Three Keys Page 8

  Mrs. Welch was a doctor? I crawled back out, put the receipts on her desk and looked up at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She looked down at the receipts. “Thanks for picking that up, but you can throw them away.” She added with a sigh, “The administration’s not going to reimburse me for all that stuff. But I had to buy them for you guys.”

  I raised an eyebrow, thinking that was nice of her. As I threw the receipts out, Mrs. Welch took a walk around the classroom and declared, “Well, this looks pretty good.” It did look better. The books on the bookshelf were straightened and all the markers put away. The papers on her desk were in a neat pile—Lupe’s A+ math test on the top. My mom was right. Lupe was great at math.

  Mrs. Welch walked over and plopped down on her chair, satisfied. “Good work, Mia. I hope next time you’ll think before saying something in anger to your classmates. You can go home now.”

  I walked over and grabbed my backpack. I peered back at Mrs. Welch as I walked out of the room. She was hunched over in her favorite position, grading essays at her desk, her eagle eyes moving intensely across the page as she jabbed the paper gleefully with her red pen.

  She looked up at me and added, “We’re doing another essay next week. Hopefully you’ll do better.”

  I nodded, eyes lingering on the degree behind her chair. I tried to picture her as a doctor and wondered which was scarier—having her decide on my grades or my medicine.

  Mrs. T, Mrs. Q, and all the weeklies were celebrating when I got back. Hank kissed the newspaper in his hand, shrieking, “Did you see, Mia? This is marketing gold!”

  I giggled as he twirled me around in the front office. There was already a framed copy of the article on the wall, and Hank and I stood proudly next to it, while my dad called up all his immigrant buddies and bragged about the article, saying how we’d done it! We’d really made it in this country! Their enthusiasm was so contagious, I forgot all about my own classmates’ earlier reactions.

  “We’re in the paper! We’re in the paper!!” we sang as we danced around the motel. Hank ordered pizza while my mom set up tables out by the pool. My dad patted Hank on the back.

  “This was all you, Hank,” he said, smiling at him. “If you hadn’t gone in to talk to the paper about the ad, the reporter would have never known about us.”

  Hank laughed. “It’s what I’m always saying to Mia,” he said, ruffling my hair. “You gotta keep trying!”

  My parents held up cups of cream soda.

  “To Hank!” they cheered.

  “To the Calivista!” Hank replied.

  Twenty minutes later, I was finishing up a letter to Shen (I included a copy of the article!), when the pizza arrived. I jumped down from the desk and joined my parents out by the pool. As I ate my slice by the side of the pool, I thought about Lupe and what she was doing. I wished she was here, but she said she had to stay by the phone in her house in case her mom called. Her mom was probably somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, by now. I saved a slice of pizza for Lupe. Maybe tomorrow we could microwave it in Fred’s microwave and it would still be good.

  My mom joined me on the edge of the pool. “Hey, do you know what a doctor of philosophy is?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, why?” she asked, rolling up her cleaning pants and dangling her own tired feet in the water.

  I groaned and told her about cleaning in Mrs. Welch’s room. “But don’t worry, it was a ‘dry mess,’ not a ‘wet mess,’ like some of our customers leave.”

  My mom smiled. “So what’s this about a doctor of philosophy?”

  “My teacher has one.”

  My mom nearly dropped her pizza in the pool. “Your teacher has a PhD?”

  “Ph-what?” I asked. My eyes moved to the pool water, which we had to keep at a certain pH level or else the health department would come knocking. That was the only pH I knew.

  “A PhD is what they call a doctor of philosophy,” my mom explained. “It’s one of the hardest degrees you can get. It’s for teaching college.”

  “Wow. What’s she doing teaching sixth grade, then?”

  My mom gazed down at the pool, at the soft ripples reflecting the setting sun. “I guess it’s kind of like me cleaning motel rooms, even though I was once an engineer.”

  I thought about that as I watched the clouds in the sky shift. I guess that would explain why Mrs. Welch was so mad all the time. If it was, it was a pretty silly reason. We might only be in sixth grade, but her students weren’t chopped liver. Some of us were running businesses.

  At school the next day, we gathered again underneath the big oak tree. There were ten of us now. Jason smiled and congratulated me on the article.

  “We all saw it, even my dad,” he said.

  “Really? What’d he say?” I asked.

  Jason paused and said, “Nothing, but I could tell he was proud.” I knew he was making the proud part up but still, it felt good to hear.

  “I’ll tell Hank you said that,” I said. “Better yet, you can tell everyone yourself when you come over this Friday!”

  Timidly, Hector raised his hand. “I actually live in a motel too.”

  We all flipped our heads to him, me and Lupe especially. All this time, I thought I was the only one, that I was so not normal—which was why I never told anybody where I lived, not a single soul except Lupe, until the newspaper told everyone.

  “We’ve been living in the Days Inn over on Ball ever since my dad lost his job,” Hector said.

  Rachel, one of our first white club members, piped up, “You’re lucky. We’ve just been living in our car. We lost our home a few months ago to the bank.”

  All heads turned to Rachel, and she shrank in the grass. I knew just the feeling, that itchy, scary sensation that you’ve said too much and now nobody will ever look at you the same again.

  “We’ve lived in our car too,” I confessed.

  “Well, I sorta live in a car,” Tyler, another one of our new members, said. “It’s called a trailer home.”

  “Like our classroom!” Lupe said.

  Tyler grinned. “Yeah, just like our classroom.”

  As we all oohed and asked him questions about what it was like, Tyler chuckled and promised he’d have us over and show us.

  Walking back to class that day, I couldn’t believe it. This whole time, I thought I was the only one who didn’t live in a big two-story house with a white picket fence. I had no idea there were so many others. The knowledge that I wasn’t all alone made me feel so warm and fuzzy inside, I decided it was a good thing the paper ran the story. It made all the maid jokes I got from Bethany Brett worth it.

  Hank was carrying a gigantic box into the front office when I got home from school. He threw his Anaheim Angels baseball cap onto the desk, and both my mom and I looked up.

  “Guess what I bought with my new credit card?” he beamed. “Ladies, may I introduce the newest, most state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line phone system!”

  We gasped as Hank proceeded to pull out the fanciest electronic device I’d ever seen. My mom reached out and ran her fingers over the smooth surface. “I used to make these.”

  “No kidding!” Hank said.

  “You bought this with your new credit card?” Mom asked him. She looked around the desk for today’s mail, but all we’d gotten were some supermarket flyers. “I wonder where mine is.”

  As I played with the bubble wrap, my mom helped Hank set up the phone. Her long, slender fingers worked expertly as she plugged in this cord and that wire. When at last everything was connected, she switched on the power. The machine beeped to life. Hank clapped.

  “It works!” he shouted.

  My mom smiled as Hank complimented her electronic assembling skills, even though I could tell she was also a little bit sad. It dawned on me then that maybe Mom missed more about her old life than just shopping—after all, she didn’t used to just turn these on, she made them.

  I fou
nd Mom sitting by the pool later that night, a letter in her hand. I saw it was from the Visa company and my eyes widened.

  “Is it your new credit card?”

  She shook her head. “Your dad didn’t want me to find this. He didn’t want me to be upset.” She handed me the letter.

  Dear Ms. Ying Tang,

  Thank you for your interest in a Visa credit card. We’re sorry to inform you that your application for a Visa credit card has been rejected. We cannot approve your application for the following reason:

  Not enough accounts opened long enough to establish a credit history.

  Please contact us again in the future when you feel your circumstances have changed. We look forward to reevaluating your credit card application at that time.

  Sincerely,

  Visa

  “This is dog fart!” I exclaimed. “They’re punishing you for not having enough of a credit history? How are you supposed to get a credit history if you can’t get a credit card?”

  My mom wiped her eyes with her sleeve, got up, and tossed the letter in the pool trash can.

  She was quiet the rest of the night. To cheer her up, I offered to make math worksheets with her, and Dad tried making her his own “credit card,” a piece of paper that was good for not having to cook dinner. All she’d have to do is flash the card, and he’d whip up something for us.

  “Thanks,” Mom said. “I appreciate that.” But she looked down at her hands, cracking and peeling from cleaning rooms all day long, and sighed. “I just wanted to have a credit card, like everyone else. And be able to accumulate miles and maybe take our family on a free vacation.”

  “I know,” Dad said, giving her a hug. I wrapped my arms around both of them and squeezed my parents tight.

  That night, I fished the letter out of the trash. I intended to write the Visa people a letter of my own.

  Dear Visa,

  You say you’re “everywhere you want to be.” You know where you’re not? In the hands of the hardest-working person I know. A first-generation immigrant. Someone who cleans thirty rooms a day and still has time to teach immigrant kids math every week.

  That person is my mom, Ying Tang, a person you just rejected because she didn’t open enough accounts to establish a credit history. Well, she’s been busy. She’s been busy taking care of a motel, which she BOUGHT after having worked there as an employee for a year. She’s been busy raising me, helping her friends, looking after the weeklies, and cooking huge dinners for all of us, which now that I’ve baked chocolate chip cookies, I realize is actually a lot of work. That’s what she’s been doing, instead of opening up credit card accounts. So you can say all you want that she doesn’t have a credit history, but that doesn’t mean she has no credit. She has plenty of credit with the people around her.

  I hope you’ll reevaluate her application for a credit card. It’ll mean a lot to her and to me.

  Sincerely,

  Mia Tang

  Bright and early the next day, I mailed it.

  At school the next day, I found an envelope on my desk. It was a thank-you card from Lupe. Inside, she had drawn her grandmother sitting in the middle of a mansion, even bigger than Jason’s house, with a pet Chihuahua and shiny lucky pennies at her feet. I smiled, looked over to Lupe, and put a hand over my heart.

  The drawing was beautiful. Lupe had sketched her grandmother so vividly, every strand of her silvery hair shone as it flowed in long, curvy waves down her back.

  “All right, class!” Mrs. Welch announced. “Clear your desks and get out your pencils. We’re writing another essay. This one is about what art means to you.”

  I immediately looked over at Lupe again. She sat so excitedly at her desk that her table wobbled. She was so pumped for this.

  I turned to the blank piece of paper in front of me and took a deep breath. I was excited too—here was my second chance to prove my teacher wrong. I picked up my pencil and started writing.

  But as I wrote, I kept getting distracted, thinking about my mom’s credit card application and how hers got rejected but Hank’s got approved, even though it was the first credit card application for both of them. I was super happy for Hank, of course. And he was so kind. As soon as he’d found out about my mom’s rejection, he’d offered to let us use his card whenever we needed to.

  “We could share!” he suggested. But we couldn’t let him do that. A personal credit card was a personal credit card. Why did Hank get one and we didn’t?

  When I brought this up at my Kids for Kids club later, everyone had all sorts of ideas.

  “Maybe they were talking about bank accounts. Maybe your mom didn’t have a bank account for long enough?” Hector guessed.

  I shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “These things are never fair,” Juan said. “My grandma got rejected for Medicare, even though we’re citizens and she totally qualified.”

  “My mom’s still waiting for her green card application to get approved,” Alicia sighed. “It’s been taking so long.”

  I glanced over at Lupe. She still hadn’t told any of the other kids her situation.

  Hesitantly, she said, “My mom’s in Mexico now to bury my grandmother. I’m worried they’re not going to let her back in.”

  The other kids all let out a collective been there nod, and I smiled at Lupe, proud of her for letting out a piece, however small, of what had been weighing on her chest.

  Later that day, several immigrants were gathered outside the front office, trying to get information on Mrs. T’s How to Navigate America classes. One of the immigrants, Mr. Martinez, recognized the other guy, Mr. Rodriguez, who had brought his young son.

  “Hey, it’s you!” Uncle Martinez said to Uncle Rodriguez.

  “Amigo!” Uncle Rodriguez greeted him.

  Lupe and I looked at each other. “Have you guys already met?” I asked. They nodded and informed me they recognized each other from a job interview at a restaurant downtown. They’d both applied to be dishwashers.

  “Did you get hired?” Uncle Martinez asked.

  Uncle Rodriguez shook his head and looked down sadly. “No,” he said. “Did you?”

  Uncle Martinez sighed and shook his head too. “I spent an entire day washing dishes for the boss for free, hoping to get the job.”

  I thought about my dad’s old job working at a restaurant and the blisters he brought home from frying rice in the wok all day long. I couldn’t imagine doing that for free!

  “Downtown? You guys talking about Felix over on La Palma?” Lupe asked.

  They nodded.

  “Sí, that’s the place,” Uncle Rodriguez said, pulling his young son close.

  Lupe frowned. “My dad says never to go there. He’s fixed their cable a few times. The boss never hires anybody.”

  “What do you mean, never hires anybody?” I asked.

  “I mean every day, he interviews somebody for a dishwasher job and gets them to spend the whole day ‘trying it out,’ ” Lupe explained. “But it’s just a scam to get people to work for free. He’s been doing it for years.”

  Uncle Rodriguez slapped his leg with his hand. “The tacaño!”

  “And he’s been doing this for years?” Uncle Rodriguez asked.

  Lupe nodded. It was the worst thing I’d ever heard. Even worse than Mr. Yao, who at least hired somebody, though he squeezed us like lemons. I still remembered his words to my parents when they dared to complain: “If you don’t want this job, there will be a thousand immigrants lined out the door to take your place!”

  “You guys! We should turn this Felix guy in!” I looked around for a piece of paper and a pen. “I could write a letter right now—”

  But Lupe, Uncle Rodriguez, and Uncle Martinez quickly shook their heads.

  “No. No. No. Can’t turn him in,” they said. “Need papers to turn him in.”

  Oh.

  Lupe locked eyes with me and explained, “That’s why he can get away with it for so long. Because he knows these guys can
’t go to court; we don’t have papers.”

  I realized something I’d never thought of before: that the thing I’d been relying on to voice my complaints and frustrations, my outlet and most powerful ammunition, wasn’t available to everyone. There were certain things you needed to write letters, besides just a pen.

  Uncle Rodriguez gazed at his son, who reached out and touched the Disneyland poster in our front office with his fingers. “We can only hope to make our kids’ lives better,” he said. Uncle Martinez nodded. “Through education … but now they’re thinking of taking that away too.”

  “They won’t,” Lupe said. As she gave the uncles the information on Mrs. T and Mrs. Q’s How to Navigate America class as well as my mom’s math class, I knelt down and asked the little boy if he’d ever been to Disneyland.

  “No …” he said. “But I want to go. It’s right around here, right?” His bright eyes peered up at me with curiosity. “What’s it like?”

  I wished I could tell him it was just as nice as in the poster, but the truth was, I didn’t know. “I haven’t been yet either,” I said to him. “But I hope I’ll get to go soon.”

  “Me too,” he said, slipping his small hand into mine.

  After Uncle Rodriguez and Uncle Martinez left and Lupe went home, Jason’s mom dropped him off at the motel. We stood in the front office, waving as she backed out. She looked a little uneasy about leaving him, but I was excited. Jason was going to teach me how to cook!

  We went straight to the kitchen, where Jason eyed my mother’s spices, many of them hand carried from China, with fascination.