Free Monstress by Lysley Tenorio Page A

into the crowd, and hurried off.
    In the hotel room, I found Papa Felix staring out the window. “You were talking to the maid.”
    I locked the door behind me. “You were watching me?”
    â€œDoes she know who we are?” I told him no, but he rambled on with paranoid scenarios of the police discovering us, confiscating our client list, robbing us of our hard-earned money. “One mistake and we’re finished.”
    â€œShe was just talking about home,” I said, and made up a story about distant relatives she had in Batangas City, former teachers at my old elementary school. Then I poured him a cup of Cutty Sark and assured him once more: “She doesn’t know anything.”
    â€œShe’d better not. Because if she does, and if she talks, then our time here means nothing.” He picked up the fading, wrinkled ATM receipt and held it to my face. “This is our future. Don’t forget that.”
    I gave him the whiskey and stepped toward the window, looked down at the street. The bus stop was at least two long blocks west of the hotel—I had to press against the glass just to see it. From where I was, the people standing there were faceless, blurry bodies. How Papa Felix could spot me with his old, bad eyes was beyond me, and a familiar feeling returned: that he possessed a real kind of power after all, some extra sense that could lead him to me, wherever I was.
    H e was standing over me when I woke the next morning. “I’m going with you,” he said.
    He meant the butcher shop in Chinatown. The chicken livers I bought were too fresh, he said, therefore fake-looking. With one day left, there was no time for my mistakes.
    He set a Snickers bar and a banana next to my pillow. “Eat breakfast and let’s go.”
    On my own, the walk to Chinatown took seventeen minutes; with Papa Felix, it was twice as long. But I stayed ahead, by half a block sometimes, and when he caught up at the butcher shop he was out of breath, and he accused me of trying to lose him in the crowd. He took a seat on a bench outside the Chinese bakery next door, then gave me a fifty-dollar bill. “Just get it done,” he said.
    I entered the shop, pushed my way through the crowd to take a number. They called me twenty minutes later; I paid for the livers and left. But outside, the bench was empty; Papa Felix was inside the bakery now, sitting at a corner table with three silver-haired Chinese women. They leaned in as he spoke, nodding despite the quizzical looks on their faces. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d solicited business like this, but his method was the same—he tapped their foreheads with his thumb, shut his eyes, and mouthed secret prayers to himself. It was always a bogus-looking act, but at some point I just assumed that Filipinos were somehow predisposed to believing anyone who claimed to understand their pain. And yet I could imagine these Chinese women making appointments with Papa Felix, who would insist they pay up front, then arrange for them to meet us long after we’d gone; he’d done it before. I pictured these women knocking on our hotel door, awaiting help that would never come.
    I went inside, walked up to Papa Felix. “I’m ready to go,” I said. His eyes were still closed and he kept on praying, so I shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes. Let’s go.”
    He turned to me, gave a mean look that I gave right back. “I’m working ,” he said.
    â€œI’m not.” I slammed the bag of livers on the table. The Chinese women glared at me with scolding faces.
    I walked to the end of the block. I tried to cross, but the light was red, and Papa Felix caught up with me. “What were you trying to do in there?” he asked.
    I pressed the button for the crosswalk. “Nothing.”
    â€œThe maid yesterday. Those women today. You’re trying to tell them about us?”
    I pressed the