I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told Jolly about what happened at Ninang’s Panaderya. Of course, there is no moral lens you can apply to this situation. Which is to say, the wrong choices can produce the right results, and vice versa. I, myself, have adopted the position that things are very much like what the 94 earthquake taught my parents when they decided to immigrate to this country and put all their savings into a house at its epicenter: regardless of what choice you make, you never know what’s going to happen. But, sometimes, you can make hard lessons from the results. Or not.

If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told Jolly about it. I hadn’t planned on bringing it up. I had forgotten all about it. Nothing learned, nothing lost. After the earthquake, my parents lost everything they had in America and had to move back to the Philippines. Thankfully, my parents didn’t learn not to come back, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. They put pesos together. My dad ferried politicians and celebrities to and from Manila. My mother served Red Horse and Marlboros at a casino in Tagaytay. They dropped it all to come here again. They put all their eggs in one basket again.

Thankfully, the eggs hatched the second time.

 

What reminded me of Ninang’s Panaderya was an awful need to eat Filipino food. It hit us both just before one in the morning. We had split a submarine sandwich, went about our books in bed—her’s, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, mine, an on-and-off-again relationship with Banana Yoshimoto’s short story collection, Lizard—turned out the lights by ten, and gone to sleep. For some reason, we slipped out of bed at the same moment. Like clouds in the distance, we saw it coming, and, by the time we reached the bottom of the stairs, it was a storm of tiny razors tearing at our insides, tugging at our tongues. It was a craving like no other.

The contents of our refrigerator were a joke. At the top shelf was a two-week-old half-gallon of milk. On the middle shelf, a small Tupperware of baked beans I packed for lunch one day and forgot to bring with me. On the bottom shelf, a jar of old pickles and minced garlic. The egg drawer had no eggs. The contents of the freezer and the pantry were not worth mentioning. The kitchen table, a bowl of weeks-weathered tangerines. With both of us working nine-to-five days, five days a week, there was no time to cook. Let alone anything else.

We had been married only a month, first-generation American-Filipinos, and college sweethearts (why can’t I remember how long we’ve known each other?). I was a teacher at the time, and she was always an engineer. That hasn’t changed. I was thirty-three and she was a little younger. Things were always happening. We ate what we could when we could. Filipino food was the last thing on our minds.

Across the table, my wife set her chest and face down. Her hair and arms spilled towards me like a pack of black and brown spaghetti fanning out from its box. Looking at her made me think of Filipino spaghetti and the thought only spurred the craving on. I picked up a wrinkly tangerine.

“Want a tangerine?”

Jolly didn’t move. “That’s not Filipino food.”

I tossed the tangerine back into its bowl with the others. The thud of their waxy skin making contact reminded me of the labored smack of boxing gloves. “If we had some spaghetti noodles and banana ketchup, we could have some Filipino spaghetti.”

“We don’t have those things.” She said, her tone sounding more aggravated. She had a knack of making me feel guilty about what we should have but didn’t.

“Yeah. We don’t have hot dogs either.” I said, as if contributing to the list would fill the absences.

“And spaghetti sauce.  You can’t just eat it with the banana ketchup. It’ll get burned in the pan and make the noodles hard and sticky from all the sugar.”

“I didn’t know you were a cook.” I said, expecting her to ignore my attempt to lighten the mood. And, of course, she did.

“I’m not. It’s just common sense.” She said to the table.

Whenever Jolly points out the absence of things or touts her practical nature, I see the side of her that resonates with mine. It is not that they are the same; on the contrary, it is her very core that is the exact opposite of mine. It has its place one end, and mine on the other. They are to never meet, yet they create harmony. They’re like the seasons or beams on a bridge or the bars the players control on opposite sides in Pong. They work together to sometimes keep the ball rolling. Sometimes hold something up. Sometimes reveal something.

And being hungry for the same thing revealed a daydream to me that described the craving with such clarity it was as if it were a memory.

In the daydream, we are in a house during the 94 earthquake. We are both pinned down by a shelf in our bed. Outside the sliding glass window, it is the Philippines. Inside the house is America, California, Northridge, 94 Earthquake. Outside the house was the Philippines, Tarlac, Panaqui, the poor town my parents came from, just a normal day. We are pinned together, holding each other tight, unable to move, scared but resigned to wondering what would happen first: would the roof collapse or would someone from outside eventually come in and rescue us?

“Can’t we just go out and find something?” My wife said, her voice ebbing into my daydream as if she were actually pinned to the bed with me.

“And go where? There’s nowhere to go at this hour. Every Filipino place we know is closed right now.”

“I’ve never wanted Filipino food like this in my whole life. I want kare-kare with extra tripe and some krispy sisig silog.”

“I want some Filipino spaghetti with American cheese melting on top. Or some fancy palabok, like it’s my birthday.”

               “I wonder if it has anything to do with being married.” She said.

“I’m sure that’s part of it.” I said. “Or maybe not.”

While the rumbling in my daydream and my stomach continued, this newfound sense of helplessness I shared with her suddenly felt somewhat familiar. There had only been one other time I had been in this moment, one other time I had hungered for Filipino food so much that it hurt. It wasn’t just any Filipino food. It was something specific.

“Pandesal.”

“Oohh, I haven’t had that since I was a kid.”

And so it started.

 

“Neither have I. I was never a fan of bread, but my parents used to go out of their way to get a bag of fresh-cooked pandesal from this place called Ninang’s Panaderya in Eagle Rock. They did it every morning before dropping me to elementary school. It was the fluffiest, softest, chewiest, most buttery-sweet pandesal I had ever eaten. For years, we got bread from there. I never had anything like it since.”

“Damn.” She said, lifting her head for the first time since she sat down. A line of drool dropped from the left side of her mouth.

“I know. When you grow up eating the best of something, it stops you from eating others of its kind. It was the only pandesal I could stomach. I couldn’t eat any other bakery’s or any of the commercial stuff. It didn’t taste the same. It wasn’t pandesal.

“As I grew older, the trips to the bakery grew less and less until my parents weren’t taking me there anymore. I had to go on my own. By then, there were so many other, more convenient places to go for Filipino food, a dozen or so more modern bakeries. Several varieties of pandesal. Buko. Ube. Red bean. The only one I wanted though was the plain pandesal from Ninang’s. But there were a couple of problems that kept me from getting it most of the time. It was frustrating.”

“You couldn’t get it anymore?”

“Well, it was far away and closed super early. I didn’t drive in high school, so I had to wake up at five-in-the-morning, take two buses for a couple of hours, and get there before it closed at nine. If I didn’t get there on time, I was shit-out-of-luck.”

“What about school? You missed school for the bread?”

“It was that good. But, to be fair, I would have missed school for anything those days.”

“What a delinquent.”

“I was different back then. I didn’t get serious about studying until something happened before I graduated. Something happened to me at that bakery.”

“Was the bread that good?” Jolly’s grin shook in my vision. Under the wobbly roof, the light from the Philippines cut across our chests like rope.

“I told a friend of mine about the bakery. Another Filipino.”

“A girlfriend?”

“She was a girl, but it wasn’t like that.” I said, but only because it didn’t get that far. “They really wanted to try the pandesal too, so we planned to meet at the bakery to get some. The morning of, we got there right before it closed, but the woman who ran the shop had closed five minutes early. We were so angry and hungry. It was kind of like the same hunger. No, it was exactly the same.”

Jolly looked up at me. She repositioned her arms under her chin. “If you couldn’t get the pandesal, what did you do?”

“Well, we did get the pandesal, but… It’s ridiculous.”

“What? What happened?”

“Don’t judge me, but I carried a knife with me at the time.”

“Jesus. Fuck, did you do what I think you did?”

“Yeah. But once I pulled the knife on the lady and demanded some pandesal, the girl ran.”

Suddenly, Jolly exploded into a fit of laughter. I had never seen her laugh so hard. Tears and snot and drool mixed with her long black hair, her golden-brown skin. When she was finished, she was still dabbing a tear away from her eye. “What an asshole!”

“I know. She went for the police, of course.”

“Of course that bitch did. So, you got arrested? Turned over a new leaf after that?”

“No, the baker, she was a weird lady. She sorta knew me after my coming there so often. She laughed at the knife and cut me a deal right after the girl ran off.”

“A deal?”

“Yeah. She didn’t want me to get in trouble but my days of coming to the store were over, that was a given. However, she did let me have all the pandesal I could carry that morning, provided that I did something for her.”

I looked at Jolly’s face. Although the bed was still rumbling, I could tell her expression had changed. “What did she want?”

I leaned forward. “Give me your hand.”

“Why?” She said, already putting it out.

I took it and turned it so that the back of her hand was facing me, then I proceeded to touch my forehead to it. “Mano.”

Jolly quickly snatched her hand away. “She wanted that?”

I laughed and sat up in my chair. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Jesus, that made me feel super old. I haven’t done that to anyone in so long. Not since I stopped living with my parents. I always did that to my titas and titos and, of course, lola, but I never thought someone would do it to me!”

“Same.” I said, looking out the window in the daydream again. There was still no one in sight.

“So, what happened after that?” Jolly asked, rubbing the hand I had kissed with my forehead.

“Well, I got as much as I could carry, about four plastic bags full, and left and never returned. I savored every piece until it was gone. It was the last I ever saw of the shop. It folded a couple of years ago. I don’t know what happened to the baker.”

“And your girlfriend?”

“The girl? She stopped talking to me. The whole thing, the bread and I, we were more trouble than we were worth to her. Who knows what happened to her? You could probably find her on Facebook or something.”

Jolly sat in silence for a long while. The imaginary house in my daydream began to groan as it shook, the pressure of the cabinet not letting up.  She probably sensed that I wasn’t telling her the whole story.

“And after that, you changed?”

“Yeah. I ate the pandesal, but it didn’t really hit the spot. I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more but the place where I could get it from was no longer accessible. I got depressed. You know how depressed I get about food. I graduated and started taking things seriously, but there was always that something. Always that something missing.”

“Maybe that’s why you and that girl didn’t work out. Maybe it’s because that mano you did.”

“Maybe. But no one was hurt. I didn’t go to jail. I got the bread. We came to a peaceful solution. It doesn’t seem like a mistake although it feels like it was. It’s like a curse.”

“A curse?”

“Yeah, when I manoed that baker, she put something on me.” I saw the cabinet in my daydream still pinning us down in bed. It felt heavier than before.

“And now that something’s on both of us?”

I nodded. “Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows what makes us feel these things?”

“No, you know. You know exactly what you need to do. Unless you do something about it, it’ll keep on affecting you. It will keep on affecting me!”

“You?”

“Yeah, I’m the one this time. I’m the one that’ll go to the panaderya with you. I won’t run away. We’ll rob the shit out of that place!”

“What place? There’s no place open right now that sells pandesal. We can wait until morning.”

“No, it has to be now. We’ll find a place.”

“How?”

“Don’t underestimate the power of your wife and Yelp.”

 

We got into my Corolla and made our way out on to the five towards Los Angeles at three. We picked a panaderya that would be open by the time we got there. According to Google Maps, we would arrive thirty minutes before it opened, giving us time to scout the place and decide on a method of attack. In the passenger seat, Jolly watched Youtube videos on successful robberies. She watched hungrily, focused on absorbing every bit of information on points of entry, escape scenarios, scare tactics and leaving a clean scene. Piled in the backseat were matching camo-colored hunting rifles whose ammunition had spilled out of their boxes rolled under the seats when I accelerated onto the on-ramp. Two knitted-ski masks along with a bag of zip-ties were stuffed into the glove compartment. Why my wife had these things, I had no idea. She didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. Married life was like this, I thought, pushing the car down the empty freeway at ninety-miles-per-hour.

               The morning was not even upon us when I felt the cabinet ease its weight. However, whether or not this would work, there was no guarantee it would lift the curse, I thought. The house still shook inside America, the day was still shining outside the Philippines, and nobody else could help even if they did find us. And yet the daydream blended with the night as if it one could easily take the place of the other. In both moments, we were trying to fight something real.

               Twice, the police ignored us. There were no roadblocks and the traffic lights never lasted long enough to matter. The bullets rolled and chimed like war bells. The moment was upon us and yet I still doubted myself that anything would come from this. Something would go wrong. Someone would get hurt. A regret would surface and stay with us even more over-bearing than what was already pinning us down. Something like someone’s life or our own roof. But, before I could speak a word of it, we were in the parking lot of the arcade. From where we were, we could see the dim light of the bakery shine through the glass windows of the entranceway.

                Methodically, my wife reached behind her and began loading the rifles, a bullet at a time.

                “Do you have to load them?”

                “I’m not loading them.” She said although she obviously was.

                “I never fired a rifle in my life.”

                “You won’t need to.”

                “What if they have cameras here?”

                “I looked it up. They don’t.”

                “You can do that?”

                “Yeah.”

                After she finished, she leaned them butt-up, between her legs, while she went for the masks and the zip-ties. She tossed a mask in my lap before tucking her hair into the back of her collar and rolling down hers over her face. I put mine on and I couldn’t catch my nerves.

                “It’s itchy.”

                “You’ll get used to it.” She said and proceeded to open the door. She carried the two rifles out with her.

                “What about the license plates?” I whispered, quietly closing the door after myself.

                “We’ll be out before anyone will see us. I promise.” She said and held a gun out to me. “Leave your door and the trunk open so we can throw everything in and get out fast.”

                I felt the weight of my rifle. It was heavy but not like the cabinet in my daydream.

 

After setting up the car, Jolly and I waited by the door to the panaderya until someone came to open it. It was earlier than they were supposed to, just fifteen minutes shy of five in the morning. My wife rushed the man with her rifle to his side and her hand on his shoulder. He stood straight and although he was much taller, Jolly looked like the bigger person.

                “Inside!” She shouted, ushering him into the store.

                I followed after them, the door ringing closed behind me. Inside, we were immediately enveloped by the sweet smell of baked bread.

                “Is there anyone else?”

                “The money. Just take it. The register’s already open.” To my surprise, the man was not Filipino. Instead, upon closer inspection, he was a young kid with a tattoo of Johnny Walker on his neck.

                “Is this Tito Boy’s Pandarya?” I asked, trying to mask the nervous shake in my voice with a deeper tone.

                “It is.” He said, looking at me and then not.

                Jolly nudged him in the side with the barrel of her rifle again. “Fucker! Are you alone?”

                “Y-yes. It’s a slow day. No one comes until seven.”

                Remembering I had a gun in my hand, I pointed it at the kid, feeling my guilt mix with my hunger. “Hey, hands up.”

                The kid complied. “Oh God, what the fuck.”

                Jolly squeezed his shoulder. “We’re going to the back.”

                We made our way to the back and there, in all their glory, were racks and trays of freshly baked pandesal strewn all over the kitchen. I drooled through the mask so much it created a dark wet puddle where my mouth was.

                Jolly pushed the kid toward the pandesal. “Start filling some bags with Pandesal!”

                “What?”

                “The pandesal. Fill as much as you can, fucker!”

                The kid looked at us and then our guns before hesitantly picking out some gloves and large paper bags from a counter and starting on the pandesal. At first, he shook as he handled each one, as if the next piece would be the last one he picked, but, the more he did it, the more it became business as usual, until his body relaxed and he forgot we were two people with masks and guns. By the time he had finished with the bags, he was casually bringing them to our car. It was only when he finished and my wife spoke again, when he remembered what was happening. He stood behind the counter, as if broken from a spell, noticing the two rifles aimed at him, his hands shooting up in the air again.

                “You got all you need?”

                “Shut up, fucker! You don’t ever say shit about what happened. Tell them you got hungry. Tell them you forgot to charge. Anything but what actually happened.”

                The kid nodded.

                My wife and I began backing out, but, before we left, I needed one more thing. “You know what it means to mano someone?”

                The kid nodded. “My girlfriend’s grandpa. This is his shot—I mean shop! He makes me do it. A sign of respect for elders, right?”

                I moved towards him and put down my rifle. I held out my hand over the counter. “Here. Take it.”

                The kid looked at me and then at Jolly. “He’s talking to you. Take his hand and mano, fucker.”

                The kid looked at it then, very carefully, reached one hand under mine and leaned forward, the sweat of his head transferring to the back of my hand. I lifted the rifle and we backed out of the paderya, got in the car, and rushed off with our prize without even having to use the zip-ties.

               

We drove all the way home but couldn’t resist the smell of the pandesal enough to go inside before opening the bags. Parked in the driveway, we stuffed ourselves with the fluffy, doughy goodness of the pandesal until the craving, that craving that felt like it could go on forever, vanished as the sky flushed with color. All in all, we ate two full bags of pandesal, with seven bags to spare. We looked back at them, sitting on top of the rifles and ski masks and then at each other. We were full.

                “I’m glad it worked out. But did we really need to do this?” I asked.

                Jolly rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her twitch like she did when she was falling asleep. “Maybe not, but aren’t you glad we did?” She said before falling into a deep, peaceful, silence.

                Back in the metaphorical bed again, the cabinet gone, the shaking stopped, the sun of the outside shining through, I wondered what else would befall our house? I pondered this question as I drifted onward towards sleep, full and far beyond empty.