I’LL ASK IN HEAVEN.

Every day my mom tends to her garden early — watering and repotting and admiring before the summer humidity becomes too stifling to be outside. I look out at her from the bay window and sometimes wonder: does being back here transport her to childhood? This is where she grew up. The old family house isn’t here anymore, but something is.

The shell wind chime my parents made sways gently by the front door. I watch it for a moment. A quiet thought drifts in, the way it does more and more lately — would I feel a greater sense of belonging here if I knew my grandparents? Really knew them?

I didn’t grow up wondering. I wonder now.

Grandma

My sister and I were loved by her even before we came into the world. When she found out that her son — my dad — and his wife were expecting twins, she sewed so many baby blankets that they made a recurring appearance in all of our newborn photos. I must have dragged that red snowman blankie around for the next five years.

When my sister and I were newborns, she took an hour-long bus ride from San Mateo to Daly City to come help my mom take care of us — stopping at the grocery store on the way because my dad was at work and my mom couldn't leave the house. She was the kind of grandmother, the kind of mother, who showed up like that for everyone. She helped each of her children take care of their own kids. For her older children still in the Philippines, she gradually filled balikbayan boxes to send back to them. She sent cards in the mail for every birthday, every holiday, every occasion.

She bonded with my mom over sewing too, teaching her how to make clothes for us. And maybe that’s how I eventually found my way to embroidery — her hands, then my mom’s, then mine.

My dad’s famous brown sugar ham is what I always devour first at Christmas dinner. It was only in recent years that I found out the recipe was hers. I used to think that eating it would remind me of my dad. It goes one generation deeper.

We didn’t share a language, not really — and so the conversations we had were few. But a love like hers didn’t need words to be felt. She stitched them instead.

Grandma — what I imagine now

She stands over the kitchen stove, stirring a pot of hearty, saucy mechado. I help her cook down the coconut milk for biko. She hands me an extra can to pour into the wok — her quiet way of reminding me that my dad wants extra coconut curds on top later. Two scents rise up and fill the house: the savory aromatics of the stew alongside the warm sweetness of coconut and muscovado sugar.

At some point she notices the baking things on the counter. The sweet rice, the baking dish lined with a banana leaf, the small notebook filled with my recipes. We haven’t been together since I was fifteen, and so much has happened since then — including, somehow, me falling in love with making the classic Filipino desserts she used to make from scratch. I don’t have to explain any of it. Her soft grin and the gentle squeeze of her hand on my wrist is all I need to know how she feels.

Granny Jo

She knew me as a smiley three-year-old in the Philippines, curious about the world. And now at thirty, I’m back here and more curious about her. We have photographs together, but I cannot recall a distinct memory of her — just the warmth of having been in the same room, held in the same frame.

Back when my mom was single and working in Manila, Granny Jo would come up from Iloilo to visit her. My mom would take her shopping, and her face would light up — not for clothes, but for crochet. They would make their way to a giant warehouse selling yarn and thread, and Granny Jo would go up and down the aisles, loading up on supplies because she could get so much for so little. My mom said she couldn’t hide her excitement.

I know that excitement. I’ve seen it my whole life. When my sister and I tell our mom we’re going shopping, a wide smile spreads across her face as she does a little happy dance before going to her room to get ready.

My mom told me that Granny Jo was the same way about traveling — except the anticipation started months before the actual trip. She would pack and repack her suitcase long before there was any real reason to, just to feel ready. Her youngest son, my Tito Roy, would shake his head and say: Mom, no wonder you can't find anything — you have so many bags. She was an avid collector of purses, it turned out. The excitement of going somewhere, the joy of having just the right bag for it — I think about where my mom gets it from.

Granny Jo was also the kind of woman who knew how to receive love quietly. In the afternoons she would sit with her crochet. Papang would bring her over easy eggs on toast — her midday break, made by his hands — before heading down the street to his cousin’s house by the church to play mahjong. She called him Pangga. He called her that back, in the way that people who have built a life together stop needing to say it out loud but say it anyway. That is who she was to him. And I wish I had known her.

It’s hard to remember my granny’s face without a photograph.

But I see her every time my mom rushes to get her shoes.

Papa Tony

I'm still in the kitchen when I hear it — horns and upright bass drifting in from outside, that irresistible swing rhythm that doesn't ask permission, it just moves through you. I follow the sound out to the front yard, where the original stone floor from the old family house has been laid into the ground and kept. My mom's potted plants and vines grow all around it. My mom’s siblings saved this floor when everything else was rebuilt. Of course he found it first.

Before I even put my shoes on, he pulls me onto it.

His footwork is quick and light for a man his age and I’m scrambling to follow, laughing before I’ve even found my footing. He grins — the kind of grin that tells me he’s been waiting to do this.

We settle into it. He leads and I follow and somewhere in the middle we find each other’s rhythm. At one point I show him something of mine — a simple salsa turn that never fails me — and he watches with his head tilted, delighted, already trying it out himself. We don’t share a dance style. We share something bigger than that.

My dad has it too. More reggae than boogie, more loose and carefree than snappy and bouncy — but the same joy underneath, the same ease in his body when a good song comes on. I grew up seeing him dance in living rooms and at family parties, never self-conscious, never performing. Just moved because the music asked him to. I think I learned from him that dancing wasn’t something you did for other people. It was something you did because your body already knew how.

And now here I am with the man who gave my dad that. Three generations of us, each with our own rhythm, all of it the same love.

I know his face before I've ever met him. There's a painted portrait that used to hang in the hallway of my aunt's house — my grandparents, young, looking back at you — and the man in it looks exactly like my dad. My aunts and uncles have always said it. Carbon copy. I grew up hearing that and now standing across from him I understand it completely. My dad is standing right there in his features, or maybe he's standing in my dad's.

My dad has passed things down too, without always knowing it. For as long as I can remember, whenever my sister or I were impatient for something — a decision, a door that hadn't opened yet — he would say: all in due time. Your time will come. He told me once that Papa Tony said it to him first. Papa Tony was in a bowling league, and my dad would tag along to play arcade games while he bowled. One evening he handed my dad the car key — if he got bored, he could go wait in the car. My dad, being my dad, took the car around the parking lot instead. He made it back to the same spot before his dad finished his game. Somehow he found out anyway. And right after bowling, instead of coming down hard on him, he sat my dad down and told him: all in due time. Your time will come. A father who could have been angry, choosing wisdom instead. Those words traveled from that parking lot to every time my dad said them to us, and I have held onto them more times than I can count.

I ask him, somewhere between songs, to show me his best move. The one that worked. He knows exactly which one I mean — and the way he smiles tells me that he’s been hoping someone would ask.

Papang

Before the table is set, before the feast, it's just the two of us at the dining table with the afternoon light coming through.

He's working on something — a speech, maybe out of habit, the pen moving carefully across the page in that beautiful hand my mom still talks about. I have my notebook open in front of me. We don't say much. We don't need to. There's a comfortable quiet between us, the kind that belongs to people who understand that some things are better written than said.

I sneak a glance at his page. The penmanship is exactly as advertised — a slanted cursive that considers every letter. A man who chose his words carefully, in public and on the page. Head of the ROTC department, covering universities across Iloilo. The kind of man people stood up straighter around. And yet here he is in retirement, softened by decades of grandchildren climbing on him, storing almost-ripe mangoes under the bed so they'd last a little longer, letting my granny fuss over the press of his collar with her charcoal iron before a formal event — standing still for her, because that was its own kind of love.

I think about my mom. How she started keeping a journal when she found out she was pregnant with my sister and me — and never stopped. How she handed that practice to me without either of us realizing it was a handoff. I look across the table at the man who might be where it all began. A colonel who wrote every word of every speech himself. His daughter who filled journal after journal. His granddaughter, here, writing still.

There is something else I know about him. Once, while he was visiting Manila and staying with my mom's older sister in Lagro, he went to find my mom. She was renting a room in the house of her best friend's aunt — and somehow he found her. She wasn't home. So he left the bed cover he had made for her — blue and green florals, quilted by hand on that old Singer sewing machine with the paddle — with whoever answered the door. She came home to find it waiting in her room. They had no phone back then, so she never got to tell him in the moment what it meant to her. But maybe he already knew. A man who would track down his daughter's address just to leave something handmade at her door probably didn't need to be told.

Outside I can hear the music from the front yard. The swing number Papa Tony put on. And I hear — faintly, a little uncertain, but trying — Papang's feet finding a small shuffle beneath the table.

He catches me smiling.

He shrugs, as if to say: I try sometimes.

The Room

The table is set.

Pancit and lumpia first, the way it always is. Then the big bowls arrive: chicken and pork adobo, mechado, a mountain of rice in the center because there is always a mountain of rice in the center. My mom and Grandma have been in the kitchen all afternoon, and the whole house smells like it. The biko and cassava and ube are waiting on the counter for after, the desserts my mom baked this morning alongside Grandma who knows these recipes by heart.

I look over at the sofa. My sister is sitting next to Granny Jo, both of them with yarn in their hands. My sister is working on a small dress — something delicate for baby girl — and Granny Jo leans over occasionally to show her something, a stitch, a tension, a correction made gently. Next to them my brother-in-law sits with baby girl in his arms, making faces at her, and her big unfiltered laugh makes everyone else smile. My mom drifts over from the kitchen, drawn by her laugh the way she always is — her first grandchild, and she feels it in her whole body every time. She crouches down to her level for just a moment, just to be close to her, before reluctantly heading back to the stove. Four generations on one sofa and nobody has remarked on it because it feels, somehow, completely natural.

Papang is still at the bay window, finishing the last line of his speech before he lets himself be pulled to the table. His pen moves slowly, deliberately. He's in no rush. He has never been in a rush with words.

Then my dad puts a song on.

I know it immediately — Shaggy’s “In the Summertime” from our childhood, one of those songs that lives in the body before it reaches the ears. He starts to move the way he always has, loose and carefree, like the music is something he's been carrying around all day and has finally put down. And then Papa Tony is beside him, quick and light on his feet, and the two of them are not dancing together exactly, each in his own style, his own era, his own joy — and yet somehow completely in conversation.

My sister puts down her crochet. I'm already on my feet.

My dad crosses the room and holds out his hand to Granny Jo. She takes it. I think about what my mom told me — that the year before she left for California, my dad danced with her mother at a family party. Kingston Town by UB40. And Granny Jo told him to promise her he would take care of her daughter. He kept that promise. He brought her back home.

At some point Papa Tony takes my hand and we swing into something faster, and I'm scrambling to keep up and laughing before I've found my footing, just like before. And then he slows down, gets a little mischievous, and shows me a move. This one, his eyes say. I look over at Grandma. She sees exactly what he's doing and she looks away, smiling, like she has been caught remembering something.

She has.

The dancing settles into something easier after that. Grandma comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel and watches us with that soft grin. Papang has closed his notebook and made his way to the table. We all take turns holding baby girl. The food is still warm on the table but nobody is moving toward it yet because nobody wants to be the one to stop this.

I look up and find my mom across the room. She's not dancing, not cooking, not hosting for a moment — just standing still, watching all of it. And then she finds my face and smiles. Not a surprised smile. A knowing one. The kind that says: yes. this is what I wanted you to find.

She and my dad brought me here. To this land, this chapter, this life I'm still building. She hoped it would help me find where I belong. And I'm standing in this room — on this land that has always been ours, surrounded by every person I come from — and I think she can see on my face that something has landed.

I know where I come from now. I know what was passed down and how it moved through each of them into me. The stitches and the recipes and the speeches and the dance moves and the shopping trips and the yarn and the rhythm — all of it making its way here, to this room, to this generation, to the baby on someone's hip who will carry it forward without knowing it yet.

My mom smiles at me from across the room.

I smile back.

*

I am not the only one with questions.

My mom said goodbye to her father at the front gate in March of 1993, not knowing it was the last time. She kept living — moved to California, built a family, brought us here to this land where it all began. She never got to ask him everything she wanted to ask.

I think about all the ways they traveled toward the people they loved. Grandma on the bus from San Mateo, stopping at the grocery store on the way. Papang finding his daughter's address in a city he didn't live in, leaving something handmade at a door she wasn't behind. The balikbayan boxes packed slowly, item by item, crossing an ocean. The birthday cards, the holiday cards, always sent.

Love that didn't wait to be asked.

Love that found a way.

Maybe that’s why she wanted me here. So I could stand on this ground and start to wonder. So I could find them in the things we do and the food we make and the way joy moves through our bodies when a good song comes on. So I could look around a room someday and know exactly where I come from.

I think about all four of them. What they looked like. What they sounded like. What it would have meant to be known by them and to know them back.

What would it have been like?

I’ll ask in heaven.