Courtney Cheng
My future mother-in-law’s home sits on a small, dusty lot at the end of a long, narrow driveway surrounded on three sides by a homemade fence. I know the fence is homemade because my fiancé told me how he and his older brother built it together by hand-pouring concrete and mounting the boards with a nail gun until their hands blistered through their work gloves. These were the weekends he traveled back to Houston from Los Angeles, where we had both been business school students a couple years back and I had received his exhaustion with concern and presumptive questions of why they hadn’t hired help.
His older brother was standing at the top of the drive as we parked. My fiancé and I were there so I could meet his mama after more than 3 years, welcome 2024, and enjoy early birthday celebrations for both his mama and me. His brother was kneeling next to the family’s large yellow lab mix with a deep, forceful bark to make sure she wouldn’t jump me even though she was already chained up. “Quiet, Luna.”
He shook my hand when we were inside their care-worn family home, introduced himself proudly as my fiancé’s “little bigger brother” because he was barely a few inches taller than my 5’2”. His wash-faded t-shirt and shorts hung 3 sizes too large. His voice scratched like gravel and trapped all his words behind his lips when he asked if I wanted a water from the fridge, if his mama needed anything, if his brother wanted a root beer. It was the first time I saw the tattoos inked across the backs of his fingers and knuckles and hands that clearly stretched across his arms and torso and neck. I’d prepared myself for the neck tattoos but hadn’t made out the extent of his ink from the few photos I’d found of him on my fiancé’s Facebook.
My fiancé spoke the most during our late lunch of market tamales and homemade rice and supermarket flan. He was the only one of the four of us who could switch between and translate English to Spanish and Spanish to English. His brother’s longest string of words was to insist my fiancé take one of his spare tires back home after we had run over a nail on the way over. Otherwise his most spoken words were “thank you,” “mama,” and “brother,” which is how he referred to his younger brother. I had grown up calling my older brother but dropped the Chinese title before I was 10.
After we finished eating, his brother thanked us before he stepped outside. “Thank you, Mama. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you, brother.” My fiancé and I remained inside to sit on the family sofa that dipped even before we sat down to exchange Christmas gifts. His mama gave me a set of demure gold hoop earrings. His brother, a Christmas ornament of a lasso-bearing Santa wearing a Stetson sitting in a cowboy boot, which he’d packaged with snug perfection in a handmade gift box. I would learn only the following Christmas that the ornament had been a favorite of his for years.
My fiancé and I listened to his mama retell childhood stories about him and his brother in Spanish until we needed to head out if we wanted to make it home to Dallas before dark. Outside, his brother was sitting on a dirty plastic lawn chair with Luna roving nearby, drawing on a sheet of paper with ballpoint pen a design made up of patterns, words, a cross. It wasn’t dissimilar to the bits and pieces I’d watched my fiancé draw in the margins of his business school notebooks when he had been bored in class.
I wanted to stay longer with him. I didn’t know what we could talk about. But I knew I wanted to sit on a dirty plastic lawn chair next to him, hear him call my fiancé “brother” a few more times. I knew I would like sitting next to him a little longer.
Courtney Cheng is a proud Bay Area native currently living in Dallas. She holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA. Her work has been published by Asian American Feminist Collective and is forthcoming in Belmont Story Review. Beyond writing, she holds a wide range of hobbies including dancing bachata and salsa, investing in her health and wellness, and spending quality time with her fiancé. Follow along at courtneycheng.me.