Things Get Broken

A Story by Balzac999

(N.B. everything inside an asterisk is italicized)

Unlike his friends growing up in New York, John Truman never made any long term plans with his life. At high school, he hadn’t been singled out as someone likely to seek out adventure, and his yearbook photo showed a quiet, thoughtful young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a shy, awkward smile. He stumbled into journalism quite by accident when, on a whim, he applied for a summer job helping edit a temporary magazine supplement. Discovering he enjoyed the work, in his mid thirties, he left the Big Apple on an assignment in Bangkok, the City of Angels. Expecting to return to the US, he soon fell in love with the city and quickly decided to make Thailand his home.

Within a year, he had married and settled into a routine of rural domesticity, and it seemed to him at least he’d finally found something to do with his life. Now in his early fifties, slightly overweight from his sedentary lifestyle as a freelance magazine writer, he fully expected to live out his years quietly getting his articles published and maybe even a book or two. As is often the case, life rarely turn out the way you expect it to.

The trouble began the day he found out that a large chunk of their savings had gone from the family’s joint bank account. This was bad enough, but when his Thai wife Sunisa told him casually over breakfast one morning she had given it to a man she’d recently met and had once known in her past life, it was the first time in seventeen years John ever had any doubts not only about his marriage, but his wife’s sanity.

*

Sunisa stood in front of the bathroom mirror and had just finished putting cream on her face. At forty-two, she had a pleasing face with smooth skin, long, shiny hair and lively eyes. Her love of gardening ensured she kept her slim shape, and she had grinned when a man at the shop told her she could easily pass for a much younger woman. Like a model in a toothpaste commercial, she smiled into the mirror displaying her expensive dental work.

When she heard the crash, she had just started to clean her teeth with the new herbal toothpaste bought that week at Tesco Lotus. It tasted bitter and not what she had expected, so she placed the top back on the tube and put it in the bin below the sink. Once downstairs, she saw her husband attempting to sweep shards of a broken plate into a dustpan with a brush.

“Here let me do it,” she said trying to take over.

“I’m sorry. It was the one of the plates your mother gave us,” John said. “For our wedding.”

“Mai pen rai”, Sunisa replied. “Things get broken.”

John didn’t reply, just nodded and sat at the breakfast table, the letter still in his hand.

“What’s that?” his wife asked.

“Bank statement,” he replied. “There must be a mistake. 250,000 baht is missing. I’ll have to call them when they open.”

“Oh,” replied his wife.

Something in his wife’s voice made John look up. He looked directly at her.

“You know something about this?”

Sunisa shifted her weight uneasily and opened her mouth, but no words seemed to come out at first.

“Yes, it’s no mistake,” she replied. “I withdrew it and give to Khun Suranand.”

John put down the letter and stared at his wife.

“Sorry? You did what?” he asked.

“I forgot to tell you. I’m sorry,” Sunisa said. “He met his soulmate and wants to get married. He asked for money, and I said I would help him.”

There was a brief silence before John spoke again. He knew his Thai wife of 17 years was not given to sly practical jokes and nor, given her fervent Buddhist beliefs, was she one to ever lie, so he found himself peering into her eyes for any sign telling him the opposite of what his brain was telling him - that the equivalent of over 8,000 US dollars had been given away from their account to a complete stranger.

“Who is this man and why did you give him so much of our money Sunisa?”

“I think you won’t understand so I not see point of telling you,” she replied.

“But…but…you simply must my dear,” her husband replied. “Who is he? Does he need an operation or something? Is he sick? Is he dying? I don’t understand!” said John who was now becoming upset not just at the shock of the news but also at his wife’s indifference.

“I know you be like this so I not tell you before,” said Sunisa. “I know him from long time back. He came to the shop many times and we talk for many hours. We were in the palace together. A long time ago. He tell me he needed *sinsod* money, a dowry I think you call it, but will return money in two weeks.”

John sensed something unusual was happening. For most Thais, anger is rarely displayed no matter what the occasion, and Sunisa was not one to display extreme emotions. He decided not to push things any further.

As she walked towards the kitchen door. “I go now to work. When I come back I tell you. Maybe then you be calm, listen and try to understand.”

He watched from his front window as his wife walked down the driveway, past the recently mowed lawn, the carefully manicured bonsai, the water hyacinths and the frangipani trees, whereupon she got into her car and was gone.

*

After his wife departed for work, John usually walked to his study at the back of the house to work on an assignment, but today he couldn’t focus as he sat at his kitchen table, his mind racing through what had happened and how he might find a way of fixing it.

He knew when marrying Sunisa, he hadn’t been much of a catch due to his hyperthyroid issue, with his bug-like, protruding brown eyes, an aquiline nose and loose skin, but he had a full mop of loose, mousy brown hair, a warm smile, and in those days was lean. Living in Bangkok, before he had met Sunisa, he had not been short of attention from the ladies.

Although Sunisa came from a good family and was well educated, she was more naive than most Thai women he’d met, what her mother Boonsri described as having *hoo bao* in Thai or a “light ear”, meaning she was a bit gullible. However, it was always a quality he liked about her, a certain vulnerability and innocence that he found attractive. Her superstitious nature sometimes amused him, too. When he asked her why she wouldn’t leave the house when *jink jocks*, tiny geckoes, made a noise, Sunisa had replied, “they may be warn me about something”. Rather than make a fuss, it was easier for John to accept it for the common trait among Thais it was, but in seventeen years of marriage, he’d never had any reason not to trust her with money.

Early on in their marriage, they had made a pact that they would always tell each other the truth no matter what and not keep secrets from each other. Now John realized he would have to re-evaluate that shared sense of trust, and he was starting to worry he might end up penniless in a foreign land perhaps ten years away from retirement. *What if one of us gets sick? If there is a financial emergency? An unforeseen event? If all the money is gone, how will we deal with it?* He also worried his wife might have gone mad or was displaying the early signs of dementia, so out of character were her actions. *And what if this scammer comes back for more? Where will it end? When we are completely broke?*

Needing reassurance from a familiar voice, he called one of his oldest friends in Bangkok to get advice, a fellow American and former colleague Bill Jansen at the Bangkok Post, who sympathized. No he hadn’t ever heard of such a scenario before; no he didn’t think she was losing her marbles, and he ran through a few of the possibilities, some of which John had already considered.

“You could make her go to the police and file a complaint but since she gave the money freely, I’m not sure that’d do any good,” said Bill.

John agreed but replied that a police station visit was still a must if only to have a formal record of what happened. Both men agreed that was a good idea.

The conversation ended with Bill telling John he believed she’d figure it out when the money failed to materialise a fortnight hence, and then she’d be begging him for forgiveness.

*

At the shop on the edge of town, a medium sized pharmacy her parents had bought and developed into a profitable business, Sunisa bid the three employees goodnight, turned on the alarms, and shuttered the shop for the night. Within thirty-five minutes, she turned her car into the dark driveway of her home. It was 6 pm and she heard the tranquil sounds of crickets chirping and birds in the trees settling down for the night.

They went outside and talked. It was a cool, balmy evening in early November as they sat on the veranda at the back of their house overlooking a garden full of mango and rose apple trees. Sunisa calmly explained to John how she met Suranand, how he had recently started to come to the shop often and how she was sure they had known each other in a former life. When John tried to ascertain exactly how she’d come to be so sure, she clammed up only saying that as he was not a practicing Buddhist, he would not be able to understand. She was convinced she would get the money back in two weeks and entreated John not to pass judgement until that time. It was a test she said, and it was related to a good deed she did in her past life. It made her very happy and she knew she was going to pass the test and if she did, she would get even more good karma for this and the next life.

To try to convince John, she showed him messages on her phone from Suranand which John read with a mixture of dread and wonder. He realized that this guy, wherever he was, had some real cajoneys leaving a trail of evidence as traceable as a thumbprint. She even told him that Suranand had introduced her to his future bride who was beautiful and sincere.

John listened yet was astonished his wife could so easily believe what she’d been told. A native New Yorker, brought up in the Bronx, John had known his fair share of charlatans and snake oil salesmen. He tried to sound reassuring and non-judgmental, but he couldn’t hide his doubt. He knew she’d been scammed and tried everything to convince her she had to report it to the police. But she would have none if it and took it as a personal assault on her character. He guessed with her strong Buddhist beliefs, she was worried that complaining to the police about someone from her past life would negatively affect her karma.

What started out a calm and reasonable discussion soon descended into a shouting match whereupon Sunisa took off her wedding ring and threw it at John.

“You not trust me. You not love me. You farang all the same! You all think everything be measured with money. Why you not trust anyone?”

Sunisa then went upstairs to her bedroom, threw a few items into a suitcase and collected toiletries from the bathroom. John followed and stood at the top of the stairs as she packed.

“I will go now to my mama’s house. I need some time to think,” she said.

“But darling I was only...,” said John trying to calm her down, but it was no use; she was not listening. With John following, she was down the stairs, out the front door, and soon back in her car as he stood in the doorway. He heard the engine start and she was gone.

John pottered around the house unable to think about anything bar the missing money and his wife’s reaction to his questions about it. At 8 pm, the phone rang and he raced over to answer it thinking it might be Sunisa. But it was only his editor in Hong Kong reminding him that his latest piece was due the end of the week and to find out how it was going.

“Just fine Richard, just fine,” was all he could manage.

*

That night he could not sleep. A few whisky and sodas had helped take the edge of his anxiety and dull his feelings of impotence, but little else. At the heart of his anguish were the feelings of mistrust he’d never experienced before with Sunisa, and he realized it would be a long time before he could trust her with money again, if ever. She had always been one to listen and to accept reason whenever they had quarreled before, but now she would have none if it. She had been brainwashed; Of that he was now certain. Someone had seen her soft, naive nature and realized it was ripe for taking advantage of.

Lying awake, in the darkness of his empty bedroom, his troubled mind brought him back to his childhood in New York, to a time after his father’s death in a car accident. His older brother had promised to teach him how to swim. He was twelve and memories of the swimming pool came back to him: the laughter of the children, the smell of chemicals, the soft lapping of the water splashing against the tiles, the strange shadows on the walls and the loud whistles of the life guards.

In the pool, his brother was gentle at first, but then when they gradually drifted into deeper water, still supported by his brother’s brawny limbs, the latter suddenly withdrew his arms from under him and swam back to the other side of the pool. John panicked and could feel his tiny body sinking. He could taste the chlorine in his mouth and felt his eyes stinging. At the bottom of the pool he froze holding his breadth until a lifeguard, noticing he’d been down there for longer than normal, began whistling frantically and dived in to pull him to the surface.

When John asked his brother later why he did it, he reminded John they were the men of the house now that pops was dead. He wanted John to learn to be tougher, to self sufficient and to find a ways out of problems for himself. In attempting to teach John a life lesson, his brother had instead, given him a lifelong fear of ever fully trusting people. When he’d come to Thailand and met so many trusting and friendly people, including Sunisa, many of those feelings had dissipated to the point where he no longer found himself thinking about them. Now they had resurfaced again reminding him of darker days in his past and the potential for them in the future.

*

The next morning, with no sleep, he got up and turned on the coffee machine. As he sat down at the kitchen table with his espresso, the caffeine hit perked him up a bit. He took out Sunisa’s wedding ring from his wallet where he had put it for safe keeping, and held it up in front of his eyes. It represented seventeen years of marriage which meant everything to him, and he wasn’t about to lose that. He decided he’d have to go to Sunisa and seek her forgivenesses.

In the car, his tired eyes focused on the road during the drive to Sunisa’s parents’ house, some forty kilometers away. He put the AC on the coldest setting and turned the radio on full volume to keep him awake. He wanted to speak to Sunisa, to hold her and tell her he loved her, and that it didn’t matter, but of course he knew it did, yet he didn’t want to lose her, either.

Her parents, recently retired, were very down to earth and John had always had a reasonably good relationship with them. They had built a chain of retail outlets that were dotted around the southern province of Hua Hin; mostly hardware stores, a few convenience stores and two or three pharmacies. However, because of his pride, John had never taken any money from them when it had been offered. They lived in a large house that wasn’t at all showy but with expansive gardens, a personal chef, a driver, with about 7-8 staff in total.

When John arrived around 10 am, he learned from one of the staff that Sunisa was not there as she’d left for work that morning as usual. He decided it would be rude having visited their home not to say hello to her parents, her father Ananda and Boonsri her mother.

“Ahh! My favorite son-in-law, John, how are you today?” asked Ananda as he walked into their expansive living room seeing John standing there. But before he could reply, Ananda lent over to him. “I hear you have been growling with the lioness. That right?”

“Sorry?” said John.

My wife says Sunisa is upset and that’s why she came home last night to stay. Have you two been fighting? The two lions fighting in the forest?”

John smiled. “Not fighting exactly,” he replied. “Just a...minor disagreement.”

“Well,” said Ananda, “you should fight more often. Then we can get to see more of you both!” He let out a big, throaty laugh and slapped John on the back playfully. “Don’t suppose I can interest you in a round of golf in an hour John? Meechai has hurt his back and we are one short for a foursome.”

“No sorry. I’m not much of...”

“Yes, yes, I know you don’t play. Thought I’d ask anyway.”

“Can I ask you a question khun Ananda? said John.

“Of course, but before you do, I have something for you.” Walking over to a cupboard, he pulled out two wooden boxes. “One of my partners just came back from Cuba. Here are some cigars, Saint Luis Rey Coronas, and in this box is the finest single malt whisky you will probably drink this year. You do like a drop of this, don’t you? Yes, I know you do!”

“Wow! I don’t know what to say,” returned John. “That’s really too kind of you,” was all he could manage.

“Well, you won’t take my money, so at least this way I can help you enjoy some of the nice things in life, eh?”

Both men laughed and sat down.

“Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”

“Khun Ananda, I want to ask for you if you know why...why Sunisa and I were...arguing yesterday?”

“Yes, I think so. My wife said it was something to do with Sunisa lending money to someone. Was that it?”

“Yes, kind of,” replied John. “Except...it was quite a large amount. It was 250,000 Thai baht to be exact. And to a man she says she knew in her past life.”

Ananda didn’t flinch when John related the story to him. He may as well have been telling him Sunisa had met a space alien and cooked him *tom yum goong*, a spicy Thai soup. Ananda just smiled and nodded his head at intervals to show he understood what was being said.

“And you don’t think that’s a bit...unusual?” asked John.

“A bit,” replied Ananda, “but even if he has cheated her, she’ll get over it.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” replied John.

“Did I ever tell you the time I was cheated out of six million baht?” said Ananda.

“No,” said John. “What happened?”

“It was when I was just starting out. I ordered some pharmaceuticals from China, but the products never arrived. The man came highly recommended as well. It took me a long time to recover, but I did. You can’t trust anyone these days. Everyone is out to make some money as easily as possible. That’s life!”

“So, do you think we should report it the police?” asked John.

“Yes, probably. No point in waiting a few days is my advice. You’ll upset Sunisa for sure but much as we should always try to see the good in people, in many cases given the opportunity, they are crooks, don’t you think? If he says he’s going to return the money, he might but the story about past lives sounds like it’s made up. Leave it with me. I’ll talk to Boonsri and together we’ll make Sunisa see she’s probably being cheated. We’ll advise that she makes a statement at the police station. I know the station chief, General Chalermkiat. One of my golf buddies.”

“Thank you so much Khun Ananda. I think what you say makes a lot of sense,” said John.

*

When Sunisa returned to her parents’ house that afternoon, they sat her down and explained why she should go and make a formal statement at the police station. Ananda took her to the station and watched as she recounted the events to a junior ranking policeman who gave them both a deep and respectful *wai* as they entered. The policeman wrote everything down as carefully as he could when Sunisa refused for the statement to be recorded electronically.

Sunisa pointed out that she did not wish Suranand to be bothered by any suggestion of impropriety or that she was complaining, only that, on the advice of her parents and her husband, she was simply registering the fact that she had lent him money. She insisted that she fully expected everything to be cleared up when the money was returned.

That evening, she kissed her parents goodbye and began the trip back to her home with John. Driving along the highway, the events of the last few days quite stressful, she needed to put it all behind her. She had tried to call Suranand a few times over the previous days, but his phone was off. She tried again with the same result.

Spotting up ahead a local temple called *Wat Chanasongkram* meaning the *Temple of Victory*, she stopped to buy some food at a roadside stall to offer as a donation to the monks and performed *tam boon*, a Buddhist custom of making merit. She also bought some candles and some josticks at the temple which she lit and got down on her knees. In front of a shrine of a golden Buddha, she prayed that all would end well, and the money would be returned, or if not, that she would be forgiven and that her karma would be intact.

When she got home, she cried and hugged John who cried in return, and they kissed and said sorry over and over like two fighting children making up. John then took out her wedding ring and placed it back on her finger as the tears continued to stream down her face.

“I’m so sorry. I promise I will not give away any more money dear. I will show you.” She went upstairs and came back a short time later with her jewelry box, the deeds to land her father had given her, and her bank card, all of which she gave to John.

“I trust you and want you to take care of those things till you trust me again, ok?” she said.

John smiled and took the items. That night they drank wine and made love like they were teenagers again.

The next day, Sunisa went to work as usual and John kissed her from the doorway. They had agreed not to speak about the money any more and so when the time came around for its return, if it had not been received, they would just chalk it down to experience and move on with their lives.

“Do you remember when we went to that temple darling? The one with the caged birds?” said Sunisa.

“Yes,” replied John. “They looked so happy when we released them.”

“We will do the same thing my darling. Then we will watch all our bad deeds fly away,” she said.

The two-week deadline came sooner than expected, and no money was returned, so they went to the temple as planned and released ten doves into the sky watching them soar high towards the clouds.

*

The following Sunday morning as usual, Sunisa was pottering around in the back garden tending to some flowers. The sun was slowly rising in the November sky and the dew drying from the lawn. As was his habit, John drove to the local delicatessen to get breakfast for them both. He liked the jalapeño bagels, a reminder of his childhood in New York. Sunisa was partial to their croissants and scones, both of which she smothered with liberal dollops of clotted cream and strawberry jam and washed down with a cup of her favorite iced tea. John was smiling happily as he drove back, relieved at last to have finally put the recent events behind them and to be back into a semblance of their normal routine.

When he parked the car in the driveway, it was getting warm, and he could smell the sweetness of the frangipani trees in the front garden mixing with the aroma from his latte carried in a foam container. As he walked through to the kitchen at the back of the house, he placed the items down on the counter top and his ear caught the sound of voices. It was Sunisa in the back garden talking to someone on the speaker of her phone.

“He doesn’t understand or trust me. I told him we’re different, and we do things differently in Thailand,” said Sunisa.

“Yes farangs will never understand *Thainess*, that’s for sure,” said the male voice. “Have you transferred the money, yet?”

“No. I’ll do it tomorrow when the bank opens.”