The Quiet is Loud by Samantha Garner

Author:Samantha Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2021-04-01T14:13:22+00:00

Chapter 26: 2005

When Rosalie’s, a new Filipino restaurant, opened in Kelowna in January, Dad immediately decided he didn’t want to try it until after his new book was published in May. A new Filipino restaurant and he of all people wanted to put off eating there for months. Freya couldn’t understand it.

Rosalie’s was very small. When they first walked in, the front door nearly smacked into a display of Filipino grocery items for sale: soft pandesal buns, packets of spice mixes for kare-kare and afritada and caldereta, bags of Nagaraya cracker nuts—the garlic ones were Freya’s favourite. There were even some Filipino cookbooks, likely for the benefit of any non-Filipino customers who might wander in.

A woman smiled at them from behind a one-sided buffet area where several trays of food steamed promisingly. It smelled incredible.

Dad’s grin faded slightly as the woman happily greeted him in a flurry of Tagalog. “Oh, kumusta,” he said. “I don’t know much Tagalog. Patawad.”

And with the unfailing chumminess of every older Filipino Freya had ever met, the woman didn’t care.

“You have no accent!” she exclaimed, switching to English. “Were you born here?”

“No, actually, I was born in the Philippines. Manila. I moved here with my parents when I was a baby.”

“And they didn’t teach you any Tagalog?” She shook her head, but her judgement was that of a teasing aunt. “But it’s okay. In Canada, it’s better that way. Your parents were right to do it.” She reached over the sneeze guard to shake his hand. “My name is Rosalie, like the restaurant.”

She beamed with pride, and Freya couldn’t help but be charmed by her phrasing, the sweetness of it. As if she loved her restaurant so much she’d named herself after it, instead of the other way around.

“I’m Brian. This is my daughter Freya. She’s eighteen, and she’ll be starting university in the fall.”

The woman’s gaze fell upon Freya like lightning, and for a brief second, Freya wondered if she had momentarily transformed into the Nordic goddess Freya. Freya the Elegant and Terrible.

Rosalie clasped her hands to her cheeks, then came around to their side of the counter and clasped her hands to Freya’s cheeks. “So beautiful! Your skin is so light and your hair is so light. Mestiza?”

Freya nodded against her hands, warm and soft. The fawning over lighter skin both irritated her and made her miss her grandmother.

“Her mother was Norwegian. She passed away eight years ago.” Dad’s voice was tight.

Rosalie gave Freya a squeeze on the shoulder, then without a word, hugged Dad. Just like that. He’d barely had enough time to register what had happened before she was back around the open end of the buffet. But his smile had returned.

They stepped forward to consider the trays of steaming food. There were only a few dishes she could identify by sight alone. Adobo, of course, and kare-kare. Lumpia and pancit canton. There was a handwritten list of the names of each dish, but she wasn’t sure which name corresponded to which dish, or sometimes what a dish even was.

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