Catching Up to You

Chapter 8 - The Contract

Linny had just finished brushing her teeth for the second time before she heard her Sailor Moon ringtone go off from her phone. The cold water was running so loudly that she could barely hear melodic bell chimes from the anime's theme song.

Trang groaned, woke up to throw an expletive, and plopped right back to bed while Linny rushed to the answer.

"Hey, I texted you that I would meet you Tatte at 7 am," she gritted her teeth into a hissy whisper.

"I woke up a little early so I'm at your front door right now," he said, sounding giddy like a child.

"What!"

A pillow crash landed on Linny with a hard thud. Instead of throwing it back at her sister, Linny decided to bring it along with her to hit Angel - who seemed to show no remorse over his lack of weekend etiquette - repeatedly for the first half of their walk to the French-inspired bakery cafe.

At the cafe, Linny had a half-dozen of freshly baked fruit tarts while Angel decided to mollify his curiosity with a dish of moussaka. Linny usually came here to study. The natural sunlight poured into their nook, not being selective over who it shared itself with as it hit the marble floors, white, dainty furniture, and rolls and rolls of bread freshly made out of the oven. If she was going to heaven, she hoped that it would look exactly like this. And maybe later on, her parents could join her in her French bakery heaven as they, too, have a love for French culture. She noticed that everyone, including her, had forgotten about the perverse nature of Vietnam's history with its original colonizer.

With their heads almost conjoined in front of her laptop, Angel spoke, "I know that you know that you have a limited time here, but you didn't have to speed up your death with six of these."

Deciding not to tell him that half of those were for her sister, she quipped, "Oh, I'm just trying to cherish all of the delicious pastries before I could never have them again. Besides, it's on my bucket list."

"Where?"

"I just added it to the list."

Not letting her get a reaction out of him, he concentrated on squinting and joining his eyebrows together to look like he had shifted his focus to her list, typed in detail on a yellow notepad. The more she looked at Angel and imagined what his younger self would look like, the more she realized how

"So, which one should we start on?"

"Mm. Everything looks doable to me," he said without a moment's hesitation.

"Ha, it's okay to say that I won't be able to do some of these. I barely have enough money to cover even three items on this list." Her eyes landed on the words "Hike the Annapurna'' next to a checkbox. She wondered how much the insurance covering the helicopter rescue alone would cost. She also wondered how much of a challenge it would be to convince her parents to let her go as she could almost imagine what they'd say to her ("We sacrificed our lives to give you better lives here in the U.S. and you ended up throwing away your life somewhere out of the U.S. - no!" in Vietnamese).

Her guardian angel suddenly took out a contract.

"I'll cover all of the costs for you." He said.

"Yeah, and while you're at it, I'd like a Ferrari as well, thank you," she laughed at him as she went back to eating her third tart.

"Well, if that's what you want as well but I thought you were more of a Prius person." He took out a slip of thick contact paper that was rolled up and tucked in his jacket. As he unfurled the paper, words began to appear at first contact with sunlight. The ink drew together into elegant brush strokes. Linny rubbed her eyes a few times to make sure that she was not going delusional.

The guardian angel was looking more like a guardian angel to her. According to the contract, in exchange for having all of her wishes met and expenses covered for those wishes until her death, she had to make sure that he was within a mile radius from her at all times - hence, he explained, why he had to move to her neighborhood.

"For the entire year? Do you really have to be with me as I go down the list? Can't you just leave me with like, an American Express credit card and come back when my time is up?" she asked, half-jokingly.

Angel's lips were still pressed together, not giving in to Linny's blunt humor. For a second, Linny thought his eyes looked hurt by what she said.

"I will have to be close to you at all times in case you end up going a bit... out there with your wishes."

"The craziest thing I've ever done in my life is jumping into the pool when I was three because I believed that all humans had an innate ability to swim automatically."

"You see, that's why we can't let you go far, hun." He clicked his tongue and nodded slowly at her.

"I repeat, I was 3!" Linny retorted, trying to repress her smile. She wouldn't admit it then but she could feel that she was starting to like this new sassy side of her new companion.

"So, what's in it for you?"

Angel looked at her like a deer in headlights.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, shouldn't you be gallivanting in some heavenly version of LA's Rodeo Drive with that fountain of wealth instead of being stuck here with a nobody like me?"

"Hey, that doesn't sound like something I'd prefer doing at all than being here," he scrunched his eyebrows together.

"Then, what? What's so appealing about guiding a stranger to her doom - unlike you're a sadist?"

"Well, the contract is not entirely for your benefit."

"No."

"Actually, the reason why I chose to be a guardian angel was that it was really a second chance at life for me."

"A second chance? Don't you do this for an eternity or something?"

He shook his head in amusement.

"Not at all. I feel very blessed to have been chosen."

"Well, who were you before you became my Oprah?"

"I haven't been here long enough to understand all of your cultural references, but I'm guessing that if you're asking me about my past life, then you're out of luck."

"You mean, you can't remember? None of the other guardian angels either?"

"No, Linny. Look. As far as I know from colleagues' rumors, it's possibly because we had premature deaths from our past lives."

"Premature deaths? As in you didn't make it to 9 months and after last time?"

He shrugged.

"Maybe. That's what we speculated since it could be the reason why we had no past lived memories."

"Except for your mother's womb." Linny's voice softened at the retroactively sad possibility. It could've been a miscarriage. It could've an abortion. No one would ever know.

"Hence, why the second chance comes into play."

"So, you can't tell me more about you even if you wanted to?"

Angel shook his head.

Linny plopped back against the velvet cushion chair and heaved a long sigh. "Well, that's anticlimactic."

"You know, I think I liked you more when you would run at the sight of me." He grabbed one of the remaining tarts and took a bite from it.

"And I liked it when you were only a gentleman stalker to me."

"It sounds like you're in for this deal with me," he smirked in a gentle manner.

"It's a deal, you beast," Linny said, holding down her smile as she shook his hands

"Hey, you're talking to your guardian angel here. Don't want a piano to fall on your head."

"Was that what you've been watching in your past life - Looney Tunes? 'Cause we need to update you on your pop culture knowledge."

"Well, you have a year to catch me up."