“Isn’t she beautiful?” Ian said, showing a photo of her daughter eating ice cream. He swiped his iPhone screen to the left, showing another photo of her daughter standing next to an old lady. “That’s my mother in law. She’s taking care of her now.”
“She doesn’t look like you though,” I said. “Your daughter, I mean.” He laughed.
“I know. She looks more like her mother, but we have the same smile. See?” He stuck his iPhone on his cheek and smiled.
“Alright. Yeah, I can see the resemblance there,” I chuckled.
“Oh, shucks!” He darted over to the oven, and then laughed.
“What happened?” I asked, startled.
“I thought I forgot to set the timer again.” I just met Ian a week ago. He was a full time baker at this newly opened bakery, and I was just a part-timer cashier/waiter/baker-assistant/dish-washer. Although he looked like Chinese, I’d figured he was not Malaysian Chinese the moment he opened his mouth—he had Filipino tongue. Back in Manila he used to be a lab technician at a pathology laboratory, and his wife was a research assistant for a private Biomedical laboratory. When I asked him why did he and his wife come to Malaysia to work in the food and beverage industry, he said the living cost in Manila was very high and they wanted to ensure that their daughter get the most comfortable life and the best education they could get in Manila. What a paradox decision, I thought to myself, how could their daughter experience the “best” life when her parents were absent?
“It was a mistake,” Ian said. The sweet smell of almond croissant started to fill the silver kitchen.
“What mistake?” I asked without looking at him. I was cleaning the mixer he just used. Did he bake the wrong pastry? Wrong recipe?
“My marriage—it was a mistake,” he said.
“Owh…” I didn’t know what to say, or how to react. When I looked up at him, his eyes were motionless and his mind had travelled somewhere, a place faraway from the dull kitchen, most probably to his marriage that he just mentioned—a mistake.
“Why is it a mistake?” I asked. My question brought his mind back to the kitchen.
“Well, let’s just say I was too young.”
“How old were you when you got married?”
“23,” he sighed. “I regret it now, but there’s nothing I can do,” he looked at me and gave me a half smile. “I guess I got to make it work.”
“How old are you now?”
“31. How ‘bout you?”
“I’m 24.”
“You’re still young. Do you have a girlfriend?” He asked.
“Well…I just got engaged a month ago,” I said. My stomach felt funny, as though something was tickling my lungs and it made me nervous and uptight.
“Owh…well, congratulations!” He said with a jubilant tone and a wide smile, but there was something dark in his watery eyes—they were reflecting something urgent, almost like a warning, a secret that he restrained from coming out.
“Thank you,” I said, looking straight into his eyes. I jerked when the oven rang suddenly, and when Ian opened it, smoke rose up to the ceiling. He took out the tray of almond croissants and put it on the silver table.
“Shit!” He said.
“Oh, boy...what now?”
“Wrong timing,” he said, shaking his head as he inspect the croissants. Some of them had black edges, burnt, but some seemed perfectly fine—at least to me.
“Can we still fix them? At least some of them?” I asked.
“We can try…” He sighed. “No harm in trying. I’d spent half of my day baking this—I don’t want to waste it.”
“My point, exactly,” I said. He looked up at me, quietly thinking, and then smiled. I smiled back, hoping that he really did get my point.