The Basin in the Corner of the Living Room, and All the Times We Said Later

The rain came down in late afternoon while I was at the school gate, pulling a tarp over the teachers' row of motorbikes. When I got home my wife was standing in the middle of the living room, hands on her hips, face tilted up at the ceiling.

"Look."

Near the corner of the dish cabinet there was a stain on the ceiling the color of weak tea. In the middle of it a drop of water was swelling, perfectly round, not ready to fall yet.

"It wasn't there this morning."

"It wasn't raining this morning."

The drop fell onto the tiles with a small tak and flicked a few dots onto the foot of the cabinet. My wife went out to the back and came in with the blue plastic basin, the one she used to bathe our grandson in when he was tiny, its left handle cracked through for years. She set it down right under the drip and nudged it with the toe of her sandal until it was centered.

The next drop landed on the bottom of the basin. Tong.

The two of us stood and listened to a few more. I remember thinking: a day or two of sun and this will be done.

"Let the tiles dry first, then we'll climb up"

That evening Anh Tám from next door came over. In his younger days he was a bricklayer, and now he trims his potted plants at home, but whenever a neighbor has trouble with a roof he turns up to look before anyone has asked. He stood with his head tipped back, rubbing the nape of his neck.

"Probably a few tiles slipped. I'll go up and have a look tomorrow."

"It'll still be raining tomorrow."

"Then I'll wear a raincoat."

"The tiles are slick with moss right now. Don't." I poured him a glass of tea. "Wait for three sunny days in a row, until they're dry all the way down, and then you and I will set up the ladder."

"Three sunny days in a row, in the middle of this season?"

"Then we wait."

Anh Tám finished his tea, looked at the basin for a while, and asked, "How's Tín doing these days? Has he called home?"

I said he'd called last Sunday. I hadn't told him about the roof.

The next morning the basin was half full. I carried it out back and poured it into the chili pots, then came in, wiped the bottom dry, and set it back in exactly the same spot. The chili plants had a strange year, heavy with fruit. My wife picked whole baskets of them to dry, and we couldn't finish them, so we gave them to the neighbors.

The three sunny days never came. Some mornings the sun blazed, by noon black clouds had piled up, and by evening it was pouring again. I would stand in the yard and look up at the roof and see that the sun was only drying the top layer. Anh Tám came by a few times, stood in the yard looking up, then talked about something else. Nobody mentioned the ladder.

At the school gate I'm used to watching the sky. When the clouds go gray near dismissal, the parents come early, the kids crowd under the eaves, and every bike ends up half wet. I would sit on my little stool with a stack of parking tickets in my hand, looking at the clouds and then at the gate, and every afternoon I wondered how far the basin at home had filled.

"The builder says the whole section has to be replaced, but we have the memorial this month"

Then the three sunny days came. Early in the morning, with the tiles dry, I set up the ladder. Anh Tám climbed, and I stood at the bottom holding the foot of it and handing up the replacement tiles. He stayed up there a good while. When he came down his hands were covered in red dust.

"The tiles didn't slip. The wooden beam under that spot has rotted, and tiles sitting on rot just sink."

He called his cousin, a builder. In the afternoon the cousin came, climbed up, climbed down, and shook his head while he drank his water.

"Patching won't hold, uncle. The whole section has to be replaced. Take off the tiles, replace the beam, lay the roof again."

My wife was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel still in her hand. "When could you do it?"

"I'm free at the end of the month."

Then he named the price. I listened, my wife listened, and the two of us nodded the way you nod when somebody quotes a price for a job at some faraway house. The builder nodded along, the nod of a man who has seen plenty of homeowners nod just like that.

"Let me work it out," I said.

He left a slip of paper with his phone number. I stuck it to the cabinet door with a piece of tape, right at eye level, so I wouldn't forget. It stayed there the whole season, picking up cooking oil drifting from the stove, its corner curling, the digits fading, though by then I knew them by heart.

That night the two of us sat on the kitchen doorstep and worked it out. Worked it out meaning each of us named something that had to come first, and then we sat quiet. My wife mentioned Bi's school bag. I mentioned the memorial. She said her motorbike could run a while longer. I said the roof could hold one more season.

"The basin can hold, sure," she said. "The roof isn't holding anything."

"Well, the basin."

"Go wash a few bowls for me, would you? I'm so sleepy."

I went to wash the bowls. The water from the tap ran loud, piling on top of the tong in the living room, and I turned it down until I could hear the basin again.

That month we had the memorial for my wife's late father. Little Bi started first grade and needed a school bag, notebooks, and a pair of shoes that he took out to the porch every evening just to admire. My wife's motorbike needed two new tires. None of it was huge, but whatever came first got put first, and a roof that already had a basin under it went to the back of the line.

At the end of the month the builder called. I said, after the memorial. After the memorial came the first week of school, and I said, after the first week. Every time I said "later," I said it lightly, like asking a teacher if I could let a bike stay five more minutes at the gate.

One afternoon I tried it myself. I carried the aluminum ladder inside, stood on it, and filled the seams in the ceiling panels around the stain with putty. I figured if the water had no seam to go through, where would it go? I let it dry overnight, and in the morning it looked smooth and clean, and I stood there praising myself.

Three days later the rain came back. The drip no longer landed in the old spot. It fell half an arm's length away, right over the low tea table.

"But you patched it."

"It went around to another place."

My wife didn't answer. She lifted the flower vase off the table, wiped its base, and put it away in the cabinet. "My mother left that vase here." Then she went out back and fetched the aluminum pot with the broken handle, the one she used to cook rice porridge for Bi whenever he had a runny nose, and set it under the new drip.

From that day the house had two sounds. The basin went tong, the pot went tach, thinner and higher. The two never fell at the same time.

"You hear it long enough and you get used to it, until the night it goes quiet and you wake up"

The basin sounds different depending on how much water is in it. With a dry bottom the drop lands with a tong, short and high. Once the water is halfway it becomes a tòng, lower and slower. Near full you can't hear drops at all, only water sloshing back and forth against the rim. Sitting in front of the television I could tell how full it was without turning my head.

My wife put an old hand towel on the bottom to quiet the drops. She kept it three days and gave up, because a wet towel is heavy and she had to wring it out every time she emptied the basin. I still remember the tong with the towel in there, muffled, like someone talking with their mouth shut.

She found another way. She took a ballpoint pen and drew three lines on the inside wall of the basin, about two fingers apart. At the second line it was time to carry it out and pour it away, and the third line meant it would spill. Bi learned to read those lines before he could read his school textbook.

At first he asked every evening, "Grandpa, why do we have a basin?" After two weeks he stopped asking. After three weeks he was folding paper boats from ruined drawing pages, dropping them in, and squatting to watch. Wherever a drop hit, the boat would spin. He counted: "One turn. Grandpa, two turns."

"Do you have homework tomorrow?"

"Grandpa, the boat sank."

"The homework."

"I finished it."

He hadn't. I knew because his notebook was still sitting untouched in his bag, and I didn't have the energy to argue.

On nights of heavy rain I got up. Two o'clock, three o'clock, I didn't need a clock, only the sound of sloshing changing into a different sound. I walked barefoot from the bedroom into the living room, stepped over the brick by the kitchen door that sticks up a little and trips strangers, and lifted the basin with both hands. I poured it out, put it back, and nudged it onto its old ring. Then I lay down and my wife said in her sleep, "Is it done?" I said it was. The first drop of the next round fell before I could close my eyes.

One night I slept through it. In the morning I stepped down and the water had spilled over the rim and run in a long puddle to the foot of the dish cabinet, with the builder's slip of paper still taped to the cabinet door and my sandals floating in the puddle. I stood there. My wife came out of the kitchen, looked, said nothing, and went back in for the mop.

"I slept too hard."

"There's half a pot of braised fish left," she said. "Have it with the cold rice."

By the time we finished mopping it was time for me to go to the gate. I was ten minutes late. The teacher was waiting there and didn't ask anything.

My wife's younger brother came for the memorial, walked in, looked at the basin and then at the ceiling.

"You keep this as decoration?"

"Yes, decoration," my wife said. "Have you eaten?"

He didn't ask again. He walked around the basin when he went to get a bowl, and nobody had to point it out to him. Our regular visitors do the same: step in, glance at it, walk around. Some week or other I noticed I was shifting my own foot to one side whenever I passed, even when I was thinking about something else.

One night the rain stopped. Near dawn I woke up because I couldn't hear anything. I lay there a while before I understood that the basin had gone quiet. My wife turned over.

"Why is it so quiet?"

"The rain stopped."

"Oh."

She went back to sleep. I lay there until morning with my eyes open, looking up at the gray ceiling and listening to the neighbor's rooster crowing.

"You didn't tell me, Dad"

On Sunday I sat listening to Tín call on video from the place he works, far from home. Bi grabbed the phone and pressed his face up to the screen. He talked in one breath about school, then about Chú Bảy's rooster, then about one last thing:

"Dad, Grandpa and Grandma's house has a singing basin."

"A what?" That was Tín's voice.

"A blue basin. It sings tong tong. In the middle of the house. And there's a pot too."

The screen tilted back and forth. Behind Bi the ceiling of my house came into view, the stain now spread to about the size of a palm since the start of the season. I had taken a pencil and drawn a line around it to keep track. Bi held the phone up so his father could see.

"Dad. Is the roof leaking?"

"A little."

"A little is how many basins?"

"One basin and one pot."

"Since when?"

"Since the start of the season."

"The start of the season was May, Dad." His voice dropped. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Have you eaten? What time is it over there?"

"Dad."

My wife was standing behind me, folding a raincoat. She spoke loudly, for the phone to hear. "He's afraid if he tells you, you'll skimp on food and send money home."

"Skimp on what," Tín said. "You kept saying everything was fine, so I thought everything was fine. I thought you two could handle everything at home."

I tried to say something and no sound came out. I'm not used to talking about money with my son. When he was in school, that was between me and my wife. When he started working, I kept thinking it was still between the two of us, thinking it so hard that I forgot to ask her whether she thought so too.

I told him about the rotten beam. About the builder saying the whole section had to be replaced. I told him that month we'd had the memorial and Bi starting first grade, that the builder had named a price, and that I didn't know yet how I'd work it out. He listened and didn't interrupt.

"I'll come home the weekend after next," he said. "I'll look at it with you."

"You're working."

"I'll take a morning off."

"They dock you for that."

"Dad."

"All right. All right, come home."

Bi cut in: "Dad, when you come home will the basin sing that day?"

"Depends on the weather," I said.

After the call I stayed in the chair a while. Outside a light rain was falling, and inside I heard tong, then tach. I got up, carried the basin out back, and poured it into the chili pots.

"Turn it upside down right there, don't put it away"

Tín came home and stood in the middle of the living room looking up at the ceiling for a long time. He took photos, he climbed my aluminum ladder and looked from inside the house, he measured the stain with his fingers against my pencil line, and then he sent the photos to the builder. The builder wrote back a long string of words I couldn't read on such a small screen. Tín read it out loud: the builder was booked up this season and asked to come back next month.

That afternoon I took him out back to see the chili pots. He picked a red one and bit into it the way he did as a boy, then coughed and coughed, tears running down his face. My wife stood in the kitchen doorway laughing and couldn't stop.

"Those chilies drank the roof's water, son."

"Why are they so hot, Dad?"

"Save the hot ones for Bi to eat with his rice."

Next month the builder called and asked to push it again. I said fine. My wife said fine. Tín called home and said he was working on it.

The rain thinned out. One afternoon it didn't rain at all, and only that evening did I remember the basin had been dry since morning. My wife washed the towel she'd given up on weeks ago, hung it on the line, and after wringing it out she stood watching it drip for a while.

Anh Tám stopped by, stood in the middle of the living room, and looked up at the ceiling, then at the basin.

"Next season I'll climb up."

"All right. Wait for sun."

"Wait for sun," he said, and drank the tea I poured him.

I carried the basin out back and washed it. There was a thin green film of moss on the bottom, and I scrubbed it with Bi's old toothbrush until it was bright again. The cracked handle I'd tied up with a bit of electrical wire some year ago, and I hadn't replaced that either. Then I carried it back in.

Where the basin had stood all season there was a circle on the tiles, cleaner than the tiles around it, and redder. I squatted and looked at the circle.

"Are you putting it away out back?" my wife asked from the kitchen door.

"Leave it. Turn it over."

I set the basin upside down exactly on the circle, its rim sitting flush, not a finger's width off. Bi ran out and tapped the upturned bottom twice. It went bop, bop, dull and thick, nothing like any sound it had made all rainy season.

"Grandpa, it sings a different song."

"Yes," I said. "This afternoon I'll water the chilies."