How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,29

wife looked odd in these vacation pictures. She’d never posed this way before, for him. Her black hair was set in big soft curls and she looked like a child’s doll: blue eyelids, long artificial eyelashes, round rosy cheeks, red lips. She would never, on her own, make herself up like this. This bikini would never be something she’d choose for herself. “Hee keyow,” she would say, shaking her head in disapproval if he ever suggested she wear anything even slightly revealing. This bikini must have been Frank’s idea.

“Oh, Frank. He’s such a goofball,” she said, giggling, trying to make light of the whole thing. Frank was her boss at Coffee Time.

The school bus driver had intended the trip to Laos to be a surprise gift for his wife. She was working long hours these days; she deserved a nice vacation. He bought one plane ticket (it was all he could afford at the time), thinking she’d go alone to see her family. But when she asked Frank for time off from work, he said she could go—if he came along.

“I’ve always wanted to see a foreign country with a native,” Frank had said.

He was in almost every one of these photos, smiling and posing with her cousins, parents, grandparents. But in the photos where Jai’s wife was in the white bikini, it must have been Frank behind the camera. There were so many of her alone.

THE SCHOOL BUS DRIVER and his wife lived in a newly built brick house—two-car garage, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a finished basement. There were two other houses exactly like it on the block. The developer was supposed to tear down the neighbouring shopping mall and parking lot to build more new homes like theirs, but there was some problem with the fees, the licences, the zoning approvals—it got too messy for the builder to deal with. So now, there were just these three identical brick houses between a shopping mall parking lot and a tall apartment building, all facing a busy main street. The developer needed to unload these homes quick, so no one questioned whether the bus driver and his wife could really afford it. Still, they owned a home of their own now, even if they couldn’t quite manage the mortgage payments. How could they, with the school bus driver working part-time and his wife making minimum wage at Coffee Time? They just barely made the monthly payments.

Sometimes when they were very short on money, the school bus driver’s wife would come home with extra cash, saying that Frank had given her a bonus at work. She said it was a bonus for her good work. “Just this one time. This bonus. For my good work,” she said. Frank was really good to them in that way.

SINCE HER TRIP to Laos with Frank, the school bus driver’s wife had started to put in longer hours at work. She came home much later than usual now. At first, she blamed the bus schedule—they didn’t come as frequently after dark. She said, “You don’t know how scary it is, to be a woman standing there at the bus stop at night. I hold my keys in my hand and put them between my fingers so I’m ready to defend myself against some pervert. You just don’t know!”

It didn’t make sense to him, but she was right. He didn’t know what it was like for a woman. The school bus driver suggested he pick her up after work. But she laughed and said, “Not in that big yellow thing you drive.”

So she arranged for her friend Frank to pick her up on the way to work and to drive her home too. He was going to and leaving from the same place and at the same time, after all. It was only reasonable.

Frank drove a dark-green Jaguar. It was fancy. You never heard the engine at all, creeping down the street to pick up the school bus driver’s wife or to drop her off after work. He took good care of this car. Even in the winter, when there was snow, Frank’s car was always newly washed and polished. All year round, he kept it like this.

When the school bus driver thought about how things used to be, he would remember what his wife used to smell like when she first started working at Coffee Time, a bit like burnt coffee beans. He had to admit to himself that she seemed happier now, not