Page 46 of Signal No. Us

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve been busy,” Robby said, not looking up.

“You’ve been busy since the day I turned down a corner office and a car allowance to stay here,” Allan said. “I did the math, Robby. That’s not a coincidence.”

Robby’s hands went still on the rope.

“I keep thinking about the number,” he admitted finally, like it cost him something just to say it out loud. “Not because I want it. Because you didn’t. And someday, not now, maybe not even soon, but someday, you’re going to be forty, painting a wall in a barangay that still doesn’t have a real drainage system, and you’re going to remember there was a version of your life where you had a corner office and a title and none of this, and I’m going to be the reason you don’t have it.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Allan said, quiet but not gentle. “You’re deciding what my life is going to look like in twelve years, and you’re not even asking me. That’s the exact thing we promised we’d stop doing to each other. Two weeks ago, I was the one hiding something from you at that table. Now you’re hiding a decision from me instead.”

“That’s not—” Robby paused, then continued. “It’s exactly what happened to my mother.” For the first time in weeks, his voice had lost every ounce of its careful steadiness.

“She could have moved us to Legazpi. Better schools, better everything. She stayed, for my father, for this house, for a barangay that did everything right by her. The warning came in time. It still wasn’t enough. Wrong time. Wrong place. A tree.”

He shook his head, as if shaking the thought away. “Anyway. I’m not saying you’re going to die because of me. I’m saying I watched someone stay for love and pay for it with everything, and I don’t know how to not be terrified that I’m about to let that happen to you too.”

Allan stood there a moment, letting that land the way Robby had once let his own confession land in the library, without immediately reaching for the reassurance that would only make it smaller.

“You don’t get to decide that for me,” he said finally, gently. “You did that already, once. Ten years ago. You decided what was safest for both of us without asking me, and I lost a decade because of it. I’m not doing the quiet-decision thing with you. Not again. Not from either side.”

“I know,” Robby said. “I know that. I just don’t know how to turn the fear off.”

“You don’t turn it off,” Allan said. “You said that yourself. You just don’t let it choose for you anymore.” He crossed the last few feet between them and took the rope out of Robby’s hands, setting it down, useless, on the pavement. “I didn’t turn down that job for you. I turned it down because I finally know what my own life is supposed to feel like, and it isn’t a corner office. Two weeks of silence about a job offer nearly cost us everything once already. Don’t let two weeks of guilt do the same thing from your side of the table.”

Robby didn’t say anything for a long moment. When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet in a way he clearly hadn’t planned on.

“I don’t want to be like a tree,” he said, rough. “I don’t want to be the thing that fell on your life.”

“Then don’t,” Allan said. “Be the—” he stopped, started over, his own voice less steady than he wanted it to be. “Be the thing that’s still standing next to me when the next storm comes. That’s the whole job, isn’t it? You said it yourself. At the drill. Everyone on your list matters.” He had to look away for a second before he could finish. “I’m asking you to actually believe I’m allowed to be on it. Permanently. No exit clause.”

Something like this didn’t fix itself in one conversation. Allan understood that better than most people now, but something in Robby’s shoulders came down anyway, slow, like a held breath finally deciding it was safe to let go.

“Okay,” Robby said. “I’m scared, but I’m staying anyway.”

“I hear it works.”

The mural was finished three days later, on a Tuesday nobody had marked on any calendar. Allan stood back from the scaffolding to look at it properly for the first time as a whole thing instead of a hundred separate decisions: the two small painted figures under their storm, hand in hand, the mangrove roots holding the shoreline together beneath them, his lolo’s half-remembered brushstrokes somewhere underneath his own, his father’s careful shadows filled in at last by a son who’d finally stopped running from the ladder.

Near the rooster his lolo had painted decades ago, preserved rather than painted over, he’d folded in a woman with a fish nearly as big as the boy holding it, laughing at something just past the frame’s edge, the exact tilt of her head from the one photograph Robby kept fresh flowers beside every day.

Lower, where the storm met the shoreline, he’d filled the space he’d once meant to leave bare with a whole crowd of ordinary faces standing shoulder to shoulder against the wind: Kapitan gripping his sandbag, Manang Loring with her grandson on her hip, health workers, tanods, titas balancing relief-goods baskets on their heads, none of them painted larger or smaller than anyone else in the frame.

The paint was still tacky in one corner where he hadn’t let it dry long enough, and someone had already chalked a small heart beside Kapitan’s dedication plaque. Allan stood there a long moment, sweat cooling on the back of his neck, looking at the whole wall the way you look at a face you’ve only ever seen half-finished. Jake had to call his name twice before it landed. Even then he didn’t move right away — roof to roof, corner to corner, like he was checking that all of it was still there.

The grant meeting happened that same week, in a fluorescent-lit function room at the municipal hall that Robby had booked and rebooked three times around two canceled ferries. The regional DRRM grant evaluator took one long look at the mural in the photos Jake had printed, at the storm-drawing workshop numbers, and at Kapitan’s signature already sitting at the bottom of the endorsement letter, and approved the restoration funding on the spot, seats, projector, and roof included.

“Community buy-in like this,” she said, tapping the folder, “we don’t see it presented this clearly often.”

What the folder didn’t show, because there wasn’t a line item for it, were years of bayanihan that had gotten them here: Tita Gemma’s sewing circle cutting drop cloths out of old curtains, the retired manongs covering Robby’s shift every time he disappeared to prime a wall, Manang Loring sending bilaos of kakanin because, she said, a painter can only create a masterpiece with a full stomach, and Kapitan signing off on scaffolding permits before anyone had to ask twice.

Years ago the same barangay had watched half its roofs peel off in a storm they never saw coming, with nowhere solid to run to. This time, before the money ever showed up, they had already shown up for each other.

CINE SA ISLA: SOFT OPENING, HARD FEELINGS, the banner said, bright and uneven, clearly printed by someone far too proud of the pun.

That was Jake’s doing for that weekend’s first “mini event” at the cinema. It wasn’t a full screening yet, the projector still wheezed if you asked too much of it, and the seats were only half fixed, but Jake had decided the wordplay alone earned it soft-opening status.

They dragged chairs into some semblance of order. They wiped down the walls. They unrolled old posters they’d found in the storage room, SISTER STELLA L., MADRASTA, TANGING YAMAN, and taped them up wherever the paint had held.