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Call It Quits by Jen Keli Bautista It took my family the time span of one classic Disney princess movie to get to Grandma’s house. It took two minutes for Grandma to answer the door after we parked on the driveway next to her garden full of purple hyacinths, pink hydrangeas, and red petunias in front of her little tan house. It took two seconds for Grandma to grab my shoulder and straighten out my back before I even entered her house. “Emma, stand up straight. You don’t want to look like Quasimodo when you get old.” Her finger dug into the back of my right shoulder, and once she let go, I tried to keep myself from massaging the spot because I didn’t want anyone to know it hurt. My mom seemed to know what I was thinking though because she rubbed the place that Grandma gripped. We walked into her one story, one bedroom house and settled ourselves on the woolly, mud-colored sectional in the family room as we waited for the rice to finish cooking. The family room was full of framed pictures hanging on walls of thin mustard and oatmeal colored stripes. In the center was a family portrait of my grandparents with my mom when she was a baby. Surrounding it were pictures of my grandparents on a beach in the Philippines, a wedding picture of my parents, my family portrait from when I had turned five, and baby pictures of my brother, my mom, my cousins, aunts, uncles, and me. The opposite side of the small house held the dining room, which faced the window to the front yard. The smells of pancit and lumpia, which were already set on the dining table, filled the house, causing my stomach to growl. I tried to make the sound quieter by hugging one of the orange couch pillows over my stomach. “So Alana how is Liam? He lept again por the military, how long ago?” Grandma asked Mom as she pushed her purple glasses up her nose. Her Filipino accent made her f’s sound like p’s. “He’s doing well. He left about a month ago, and now he’s in . . .” I tuned out of the adults’ conversation after hearing that my dad was fine. This was the second time he had left for the military, and sometimes I cried when I thought about him not being there in the morning to make me animal shaped pancakes. I wondered if Grandma felt like this after Grandpa died, leaving her alone to raise my mom. I fiddled with my red dress with white polka dots. I took the matching bow out of my hair and started to play with that too, but it wasn’t much of a distraction. After putting the bow back on, I began to count the stripes on my grandma’s wall to keep from thinking about food, Dad’s absence, and Grandpa’s death. Last week, I counted twentyseven mustard stripes, but I didn’t get to finish counting because we were called to eat. One, two, three. I counted up to fifty-eight before I heard Grandma yell at Ryan, my brother. “Ryan! Go check to see ip the rice is cooked.” Not wanting to be left alone with the adults, I hopped up. “I’ll come with you!” “It only takes one person to look at rice,” said my grandma, but I was already in the beige kitchen before she finished her sentence. When I walked up to Ryan, I saw that he was angrily frowning at the rice from under his coconut looking bowl haircut. “I would let this rice burn if I didn’t have to eat it. We’ve been coming here every single Sunday for as long as I can remember, and she only ever talks to me to say hi, bye, yell at me, and when she wants me do things for her.” He mimicked her in a high-pitched voice and was on point with her accent, pronouncing v’s like b’s. “‘Ryan, rake the leabes. Ryan, pull the weeds. Ryan, cut the grass using scissors. Ryan, use this toothbrush to clean my brick walkway in the garden. Make sure to clean the grout too.’ I don’t even live here.” I sighed. I knew exactly how he felt. Grandma had made me wash the dishes and vacuum the house at least four times in the past couple months. I didn’t mind helping her out, but she was so screechy about it. I felt like a vulture with piercing eyes was shrieking at me to clean the house. “Ryan, is the rice pinished?” Grandma shouted from the family room.
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