Credit
by Jack Wolflink
Introduction by Amy Friedman, Music by Roland Tec, click below
Jack Wolflink is a biracial Filipine writer who holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and an M.A. in Environmental Geography from San Francisco State University, where he studied protest tactics. His work appears in Kinsman Quarterly, the Lighthouse Community Anthology, and Suspect, where he is a 2026 Best of the Net & Pushcart nominee. He also edited the Winds of Asia prose and poetry collection with Kinsman Quarterly, which was released last year.
Click below to hear the author reading Credit.
“Don’t take that tone with me,” you shout. “You used to be so good. What happened to that cute kid?”
He’s nearly a foot taller than you are now, and at fifteen his growing isn’t over. You work weekends as a home health aide to put money into his college fund, but he won’t talk to you about his slipping grades. Even now, he glares and stalks off. Doors slam in the basement. You half-fall onto the living room couch.
A portrait of your son hangs on the opposite wall. Your father had painted it two years before returning to the Philippines, an eyeblink in his long life, but you no longer see your son in the painting’s static lines. Bones now probe the roundness of his cheeks and chin. His flat bowl-cut’s given way to patchy shadow and gelled cowlick. He wears it well. But he wipes his hands on his pants and leaves crumbs clinging to the front of his shirt. It takes so much effort for you not to dab them off with the napkins right there on the coffee table. But his patience wears as thin as your budget, and you can’t spend it on simple appearances.
There’s mail piled on the table in front of you. It covers the glass windows which display the shells and trinkets you and your husband brought back from Barbados. What was that, eight years ago? Nine? It was the only real vacation they’d shared. Now those mementos are hidden by the bills sent by your lawyer to keep your husband from winning split custody, the college plan you started when he cashed the first one out, and the mortgage payments he’d stopped making.
When you were young, America sang to you like the Emerald City of Oz, which you’d first seen on a school break in Iloilo, between classes where you were ridiculed for your bumpkin accent. You’d outworked your classmates, pulling double study hours on accounting homework, then breaking down the sharpened peaks of your Karay-a accent until they fit Ilonggo’s snooty melody. The bullies got worse when you topped their marks in class, and so you left, flying to Manila, and then to Missouri, and then to here, the nation’s capital, to have a son. On weekdays your office overlooks the White House, whose inhabitants you schedule flights for, and you worry that your son across the river is zoned out on TV and forgetting to eat.
Years before, the only trouble he gave you was getting tangled underfoot as you cooked dinner. He kept asking to help, and you wanted to let him, but of course he was two and too small to handle knives or hot oil. He’d go quiet for a bit, while you sliced onions and chayote, or stirred fish heads into soup broth. You’d hear clanging, and look down, and he’d be sitting in a circle of unused pans, filling each with the congealed hair and dust his little fingers gathered from beneath the cabinets. In your head you’d curse—another load of dishes to do before tomorrow—but you couldn’t help but smile. Even now, tears stinging your face, your mouth curls, and your son looks at you as if you’ve gone insane.
The next morning, you try again. You pour cups of orange juice and heat up a couple of his favorite turkey sausages. You evict the latest stack of bills to the armchair, where they join his backpack and a pair of dirty socks. You greet Rose, the cockatiel you bought when he was eight. Rose’s head dips assertively toward the empty feeding tray, so you bend to take another cup of birdseed from the bag. Your son’s shoulders tense—he knows that it’s his chore to do—but you grant him this one, marshaling his goodwill for greater goals.
“Ga, I know this is stressful for you, but it’s really important. Your credit score helps you buy a house, buy a car, start a business.”
He rolls his eyes and gives a long, dramatic groan. Your father would have whipped you silly if you’d expressed such disrespect. But Americans don’t do that, and your son lost his Tagalog long ago.
“Just give me a debit card,” he grunts. “I’d be fine with a debit card.”
“A debit card won’t help your credit score,” you say.
“Well you know what also doesn’t help your credit score? Missing payments!” His sarcasm feels like a papercut dipped in vinegar.
“Just make a schedule! Put it on your to-do list.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouts. He jerks his hand up clumsily and sends a sausage spinning to the floor. “You see me right now, shouting at you, and you think, this kid is ready to manage debt? That’s so stupid!”
“Jack, it’s good for you! Buy your lunch with it and pay the bill when the mail comes. Your credit score is really important—you’ll see.” And then you say—because you’ve said it a thousand times before, because, maybe, this time it will work— “You’ll thank me when you’re older.”
His face crumples like the Pentagon’s façade. “You should fucking thank me. So many of my classmates would kill to get their hands on a credit card so they can bankrupt their family. The shit they’d buy—clothes! Porn! I’m telling you I’m not responsible enough for one! Why won’t you listen to me? You never listen to me!”
He slaps his arms palms-first against the blue placemat, punctuating his sentences. His father waved his hands like that, beat them against walls and furniture until they broke. The holes your husband left are covered by framed photos, which now judder on their hooks. You need to fix the drywall underneath. You need to change the lightbulbs that flicker with each blow. You need to fix the chimney grate the squirrels chewed open last winter, and check the heater’s warranty before it dies.
All you want is for your son to grow up stable, to meet the world with his soul intact. You imagine him, years from now, with a house, a job, a car, saying “I couldn’t have done it without you, Mom.” The American Dream, they say. But really, it’s the Filipino Dream, a dream unsullied by this country’s narcissistic blather: a dream of children pretending to cook instead of pretending to eat, politicians pretending to care instead of voters pretending to vote, of locked doors and thick brick walls between you and the paramilitaries finding activists to brutalize.
“Lintikan na yawa gid e,” you scream. Lightning strike the devil. It’s Karay-a’s harshest curse, once used to silence angry aunts and catcalling construction workers. Not that your son understands anymore. “Your card comes next week already. Just be responsible!”
“Fine,” he says. “Whatever. I’ll overdraft and miss my payments. That’s not a threat, that’s a certainty.”
He grabs his plate and stomps downstairs. Chairs thud against the basement door. Now you notice Rose’s nervous chirping and the patter of her anxious feet across the cage. You climb the stairs, putting the empty floor between them, then snatch a pillow from your bed and crush it against your chest, and so it falls with you, deflated, onto the mattress.