Albert Samaha - An Immigrant Familys Fortunes

My mom almost got scammed this one time, not long ago. Shed met a guy who seemed promising, a white dude who prayed with her over the phone and talked about business deals he was making all over the world. She had been struggling for a while. Shed bounced across a half-dozen cities over the past decade, started and ended a bunch of jobs, sometimes grinding two or three gigs at a time to keep the rent paid and the lights on, and life was only getting harder. By the end of 2018, she hadnt broke even in months. Her credit card debt rose to sums she would only whisper to me, even when nobody else was around. The temp agency she was working for hadnt given her an assignment in weeks. On the last, filing papers for a property management company at a Section 8 apartment complex, a tenant had threatened to shoot up the place after learning he was getting evicted. My mom was so scared that her boss let her go home early. OMG, what a stress, she had texted me, punctuating the message with an emoji of a frowning face with a bead of sweat dripping from its forehead.

She was living in San Francisco now, in the cramped ground-floor unit of a creaky two-story duplex that had been in our family for decades. Her landlord, her cousin-in-law, kept the rent at a family discount. The space had once been a doctors office, and it was drafty and narrow. When I visited from New York, as I did once or twice a year, I slept on the couch bundled in a hoodie, nodding off to the Gregorian chants coming from the boom box in my moms bedroom.

The neighborhood used to be known as the Fillmore District, or the Western Addition, but newcomers call it NoPa, for north of the Panhandle, because the developers buying up the housing stock and the brokers writing the listings want to distance their increasingly valuable buildings from the areas reputation as a historically Black community. In recent years the area began sprouting the amenities you might expect from a place with a name like NoPa: a caf serving seven-dollar toast, a bar decorated with surrealist art available for purchase, a three-floor entertainment center featuring vintage arcade games, one-bedroom condos going for $700,000a world of luxury just outside my moms door, but tauntingly out of reach. The contrast was disconcerting. As the neighborhoods prospects brightened, hers only dimmed.

She always assured me she was doing fine. She described her days to me as simple and peaceful, and as evidence sent me photos from her early morning walks on Ocean Beachdogs splashing in the tide, jellyfish washed ashore, messages she wrote in the sand, like Happy Birthday, Jesus! with a heart dotting the exclamation point. She collected shells, stones, and sand dollars, some for their unusual colors, some for their smooth, perfect form, some because they bore marks in which she saw the face of Christ. My mother saw miracles everywhere.

When she was a kid back in the Philippines, her own mother would wake her and her brothers and sisters at three a.m. on each of the nine days leading up to Christmas, to walk thirty minutes in the dark to a packed church where they would pray the novenas; by the fourth or fifth day, my mom was the only one of the children who could be gotten out of bed. Anytime something good happens, my mom says, Praise the Lord! and anytime something bad happens, she says its part of Gods plan. She goes to church six days a week, and on Good Friday she hibernates in prayer from noon to three, the hours Christ hung on the cross. Every time she moves, she has a priest bless her new home with holy water, and when she drives, she listens to a Catholic AM radio station or Christian rock CDs. The background on her cell phone is a portrait of Jesusnot a Renaissance classic or an image of suffering, but a handsome, square-jawed, smiling white Jesus with romance-novel hair. Whenever I express concern or apprehension about anything big or small, her response is, Dont worry, God will take care of us.

There was a time when I shared that certainty. Over the years Id come to doubt that tribulations have greater purpose, that justice awaits the righteous, that misfortune is the product of anything but human malevolence or sheer chance. But I kept this to myself. Why undermine my mothers hope if I had no alternative to offer? Instead, I concentrated on solutions. More and more, our phone calls and texts focused on ways to address her money problems. More and more, I worried about her. Sometimes, shamefully and selfishly, I took out my frustration on her, hardening my voice as if I were the parent and she were a wayward child. Why had she quit a job that seemed stable, even if the boss was an asshole? Why had she left her purse in the backseat of her car, for someone to steal? One Christmas morning when I was back visiting her in California, I saw her put a fifty-dollar bill in the collection plate at church. I shot her a harsh look. Dang, Mom! You dont gotta give em all that! She countered my show of disapproval with an icy glare of true parental force, the one that says, Boy, you better check yourself, although all she said was, Albert, its Christmas.