into the back to prepare some orders and paused to see me scrubbing at the particulate matter off a plate.  She shook her head at me and smiled.  Weren't those contradictory and mutually exclusive actions?

She asked as she started scooping some rice from the steamer, “How was your day?  Have you made that breakthrough you've been hoping for?”

I shook my head as I washed the soap off the plate with the sprayer.  “The day was satisfactory.  We are progressing nicely on the hardware.  We've been able to successfully predict and duplicate the quantum superposition of a pair of qubit states in virtually any quantum superposition of four states.”

I continued excitedly, “We are so close to a breakthrough that will allow us to accurately predict and combine pairs of qubit states.  That will be a huge achievement in the quantum computing field and will move us exponentially past the roadblocks that Nagasuma and Sky Computing have run into.  Allowing us to utilize the quantum superposition of eight states.”

Mom had that look on her face, which dad says is amusement.  She shook her head and said, “Just say you had a good day, my Liya.  You know I can't follow all that numbers nonsense.”

Nonsense?  Doesn't she realize that numbers and math are everything?  They are all encompassing and can be used to explain all things and quantify everything we know about the world and the universe, and the universes beyond our current ability to interact with?

Wait, she was grinning again.  Then I understood.  She was just playing with me!  I smiled back at her as she backed through the kitchen door with a couple plates of food.  Humorous.  It was great that she understood me so well.

I finished up and moved to the books.  It relaxed me that she used an old-fashioned ledger.  I grabbed the stack of receipts and invoices and flipped through them quickly doing some quick math.  I paused at a couple where she charged less for some menu items than she should have, or wrote them off.  We lost money on those tickets.  She always undercharged the customers who were having financial difficulties and even gave out free meals to any homeless people who came through.

I didn't understand why that made me feel... warm?  Inside, when I looked at her.  We had a hard enough time making ends meet without her giving food away and affecting the bottom line, but it made me look up to her in a way I didn't understand.  It made me want to aspire to be like her and do her proud.

I saw the lights dim under the door and mother stepped into the back, wiping her hands on her apron.  She smiled and walked up to me and gave me the last of the tickets.  I skimmed them quickly, adding them to the totals in my head then exhaled and looked at her before writing in the ledger in the revenue, and expenditures columns.  Mentally calculating in taxes and overhead for the day I wrote ninety-three dollars and four cents in the net column.

I sighed and showed her.  If Lisa Ives had still been working here, she would have taken home seventy-two dollars of that.  Leaving mom just over twenty-one dollars to show for her day.  Something had to be done, she was working herself so hard for less than minimum wage.

She shook her head at my expression, like she knew my thoughts, and said, “There's at least forty dollars in the tip jar at the register for today.  You don't need to have such a sour face.”

We turned back to the sound of the back door opening and dad stepped in.  The big, fit man taking up the entire doorway.  He gave us both a wink and a wave and asked as he reached for the three large bags of trash beside the door, “How are my girls tonight?”

Again, I felt like a little girl, and I gave a tiny wave. “Hi, daddy.”

He gave me that smile that mom says won her over when he was an exchange student in the Philippines from Seattle when they were in high school.  Then he went back out the door with the day's trash in one hand. He was always so strong.  He was a sanitation engineer for Bremerton.  He says that's just a fancy name for garbage man.

A minute later he came back in and washed his hands at the sink before joining us and giving us each a kiss on the forehead.  He stood behind mom, towering over her and rested his big hands on her shoulders.  I could see her change her angular momentum to lean back into him.  She looked back and up at him with a smile.

He asked, “We all set here?  Ready to go home?”

Mom nodded. “We're all locked up.”  She held up the big brown paper bag that would have our dinners in it.

I looked at my cell and shook my head.  “We leave at eight sixteen.  It is only eight fourteen.”

He gave me a grin and offered a deviation of established procedure, “What do you say we live on the wild side and sneak out a wee bit early, Imee?  Throw caution to the wind.”

I thought about it, it was sort of exciting to go against the structure of our regulated procedure.  I felt like a rebel and nodded with a smile.  He led us to the back door, checking to make sure it locked then we loaded up into our old green minivan.

I noticed a box beside my seat.  The shipping label said it was from Jake's U-Pick in Houston, Texas.  It was already open, and I took a quick peek inside.  I quickly looked up at dad as he smiled in the rear view mirror at me as he said, “Finally located it.  What say we get it installed this weekend?”  I nodded excitedly while mom chuckled at us.

He said to her, “Now Lily, it's our project, and we are coming into the homestretch now.”

She said in the tone I have identified as teasing, “You two have been in the homestretch since Liya graduated from college at thirteen, Vince.”

I started shuffling my weekend schedule around in my head to accommodate this new, unexpected dataset variable.  It was one of the activities dad insisted I participate in to keep me out of my own head and the math.  He says I have to be a part of the physical world as well as the intellectual world.

I just sat and pondered the warm feeling I got as my parents slipped into their nightly banter.  It confused me sometimes, they seemed so happy, but they continually teased each other.  But it wasn't like the teasing I got from the other kids in school that made me feel tense for some reason, though I didn't understand most of their references.

I understood that what I saw between my parents was love, and love confused the hell out of me because it defied math, there seemed to be no reliable formulae for it, though it seemed there was plenty of empirical evidence that it was indeed a tangible thing.  I knew that one day, I'd like to have with someone what I saw they had with each other.

***

The next morning, after dad dropped us off at mom's Kusina Ni Tala, I waved to him as he drove off to work and I made my way over to catch the ferry.

I noted that tall woman with straight black hair and those light grey eyes was sitting on the bench opposite me as we waited for the Hyak to dock in the early morning twilight.  She seemed to be just watching everyone at once with her cane laying across her lap.

I had noticed her a few months back when she had first wheeled up to the ferry in a wheelchair.  Her eyes were striking and were a counterpoint to her black hair.  There was just a one in forty-three thousand two hundred and twelve that someone would have that combination of hair and eye color.

I always felt more unsure and aware of myself whenever she was around and felt an odd fluttering in my gut.  That feeling just multiplied when she showed up ninety-one days ago walking with the cane and I saw just how tall... and fit she was.

I exhaled and looked at my shoes, I felt a little flush, I hoped I wasn't getting sick.  I looked away and pulled out my calculations from my bag and started shuffling the partial differentials around a bit to see if I could identify the problem with my wavefunction probability current.

I glanced at the woman again before going back to the math.  I got distracted, remembering her at the establishment I had substituted for Common Grounds Java in my life equation, the Pike.  She seemed even taller when she had held the door open for me, though I knew that was improbable.  I felt like a little girl again as I passed under her arm as she smiled down at me.  I absently wondered if she was a regular customer there.  Mom had a lot of regulars at her restaurant.

I realized that I had allowed my mind to stray and get off task, so I focused on my notes.  I was so close, I got what dad called a 'feeling,' that I was just missing something, just one parameter that escaped me.

I looked up when people started toward the ferry after the cars were loaded.  I followed along, crunching the numbers on multiple iterations of my adjusted formulae as we boarded.  In my distraction, I was a little slower than usual and wound up behind the woman I found so fascinating.

She insisted on using the stairs instead of the elevator that would make things so much easier for her since her leg was not functioning at optimal levels.  Even though she had to stop a couple times to rest on the way up, it made me appreciate her more for some reason.  It wasn't about efficiency for her, and she seemed determined.

I moved into the passenger cabin as she continued to the upper deck.  I idly wondered what she did up there.  Even in cold weather, she would sit up there in her wheelchair.  Then I went back to my research when I sat on one of the chairs inside the large open room.  I paused and looked back out the doors to the stairs, maybe one day I'd go up to see what drew her to the observation deck each day.

I sighed to myself and muttered, “Don't get distracted Liya, you have a problem to solve.”

I hadn't had any success, and I had, like every day in the past six months, exhausted all of the numerous possibilities for that particular attempt for resolution.  I'd modify the parameters yet again once I arrived at the University lab and try again.

I looked away from my work when the chime went off, signaling the ship docking, and noted my shoe was untied.  I smiled and reached down and tied it.  Seeing another hole in its side, I sighed, their structural integrity was being compromised more and more each day.  I had to find the answer for my research soon.  I had made a promise, and I meant to keep it.  I rested a hand on my shoe a moment then stood.

I was the last one out to the stairs, and I jumped in surprise and made a squeaking sound when the grey-eyed woman landed in front of me with a thud.  She put her cane down to steady herself to arrest her forward momentum to stop from running into me.

I just stared up at her as she smiled in an odd way and said in a voice full of confidence and I think amusement? “Sorry, didn't mean to startle you.  I thought everyone had already gone below deck.”

My cheeks felt hot to me.  I was coming down with something, wasn't I?  When I combine that with my earlier feelings, it was the only logical conclusion.  I looked down as my belly fluttered and I pushed my thick hair out of my face and said, “It's alright.  As my father would say, no harm, no foul.”  Why was I babbling?

I chanced a glance up and was startled, she was gone, I turned to see her at the other end of the landing a couple steps away.  She was looking back at me, and she said with a smile as she laid her arms on the stair railings, “Good to hear.  Have a great day Miss.”  Then she winked at me and fell forward.

I gasped and ran forward a step to look down the stairs as she landed on the lower deck.  I found myself smiling hugely.  She had slid down the banisters.  Gravity assist, how ingenious.  My heart was beating rapidly at the scare.  I stepped to the stairs and reached my arms out to touch each rail.  Even if I wanted to, my arms didn't have the span of hers, and I wouldn't have been able to duplicate the feat.