Ch. 67 – On the Other Hand

Sally knocked on the door with her right hand, and it made a soft, flat sound. She sighed, and shifted her purse from her left hand to her left shoulder, and then knocked again with her left hand.

Knock, knock.

There. That had some strength behind it.

She looked around again. If she was ever around the shop this late at night, she would usually be stroking Tony’s back as he opened the door, or already be inside, snuggling up against Tony’s chest hair.

It was safe in Chinatown. Kinda. Sorta. It was what she kept telling herself, anyways. But when she was alone in the night chill, far from the sparse pools of lamplight on every other street, everything Mom and Dad had told her came back to mind.

“Sally, why are you wasting your future like this?”

“Why couldn’t you have at least picked a more practical art, like architecture?”

“Or at least went to a more reputable college. You could meet the right people there, instead of at this . . . trashy art school.”

“You know we could just get you a job with your father’s friend. We could find you a nice husband too.”

“You need someone to take care of you, especially with that hand of yours.”

The voices never left, but a good slap to the face would chase them away for a few moments; clearing her head was worth the pain.

Smack.

The palm of her left hand stung, and so did her face. Her ears rang just a bit.

A few moments after she’d knocked, the sweat she’d worked up from walking to Hack Alley chilled her back like a sheet of ice in the cold night air. Her bangs brushed back and forth across her eyelashes as she shivered, and it had almost seemed like a lost cause, before there was a sound from inside. Footsteps came towards the front door, but they weren’t slow and heavy like Tony’s were. They were familiar though: cautious and measured, as if someone was tip-toeing around a sleeping dragon. It was probably Derrick, Tony’s apprentice.

There was a brief moment when the footsteps had stopped in front of the door, but nothing had happened, when it felt completely possible that the footsteps had been imagined altogether, as if they were a byproduct of Sally slapping herself.

But then the locks on the door came undone, and the door opened a crack, through which a man’s eyes peeked out. The light from inside the shop hit the back of the man’s head, and cast his face in shadow, but the face looked like Derrick’s. As Sally squinted, and her eyes adjusted, his familiar, not-so-pretty features emerged from the darkness.

“Hi there,” Derrick said, nodding his head slightly. “Tony’s not here right now. Do you want me to let him know you were here? And, I guess . . . do you want to come in?”

He wasn’t here. “Yes, that would be—well, actually . . .” Sally dithered. There wasn’t much point in visiting unless Tony was actually there. She’d been failing to convince him for months to perform the operation on her right arm, and leaving a single message at his shop wouldn’t make the difference. He usually indulged her, but not on this point. Not when it came to cutting off her perfectly ‘good’ arm. She’d have to convince him in person, drawing on the energy of Martin Luther King Jr., or that really loud guy from those livestream infomercials.

Her stomach growled, which would have been embarrassing if she was around her hoity-toity art school classmates, or if she was attending a fancy party with her parents’ friends. But here, in the cold night, standing in front of the door, in front of Tony’s apprentice—who probably wasn’t far off in age from herself—she grimaced and clutched her stomach, elegance and poise be damned.

Derrick must’ve caught on. As he eyed left and right beyond the crack in his door, and then opened it up, letting the slightly warmer air out into the night. Only slightly warmer, because Tony turned down his heating to save money. “Would you like to come in and have something hot to drink?” he asked, in the most unsure voice she’d heard him use. “It’s pretty cold out there.”

Whether it was the fact that Derrick had warmed up to her so much since their first encounter, or the way he awkwardly looked away after asking her in, something warmed Sally’s heart, and a smile crept over her chattering teeth. “Thanks, I would love to.”

She shuffled in, clenching her stomach

#

Sally dipped her packet of green tea—a brand which was sold in bulk at supermarkets—into the cup of freshly microwaved water a few times. “You know, I have a spare electric water kettle I could bring over if you’d like it,” Sally said. “It’d save you more electricity than microwaving a cup of water.”

Derrick paused mid-sip and blinked at her, putting the cup down in a rush. “That would be great,” he answered. “Our old one broke, and I’ve been meaning to get another ever since, but, you know, things get out of hand.” His misshapen face crinkled as he shrugged. It wasn’t his fault to have a face like that. He must have resented it with all his heart. But Sally couldn’t help thinking that even if she was born with a bad arm, at least her face was normal looking.

“Yeah, you two seem really busy,” Sally said. She sipped from her own mug, and then put it down, grabbing a napkin to wipe a bit of spilled tea off her mouth, before picking the mug up again. “Tony still spends time with me recently, but it feels like he’s not really listening as much, you know?”

Derrick didn’t respond, instead sipping on his tea, and staring towards the back of the shop, where Tony’s room was. As a silence set in, he jerked, spilling a drop of tea on his pants, and then looked back at Sally, his eyes wide and alert. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that? It’s been a long day.”

“Ah. Never mind,” Sally said. “So how have you been recently, Derrick? I haven’t seen you in a while, and Tony doesn’t tell me too much when we’re hanging out.”

Derrick bit and chewed his lip. “Oh, you know. It’s the same old thing. The shop is running as well as we can hope for . . . I guess. We’re still low on supplies and cash, and jobs are harder to come by now that the Leopards are prowling the streets because—um, there’s been some unrest I think. I don’t remember the details. Oh, right. Speaking of which, did you get over here okay? Where are you coming from?”

It was probably too much to lay on Derrick that she’d gotten into a fight with her parents over her art career and had come running over to the only place she felt safe anymore, only to find that Tony wasn’t even here. But she could share the basic idea. “Oh the ride over was fine. I was just at New Shore City, and took the bus back to Chinatown and visited the bar before I came here. My boss from the Prancing Cat gave me some drinks on the house because I wasn’t feeling too well, but I ended up getting sick in the bathroom, which pretty much made things worse . . . .”

“Oh . . . .” There was silence as Derrick’s gazed darted around, bouncing off the walls and furniture, but miraculously avoiding Sally. Shoot, where could she look? Ah, yes, the stain on that flooring tile looked particularly interesting: kind of like this ink blobs on the Rorschach test. “Do you want to talk about it?” Derrick asked. “—I mean, why you were feeling bad in the first place. I know throwing up must’ve sucked.” A hint of a grin tugged at one corner of his uneven face.

“Well, I don’t know if you’d be interested . . . it’s a long story after all,” Sally said. “By the way—I meant to ask you: do you know where Tony is right now?”

“What, he didn’t tell you? Shoot, he better not be . . . .” Derrick said, eyebrow arching, his smile fading into a sort of half-snarl of annoyance. Sally swallowed. The first time she’d met him, he’d had that same look. Derrick surely didn’t mean to look so unwelcoming, but it still made her stomach drop for a second. She thankfully wasn’t holding any eggs in a frying pan this time.

“No he didn’t tell me where he was going. He’s been really dodgy about where he’s been recently. Keeps changing the subject.”

Derrick glanced away, scratched at his neck, and then set his jaw before his eyes settled on hers again. He had eyes that looked a bit misshapen, because of his uneven face, but they were sharp and decisive. “Honestly, now that you’re saying this out loud, I’m getting a bit nervous. I was planning to call him later to check if he was okay, but I might as well do it now.”

“Okay? Did something happen,” Sally asked.

“Well, I don’t know if I should tell you, but let’s see if he picks up,” Derrick said.

Derrick tapped his phone a few times, and held the receiver to his ear. It rang a few times, and Derrick flexed the fingers on his prosthetic hand back and forth, maybe subconsciously, as he waited. His hand looked strong, and the finger movement was smooth—if not completely natural-looking. There were coverings for hand and arm prostheses that imitated human skin, and they were pretty convincing, but even that was icing on the cake. The movement was the important part, and there was at least one concert pianist out there who used a hand prosthesis to perform. The way those hands glided over the piano keys was nothing short of elegant—

The ringing stopped, and Derrick scrunched up his face. “He’s not picking up. I guess I’ll send him a message and try again in a bit. He goes out all the time, but”—he glanced at Sally. “Eh, it might end up being nothing. Here, let me fill your cup.”

“Thanks,” Sally said, forcing a smile, and holding her cup out with her left hand.

They drank tea and attempted small talk for another half an hour, Derrick calling Tony every few minutes or so, before Derrick slapped his phone on his thigh and sighed.

“Okay, I’ll let you in on his secret, because I get the feeling he’s going to do something dangerous, and I don’t know if I can stop him myself,” Derrick said.

Tony . . . you sweet, silly, reckless man. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought Tony was putting himself in serious danger, since he dealt with shady people all the time—and wasn’t afraid to get into fights at the bar—but this time it had actually come true. “What happened?”

“Well, you know how Tony was hanging with that Li Xian guy right?”

Sally nodded.

“Well, Xian finally decided to try and start some sort of protest, and Tony got roped into it,” Derrick grumbled. “Well, I say ‘got roped into it,’ but Tony never really gets roped into anything. He just pushes it further along.”

“What are they protesting about?” Sally asked.

“Rents have been really high in Chinatown,” Derrick said. “And that’s for a number of reasons, but basically, if we don’t get the rent under control, a lot of folks are going to lose their businesses, and maybe their homes.”

“Yeah, Tony’s been complaining about that a lot,” Sally said. “And he was saying that the Leopards were the reason why rent is so high.” The Leopards were a nasty lot. Most of them thankfully didn’t prefer the Prancing Cat, where Sally worked, but whenever a lone Leopard or two came in, there was always trouble. They either didn’t pay their bill, or tried to grab the girls—Sally had been grabbed once or twice—or were selling some dangerous stuff in one of the private booths. And if a Leopard was there when Tony was visiting her . . . she did everything she could to make sure they were seated in opposite corners.

“Well, they’re certainly one of the reasons,” Derrick said.

“We need to do something about this,” Sally said. “I don’t want Tony to piss off the wrong Leopard and get hurt.”

Derrick swallowed what was left in his mug and set it down with a thunk. “I agree. Xian owns a barbershop, so if they were meeting anywhere, it’s probably there Let’s head there, see if Tony’s with Xian, and if so, try to talk him out of this mess. If you’re with me, I think we have a chance.”

The lukewarm tea went down easy, and Sally set her cup down next to Derrick’s. “You don’t have to ask me twice!” she said.

Tony needed her help to not do something stupid, and she needed him, in more ways than one. If there was ever a time to muster some bravery since she joined that shitty art school and moved to Chinatown, this was it.