In the morning, Haven is buried in fourteen inches of new snow. Along the avenues crawl aging city plows, woolly mammoths making slow furrows in the glittering white. Into this sparkling, frigid tundra, James struggles alone, protected by a hood, face mask, puffy coat, gloves, and plastic bags pulled over his sneakers and taped at the ankles. After only a few blocks, his jeans are already soaked through and frozen stiffly at the knees.
Approaching the restaurant, James can hear the engine of Dagou’s small Toyota pickup with the plow attachment, rumbling from the parking lot. Snow has been pushed up so high the parking lot itself is hidden from view. Dagou, laboring within this fortress of white, can’t be seen. James slogs around the walled lot and into the driveway.
Dagou has gotten out of the Toyota and is using a big shovel to heap snow atop the high mounds. He works easily, lifting heaping shovelsful as if they’re nothing.
“Hey, Snaggle. You’re late.”
“I couldn’t get to sleep—”
“Oh yeah?” Dagou grins, and James is struck again by his resemblance to their father. “Well, you woke up right on time, noodle-dick—I’m basically done with the snow.”
“Sorry.” 75
“S’okay. You’re ahead of Ming. He said he’d be here a half hour ago. Lunch is going to be slow, so I’m depending on you both to help prep for the party!”
“I’ll do it,” James promises. “Go out, run your errands.” Gu Ling Zhu Chi warned Dagou to stay away from the restaurant.
“Thanks, kid. I’ll go check up on Ma. She’s still in bed, her temple friend Omi says. Rough day for her yesterday.”
“Dagou—” James swallows. “Don’t tell Ma this. Alf got away from me again last night. In Letter City.”
Dagou stands, frowning, overheating in his winter jacket. His creased cheeks glow red; he looks hot enough that his feet could melt through the snow. “Well, he knows the way to the house, and the way here,” he says. “Someone probably found him and brought him home. They’ll call the number on his tag.”
“His collar and tag are gone.”
A puff of steam escapes Dagou’s collar. “S’all right, Snaggle,” he says, patting the top of James’s hood. “He’ll find his way back to us. Like Ba says, he knows who’s feeding him.”
It’s as if the uncontrolled bitterness of his radio rant never happened and his anger never broadcast itself out into the snowy night. James swallows, waves goodbye, then lets himself into the restaurant.
Entering the back door, he has a sudden need to use the toilet. He removes the bags from his shoes and hurries down the hallway.
Only O-Lan is in the kitchen, entirely forbidding, even more intimidating than he remembers. Nicknamed by Leo “The Orphan,” she first arrived at the restaurant two years ago with no connections, no family, and no plans. Winnie took her in, noticing her pinched face and her hair reddish with malnutrition. She insisted O-Lan be given temporary work, to get her back on her feet. O-Lan has been at the restaurant ever since. She’s carved out her preferred kitchen tasks, defending this territory against JJ, even against James. 76
Now she barely glances up, as if he hasn’t been away for months. She’s a woman of indeterminate age—big boned, wary eyed. Sometimes she looks like a plump teenager; at other times, with light from an open window on her face, she appears to be a person who’s already lived through a beginning, middle, and end, a story enclosed, known only to O-Lan if she cares to remember it. Her actions in the kitchen are ruthless and efficient, the actions of a person who wishes to remember nothing. Older and indifferent, not wanting to like or be liked, O-Lan is alpha dog to James. She terrifies him. He waves. She doesn’t respond.
The bathroom is roomy enough for three people to enter and converse—or argue. Here, Winnie once vehemently scolded James and Fang for sneaking flavored toothpicks meant for the customers. James thinks about the thousands of hours he’s spent at the restaurant, doing his schoolwork at a back table in the dining room, or sitting in the office on an old MSG box, rereading Ming’s battered Werewolf comic books. Perfect child care: the child never out of sight. All three brothers growing up, learning a work ethic here, how to be responsible. While Dagou hung over Winnie’s shoulder during off hours, tasting ingredients, Ming was more interested in the contents of the register. He once saved them a hundred dollars when a large family tried to decamp without paying. Ming raced out the door and down the avenue—“O. J. Simpson!” Leo said later—returning with the bills clutched in his hand. But when Ming turned thirteen, his enthusiasm slackened. He no longer spent his downtime industriously folding napkins, snapping beans. His interest in the money lasted longer, until one day he lost patience with even that.
“This place is a dump,” he exclaimed. “We work like dogs six days a week. We’re making egg rolls from scratch.”
“They taste way better than frozen egg rolls,” Dagou pointed out.
“The point is, we’re investing our labor on a product that is consumed immediately and brings in small change.”
“Big Shot!” their father said. “You rather spend your precious time jacking off? Then shoot your wad about your own business and not mine.”
For several months after, Leo referred to Ming as Big Shot. Ming didn’t 77respond. As a freshman in high school, he won first place in a math contest. He kept the prize money and invested it on his own. He joined the track team (four-hundred-meter relay) and ran every day. Leo hired JJ, who (until he fell in with Lulu) did whatever Winnie told him to do, and whose greatest flaw was his tendency to sing off-key in the kitchen. For the rest of his time in Haven, Ming clocked in minimal hours at the restaurant, and then withdrew except in emergencies. Leo, for whatever reason, let him do this.
James checks his watch: it’s ten past eleven.
In the front room, O-Lan stands behind the counter while a man orders takeout. He wears a baseball hat, and his jaw moves ceaselessly and nervously in a way James knows means he’s quitting either drinking or smoking. He booms out his order as if he’s at a drive-through: “Sesame peanut noodles and fried rice. And some extra soy sauce packets.”
O-Lan doesn’t meet his eye, pushes the button on the cash register. “Sih. Doerrr. Fittty. Sih. Cen.”
“Did you hear me? I want sesame peanut noodles and an order of rice.”
O-Lan spits out, “Sih. Doerrr. Fitt—”
“Be right there!” James hurries to the register, dodging tables and chairs. But O-Lan and the customer are locked in mutual hostility, ignoring him.
The man works his jaw. “Can. You. Understand. Wh—”
The front door flies open and Ming appears against the backdrop of brilliant snow, wearing his cashmere overcoat and again looking, James notices, entirely out of place. His authority is palpable. He strides directly to the register. O-Lan moves aside.
“May I help you?”
“What’s wrong with her?” The man fumes at Ming. “I placed an order. I asked for sesame peanut noodles and fried rice.”
Ming says, “One order of sesame peanut noodles and fried rice. That will be six dollars and fifty-six cents.”
The man hands over a ten-dollar bill. “And extra soy sauce. Seriously, what is it with her? Is she deaf?” 78
“She can understand the orders, but she can’t speak English.”
“Then she should go back to where they speak whatever she speaks.”
Ming’s voice is a shade higher than usual. “She knows what you ordered and how much it costs. She was filling in for me. I was late because of the snow. My apologies. Here’s your change. Your food will be ready in ten minutes.”
Even Ming knows he must apologize.
In the kitchen, James struggles through the man’s order—unlike Dagou, who is a natural, James has never been confident at the stove—and runs into the storeroom to search for more soy sauce packets. Returning to the kitchen, he finds O-Lan, bent low over the open take-out box, working the muscles of her face, licking her teeth. Her lips part in a quick grimace as she aims a gob of spit into the man’s noodles.
“What’re you doing?” James tries to keep his tone neutral.
O-Lan ignores him. He swipes the order from the counter. He’s about to throw it out when a hand pulls it roughly from his grasp. He flinches, turns. O-Lan is putting the order into the staff refrigerator. Then she returns to the cutting board.
Following this incident is the lunch rush—smaller than usual due to the snow and the impending holidays, just the regulars. The regulars are all men. They come only on workdays, as if punching a time card. They sit alone, they almost always order the same thing, and they shovel fried rice into their mouths as rhythmically as swimmers. Only a few of the regulars, whom Winnie calls the “taste buds,” are genuinely interested in the food.
James waits on the customers. He’s known most of them for years.
In the kitchen, Ming argues with O-Lan. James assumes they’re discussing her behavior toward the sesame peanut noodles man, but he doesn’t have enough Chinese to navigate the conversation. Even Ming’s four years of A’s in college Mandarin and his fifteen weeks of studying abroad do not make it easy for him to talk to O-Lan. O-Lan’s Mandarin is a mystery to everyone. Ming claims she’s from a southern city populated by newcomers from the countryside, and her sentences are inflected with 79a mysterious vernacular—neither Cantonese nor the country speech of Toisan. “She’s the Orphan, in between dialects,” Ming once told James. “She has no native language.”
Now, as he snaps beans for the party, James struggles to decipher O-Lan’s conversation with Ming. They don’t seem to be talking about the sesame peanut noodles man. “Snow,” Ming says. Ming has a flight back to New York this evening. They trot through a few exchanges—Ming’s ironically inflected voice and O-Lan’s dry one, curiously similar in tone—until it grows clear to James that Ming is defending himself. But why be defensive, when they’re discussing the snow? Next, James hears “United” and “Chicago” and “eight o’clock.” “Snow.” Now Ming is gesturing with his hands and saying words James knows from Alf’s commands: “Stay. Go. Stay. Go.” “Go? Stay?” O-Lan gestures toward the front window, where they can see a snowbank and a scrap of gray sky.
There’s a sense of alteration in the air, the faintest twitch in the room’s atmosphere. Something is about to happen. Things are about to change. James recalls the man in the train station. He’s listening, waiting for it to happen again.
Minutes pass slowly. The lunch shift is over, and James flips the sign on the door to closed. O-Lan eats the man’s spat-upon noodles. She adds hot sauce, stirs the dish into a peppery sludge, and chews methodically. James finishes the beans, takes them to the kitchen sink, and floats them in the big stainless-steel bowl. He tries to focus on his upcoming date with Alice, five o’clock. But he remembers his mother isn’t well. When he tries not to brood about this, he starts to worry about Alf. Is he hungry, is he somewhere warm?
Bells jingle, the door opens, and Leo Chao enters, followed by the lawyer Jerry Stern. They stamp their feet and scatter crumbs of snow on the carpet. Leo smiles his gleaming smile. James has often noticed he is not like his self-proclaimed totem animal the dog, but like the Cheshire Cat. His grin is a beam of light over the room.
“Hullo, hullo!” Leo shouts as if to many listeners. “I know, lunch shift is over! But you guys need to break the rules, get off of your asses, get 80this man some food!” He claps Jerry on the shoulder. “He’s going to spend an hour with me going over papers, pro bono work. He’s starving. Hey, get him a beer.”
James opens two bottles of Qingdao. Jerry is the closest thing his father has to a real friend. A chowhound, he can be found at a back table every day since his divorce, digging his chopsticks into a clay pot red with spice. Jerry is also a suit. As Leo Chao’s attorney, he’s the sole American who matters at the restaurant. It’s Jerry who keeps Leo out of trouble. The last favor Jerry did for Leo involved the restaurant’s ancient freezer room. James never knew exactly how, but Jerry helped Leo emerge victorious from the scrape with the city inspection unit. He calls Leo “you sly dog,” a reference to something James suspects has nothing to do with the restaurant. It’s as if Jerry has married into the family—he will never truly understand it, but he’s committed.
Now Jerry mops his forehead with a napkin, takes a draft of Qingdao, and sighs with relief.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Leo Chao says. “Come help me with these papers.” They disappear into the back.
“One of these days,” Ming mutters, “Jerry’s going to take a trip to China. He’ll get a whiff of the real breadth and depth of Chinese cooking, legendary dishes. That chicken wrapped in lotus leaves he’s read about. Authentic peppers from Sichuan, fresh as hell. Then he’ll leave the U.S. for good, retire to Asia, and Dad’s going to have to cough up real money for a lawyer.”
“He says he can’t go to China until he’s finished paying for his daughters’ educations.”
“I guess until that happens, Dad is his source.” Ming’s phone buzzes. “Gotta take a call.”
While James struggles to put together Jerry’s clay pot pork, Ming steps into the supply room, presumably to discuss the big deal he’s mentioned with some bank in Phoenix.
Another jingle at the door. It’s Katherine Corcoran. She’s snow-dusted 81and pink-cheeked, wearing a black overcoat, red scarf, and slender black leather boots.
“Hi, James,” she says. “Are you getting ready for the party? I stopped by to check in about the decorations.”
“Hi,” James says uneasily. He’s not sure how to behave around Katherine after last night. Does she still see him as her future brother-in-law? Or is he just a waiter? He’s more comfortable in the latter role, but she smiles at him as if he’s still a future relation. “Um, have a seat,” he says. “Sorry it’s so chilly in here. Something to eat or drink?”
“How’s your mother?” Katherine’s voice is warm. She won’t let him off the hook. He has the distinct impression she’s thinking about the scene at Brenda’s house and she wants to make sure he still likes her. He feels a desire—a need—to reassure her that he does.
“She’s not doing so great.”
Her smile fades. “I know she got upset yesterday. Can I do anything?”
“It’ll just take a while for her to get her tranquility back. Dagou just went to see her. And I think Ming talked to her this morning, you could check with him.”
“Ming is here?” She looks suddenly severe.
“He’s on a call, I think. He’ll be back.”
Katherine sits at a table for four. She’s a defensive diner, with her back to the wall like Al Capone. James asks for her order. Tea. Spicy tofu. Does she want it with, or without, pork? She wants the pork. Would she like brown rice? No, she says, brown rice is an affectation of Dagou’s, not authentic. White rice is fine. Whatever her complications, James thinks, they’re played out in the real world, not in her palate.
But Katherine’s appetite for Chinese food is hard-won. She’s learned to love it, after an initial aversion, followed by disinclination, and finally, exploration. Everyone knows she grew up in Sioux City eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, carrot sticks, and “ants on a log” (celery sticks smeared with peanut butter, then dotted with raisins). Guzzling orange juice for breakfast; learning to make omelets, pancakes, waffles, 82and French toast. On holidays, family dinners of an enormous standing rib roast served with cheesy potatoes, mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes with marshmallows, Brussels sprouts with pecans, creamed spinach, corn casserole, and homemade cranberry sauce. Baking, with her mother, Margaret Corcoran, Christmas cookies in the shapes of music notes, jingle bells, and double basses. Learning to roll piecrust. Yet her immersion in these skills, taught by her devoted mother, have over time created a hunger for another culture. James can see it in the focused way she examines the shabby restaurant. He can see it in the way she looks at him. It’s a clinical look, a look of data collection, but also of loss. Why doesn’t she do her research in China, where her biological mother lived and died? Because she works so hard at her demanding job in Chicago. In the meantime, the Fine Chao will have to do.
“James, where is Dagou?” She knows all of Dagou’s shifts.
“Um, not here today. He’s at home testing some recipe, getting ready for the party. Ming and I—”
At that moment, Ming walks into the room.
He seems agitated, younger than usual. Maybe he’s afraid of Katherine. She’s five years older, and, although they both have the same kind of good looks—clean-cut and self-possessed—she’s better-looking than he is. Moreover, she’s not generic. Her coat is too expensive to be artsy, James thinks, and yet she doesn’t quite have Ming’s corporate uniformity. You could just as well imagine her very high up in a special charity for rich people—something righteous, supporting the disadvantaged. Now she turns on Ming with an expression of familiarity and intensity. James feels sorry for Ming.
“What are you doing here?” Ming’s voice is cold. He’s not afraid, James sees suddenly; he’s angry with her. Why is he so angry?
“This restaurant is open to the public, or so I’ve heard,” she replies with equally icy precision.
Ming frowns. “You shouldn’t have come to town. Dagou told us about your ‘hiatus.’”
“That’s none of your business.” She’s so pretty and so terrifying that 83for a moment James is almost worried for Ming, or would be if he didn’t know his brother’s knack for evaporating from difficult situations. “I’m here to see Dagou,” Katherine says.
“He’s not here.” Ming keeps his voice as cool as ever. But there it is: although Ming tries to hold himself completely still, to not move a feature on his face, he blinks.
James blurts, inaccurately, “I can text him—”
“We can all text him,” Ming says. He pulls out the chair opposite her. “James, I need to discuss something with Katherine. Will you run to the kitchen and help O-Lan?”
James retreats to the kitchen. There is a fairly fresh pail of soapy water sitting near the door, but O-Lan is nowhere to be seen.
James busies himself chopping garlic for the party. Ming and Katherine are arguing in heated murmurs. They sit facing each other like mortal enemies, or life partners. From where he’s standing, he can almost hear them, but not quite. Ming has sent him to the kitchen because he knows (as all of them know) the exact distance that a normal conversation can carry from any point in the empty restaurant. Katherine is flushed. She and Ming are rigidly self-contained, yet as they talk, James can sense a kind of tilt under his feet, as if the carpet has become sand.
In the next moment, Ming and Katherine are shouting, their voices carrying across the restaurant as cleanly to James as if he were beside them.
“I’m not saying it’s my business!” Ming says. “It’s just hard to stand and watch as—”
“Butt out! This is between Dagou and me!”
“You don’t get it! Listen to me. Just listen. You guys are over. You are finished. You’re embarrassing yourself. Get lost! We are not your family! You live in Chicago! You need to leave town and forget about it for your own good!”
“You don’t know shit about what’s good for me!”
“I know more than you think!”
Katherine is weeping. 84
James senses movement at his shoulder. It’s O-Lan, wearing the expression of a cat in a window, a private, hungry gaze, as if she’s lapping up every scrap and drop of passion in their conversation. That’s what it is, James sees all at once: it’s passion. The very air shakes with it. James edges toward the bathroom, that place of refuge. He’s about to make a run for it when the telephone rings.
Ming moves automatically to the front counter.
“Fine Chao Restaurant.” He listens for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says at length. “He’s not here. I don’t know.”
There’s something in Ming’s voice. James approaches.
“Hold on.” Ming leans closer to James. “Listen,” he says, pressing his palm on the receiver. “Some woman named Chang, an ABC, I’m guessing, is missing a piece of luggage. This woman is calling every Chao within two hundred miles, she says, to search for it.”
James stands still, his mind abruptly cavernous, echoing with the distant screech and roar of underground trains.
“Lost item?” Leo Chao returns, ostensibly to get another couple of beers. But he can’t do anything subtly. There is something charismatic in his movements—even in the casual way he reaches out to wrest the phone from Ming—that makes them all look over at him, even Katherine, who no longer weeps, but watches.
Ming grabs an order pad and scribbles on it. As he walks back to his seat opposite Katherine, he hands James a slip of folded paper.
Leo listens, then barks into the phone, “A bag? What color bag? How big is it?”
James opens his mouth. He must tell his father what he knows—he’s on the balls of his feet—but Ming shoots him a warning glance.
Leo adjusts the phone at his ear, concentrating. An intent and vivid glint comes into his expression. James has seen this before, most recently at the Spiritual House, as his father picked up the slivers of fresh ginger and placed them atop the dumpling. A glint of greed. Leo says, with atypical politeness, “I’m sorry, but no one’s turned in anything like that.” He listens for another long moment. 85
James unfolds the note. On the one side, in Dagou’s handwriting, is a receipt for crab rangoons and a large wonton soup. On the other side is scrawled a note:
Meet ASAP, at the Other Restaurant. Leave separately.
The Other Restaurant is their name for Skaer’s Diner, down the street, which Trey Skaer inherited and runs now. James has never eaten there. He’s surprised Ming would set foot in the place, after being bullied by Trey throughout childhood, into high school. Whatever Ming wants to discuss, it must be top-secret if he’s willing to go to Trey’s diner.
Leo’s voice is casual and friendly. “Nope, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Try Chicago? There’s got to be a hundred listings for Chao or Chow in that area. We don’t try to save people in train stations, or steal people’s luggage.” A pause. “Okay. There are a lot of towns in that direction. Try farther north, try Minneapolis. Sure. Good luck.” He clicks the phone back into the receiver.
“You know what that means!” he announces to the room. “It means they lost his Life Savings! She was tricky, she wouldn’t reveal the contents of the luggage. But an old man like that, nine times out of ten he walks around with his Life Savings in hundred-dollar bills. Hell, I’m going to search! It’s possible that someone’s Life Savings is lying around! If there’s any bag of money here, I want to find it. Definitely me, and not that nogood son of mine.”
“Don’t talk about Dagou that way!” Katherine cries out.
Leo Chao turns his gaze on her. Though he’s still smiling broadly, James is afraid. His father’s cruelty is also quick as a cat’s. But when he speaks, his tone is light.
“Kath-erine-Cor-coran,” he says. “You are an attractive woman. Not sexy, but very attractive. I have nothing against you spending your time here. It brings in customers! But you are too good to wait around for a guy about to lose his job. Take it from me. You need someone with more resources, someone who knows how to appreciate you. Someone with experience!” His grin widens. Brandishing the bottle opener, he heads back to the office. 86
Ming’s hair is sticking up on top. He appears absolutely beside himself. “I told you to get out of here.”
Katherine’s small features are tiny with rage, but she’s glaring at Ming, not Leo.
Ming seizes the sleeve of her sweater. His hand is shaking. “You always think the best of him!” he says. “You don’t understand—you need to understand—”
“Understand what?”
“To understand the men from our family,” Ming says with finality. He lets go of her sleeve.
To James’s surprise, Katherine doesn’t respond. They are all silent. Katherine pours each of them a cup of tea, but no one drinks anything.
Twenty minutes later, when James arrives at Skaer’s, the diner is almost empty. With its plate-glass windows, fluorescent glow, and stark counters, the place is reminiscent of the Hopper painting, but James is fairly certain this effect is not deliberate. He peers through the window; under bright light, a few lonely afternoon owls of Haven who don’t eat Chinese food hunch over the counter as if posing for the artist.
Inside, the restaurant is pleasantly warm. From a booth on the far side, someone waves at him. It’s Ming.
Ming has hung his overcoat on a rack near the booth. He’s smoothed his hair. A small, expensive-looking suitcase defends his side of the booth, and James remembers again that Ming has a flight this evening. Nobody reproves him for this, or insists he spend Christmas at home. He became independent long ago.
“This is like that riddle about the town with two barbers,” Ming says as James approaches. “You go to a small town with only two barbers. One of the barbers has a bad haircut. If you and I want privacy, we’re doomed to a shitty meal.” 87
“The food can’t be that bad.”
Ming shrugs and checks his phone. “There’s one good thing on the menu, and it’s the fish sandwich.” He waves his hand at the other side of the booth. “Sit down and order. Go crazy. Supper’s on me.”
James sits. A young woman brings him a menu, laminated in plastic, illustrated with colorful photographs: an open-faced sliced turkey sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes; a jaunty cheeseburger and fries. James’s mouth waters. He loves American food. Although he’s been eating at the dining hall for a semester, it’s still exotic.
Ming says, “I have to eat anyway before I get on the plane. Last flight to Chicago. How’s it going, little brother?”
James remembers something. “Yesterday I ran into some of the Skaer kids.”
Ming speaks without emotion. “Lucky you.”
The server reappears with Ming’s plate. She’s about twenty-four, with a messy bun of wavy orange hair so flame-bright the filaments seem transparent.
“Here it is,” says Ming. On the plate is a fried cod fillet sandwich, a lettuce leaf, and a slice of pickle.
“Have you decided,” she asks James, “or would you like more time?”
“I’ll have the breakfast special, with scrambled eggs and bacon, please. And hash browns.”
“Look at that,” Ming remarks, when the server has gone. “Real red hair. It’s hard to find a genuine redhead now. Too much interracial breeding.” He lifts the top bun and peers underneath, then replaces the bun and takes a bite. “Crisp, and light on the tartar. Perfect.”
“Ming,” says James, “why were you so mean to Katherine? What’s she ever done to you?”
“Katherine?” Ming clears his throat. “Nothing. No, not nothing. It’s just, she enrages me. She should get away from us, for her own good—but she won’t leave. Because she was adopted by well-meaning white people and raised apart from her kind, she’s stuck on us. She’s fetishized us. 88She wants to be us, for God’s sake, and what she should really do is accept who she is: a highly intelligent, beautiful, very lucky, well-brought-up young woman who just happens to look like us.”
“You’re insulting her and us.”
“Katherine and I are strictly business,” Ming continues. James can tell that this statement, for Ming, is both true and not true. “She and I talk, we even have a coffee now and then when she’s in New York, although she has to order tea, because it’s more authentic—” He frowns at James. “Why? You’ve got something to tell me?”
Has Ming forgotten that he’s the one who’s called this meeting? Has he forgotten the phone call at the restaurant? But since Ming’s older, James obeys. He leans forward, ready to speak, prepared to pour out all the events of the day before: Dagou at his laptop, adding names and addresses to his list of invitations to the Christmas party; the confrontation between Katherine and Brenda Wozicek; Alf’s second disappearance; Dagou’s broadcast.
But he finds himself unable to speak to Ming about Katherine or Brenda, or Alf. Or, for that matter, the phone call.
“Ba seems upset with Dagou,” he says instead.
“That’s because Dagou was his favorite. Their favorite. Still is.”
It seems perverse, given how different his parents are, to imagine that any of their sons could be the favorite of them both. Yet, as usual, Ming speaks with authority, as if relating an established piece of history. Ming can remember. Six years older than James, he has had firsthand experience of things James will only hear about. James has the crushing sense that he was born too late to understand the real story of the Chaos—that the great passions, the bedrock promises and betrayals that formed the basis of whatever lies among the members of his family, have long since taken place. Does their father disdain Dagou because he once had such high hopes for him? Surely their mother doesn’t feel that way.
Ming says, “Whatever else you can say about her, Ma is just as traditional as Dad. Dagou’s their oldest son. He was supposed to be the crowning achievement of their lives in the U.S.” 89
He takes a bite and chews calmly, observing James, assessing his reaction. James stares at the table.
“Think back thirty-five years,” Ming says. “They’ve moved to this lousy town, they hate their lives, they hate the villagers, they hate the weather, they hate each other—but their oldest son? He’s going to be a winner. You can tell by the way Ma talks about how Dagou was as a baby. The way her voice will sweeten. The way she says he was ‘such a precious baby.’ Her ‘baobei.’ So bright. So large. So talented. Of course he would grow up and prove their lives were worth something. And Dagou is large. And smart. But he’s turned out to be such a disappointment.”
As usual, James cannot read Ming’s eyes, flinty, fathomless, deliberately still. Ming seems even more detached than usual. Or has the scene with Katherine made James forget the exceptional nature of his middle brother’s superpower: his impenetrability?
James picks up his fork, testing its weight. He spreads the dark green napkin on his lap. He slides his hand into the pouch of his hoodie, touches the piece of candy from the temple and a tiny slip of paper he’s certain is an old fortune cookie fortune. Lamely he says, “He’s really excited about the Christmas party. Maybe he’s satisfied with how things are now. Who says he has to—”
“Is he satisfied? With the way he is now?”
The server arrives, carrying James’s plate of eggs. “Can I get you anything else?” she asks perfunctorily.
Ming asks for another cup of coffee. When the server leaves, he murmurs, “I don’t know, can you?”
James forks a bite of egg and crisp potatoes. It’s delicious. He tries again. “Maybe he’s working on something—not the party, but another, bigger project—and he’ll show us someday, and he’ll surprise us. Or he could be thinking of applying to culinary school—”
“Don’t you understand, James, he’s never going to change? It’s too late for him. Too late.”
Dagou’s words come back to James—It’s as if none of us can bear to be in our present lives—and James feels a sudden constriction in the area of his 90heart and lungs. Is it really true, he wonders, that there might be, in any human life, a certain window of time that matters more than any other? That he could be passing through it now as he sits holding a forkful of eggs, glimpsing it around him, as through the window of a train, and then leaving it behind, irretrievable, disappeared?
“I don’t believe it,” he says aloud. “It’s impossible that a person could get to be thirty-three and have already lost his hope for the future.”
“Almost thirty-four,” Ming says. “Youth is over at thirty-four. By then you’ve lost the gleam and possibility of youth, and most Americans couldn’t give a shit about you.
“There are only certain times in life when emergence is possible. The life strategy for children of immigrants, starting with nothing, is to use that time to build social, educational, and financial capital on which to ride out the rest of their lives. Dagou has blown it. He’s now interested in salvaging his middle age by becoming a member of the petite bourgeoisie. But he doesn’t have the capital to be a member of the petite bourgeoisie.”
James sets down his fork. He feels, to his confusion, the pressure of tears against his lids, but Ming is checking his phone and doesn’t notice. “It’s no surprise,” Ming says, putting down the phone. “Of course he would decide to settle down, to make ‘a commitment to Haven.’ He has most of what he needs here: a place to live, a job. People to love and hate.”
“A job? But the restaurant isn’t really his career. It’s just where he’s working now, until—” James’s words catch in his throat.
“Don’t be a snob, James,” Ming says mildly. “Of course it’s his career.”
“What I mean”—James casts about—“is, Dagou must still have other plans.”
“If you’re as close to him as you think you are,” says Ming, “you’d have noticed a while ago that he really doesn’t have other plans. Oh, at first he used to say he was practicing to audition for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra or whatever, and then for a while he was talking about moving back to New York, or to somewhere warmer, like Austin, and opening 91up a record store. But now, after six years, I think he’s gotten used to the idea of being a villager, working at the restaurant. Dagou’s given up. He’s even found some kind of pride and honor, some dignity in giving up: he’s telling himself he’s helping Mom and Dad, he’s their only truly filial son. He thinks the time he’s putting into the restaurant is a kind of payment for the sacrifice Dad thinks Dad’s made, something Dad thinks Dad deserves. But of course he can’t settle for having the most filial piety: he wants Dad to recognize him as a partner in the business. What Dagou doesn’t understand is that, even if he settles here, Dad is never going to let him get his hands on the restaurant or on the pile of cash he’s no doubt hoarding. At least, not while he’s alive.”
James asks a question he has never thought about before. “Does Ba have a will?”
“He’s too confident to make a will.” Ming grins. “According to state law, everything will go to Ma when he’s dead. Anyway, Ba would never give anything to Dagou.”
“But Ba needs Dagou.” As he speaks, James knows this is true. “And Dagou’s been putting everything into the restaurant for six years.”
“That was a self-destructive decision on his part. And he’s nuts if he thought Gu Ling Zhu Chi was ever going to side with him. I told you, these spiritual types side with the cash. I get a New Year card from the abbess, every year since I started working in New York.”
“How’s everything tasting?” At the sound of the server’s voice, they both start.
“I asked for a cup of coffee,” Ming says.
When she’s gone, they put their heads together again.
“He should have negotiated a deal with Dad in writing,” Ming says. “It’s his fault if he didn’t.”
“But it’s in Ba’s interest to keep Dagou in the business,” James says. “How can Ba keep up his share of the cooking when he gets old? It’ll have to be Dagou.”
“He’s not old yet. Just sixty-nine. Says he’s in his prime. No major health problems, and still full of beans.” 92
James struggles against his brother’s relentlessness. “Then Dagou should get out of town. Dagou must escape!”
“If you haven’t noticed,” Ming says, “Dagou’s not going anywhere.”
For several long minutes, James works on his breakfast. Ming isn’t eating anymore.
“Three brothers,” Ming says. “All three intelligent, promising, and strong, but born into unspoken disadvantages. One: born to immigrant parents, newly arrived in a new country, with nothing but their foreign names; two: born Asians in a community of white Americans; three: born with strong Asian features, genetic markers of their nothingness, slant-eyed, yellow-skinned, gook-faced—”
“Ming,” James says. He speaks as gently as possible, because of the bitterness in his brother’s voice; and below the bitterness, the self-hatred and the torment.
“Let me finish. Four: born, moreover, to a singular man who is despised by the community. The other Chinese immigrants hate him because he’s depraved, unstable, a crook. The other business owners, mostly whites, hate him because they see him as a squalid laborer, an illiterate, a chink. And his white neighbors hate him because they think he’s a usurper, greedy, and a chink. They would consider him a criminal, too, if they paid him the slightest bit of attention, but they’ve already dismissed him as a buffoon.
“And yet, despite being born to this man, the three sons grow up with looks, intelligence, and charisma—all this because their father, despite being a bullying and unscrupulous man, possesses a mysterious and undeniable force of character.
“He’s a heathen. His long-suffering wife is a churchgoer—for years, she’s been desperately faithful, a believer of the miracles of the Gospels—but he believes in nothing but the urgency of his will, the superiority of his seed. Why be concerned about the afterlife when you have three 93sons? All physically intact, intelligent, ready to carry on your legacy, your blood, your name? Why believe in eternal life if you’re never going to die?
“Because he does not believe in death. Death for others, yes. But for himself? It’s not happening to him.” Ming glances up at James. “What?”
“Yes!” James exclaims, unable to take his eyes away from his brother. He envisions Ming presenting in a corporate boardroom, emanating all the strength, the gleam, of their father. He recalls Leo’s reassuring voice, I’m not going to die.
Ming goes on.
“The first son is raised to be the savior of the family: the bringer of justice, the righteous achiever who will justify each year of labor and sacrifice, the primary motive for their living in this isolated town, the sanctifier of their miserable marriage, the human answer to the questions waking them up in the night: Why am I here? Why am I required to speak a language that can express only a shadow of my intelligence? Why, asks the father, do I squander my natural gifts by feeding people who don’t appreciate the food? Or, in the case of the mother, why do I stay with this bully, why do I continue to have sex with this abominable man?
“And yet, despite this favoritism, perhaps because of it, the first son fails to thrive. He is a failure. In American terms, he has ‘character flaws.’ He ‘lacks initiative.’ He can’t ‘pull himself up by his bootstraps.’ In truth, it’s his parents who ruined him. He’s spoiled, raised by them as an emperor in a society to which he’s invisible. He hasn’t been brought up to know how to be invisible, he expects everyone to see him and adore him. And so when he comes of age, and is catapulted into American society, he falls back to earth, crawls home to live, not a king now that his inadequacies have been exposed, but a servant. Instead of a savior he becomes nothing more than a dog to kick around.”
Ming takes a deep breath.
“But this isn’t the story of the father or even of the first son, that dissolute failure, but of the second son. Perhaps because they are already disappointed, the parents overlook the qualities of the second son, who was born possessing intelligence, and above all, reason. This advantage, 94a brain, has been given to no one else in his family. The rest of the family is all spleen and heart and guts—but no brain.
“This second son has never been the favorite. He doesn’t own a single article of clothing that wasn’t once worn by his older brother. He isn’t given a single new toy. He’s left alone.
“He has a rich fantasy life, this second son. Having no advantages at school or at home, he develops his ability to dream: in classes, where he excels; between classes, when he is bullied in the halls; and after classes, on the bus. Especially on the bus, where no one will sit next to him, where he’s called names, and boys throw spitballs and worse at him, and girls giggle and hold their noses”—Ming mimics the gesture—“and enjoy watching this happen—on the bus, the second son envisions another self, impervious to all of this. Oh, he knows he’s alone and surrounded by jeering children. But in his imagination, he’s not being bullied. He’s watching. He can’t feel strangers’ fingers twist the corners of his eyes, mocking him. He’s invulnerable.
“In his mind, he stays on the bus as it goes past his house, past his neighborhood. The bus continues toward the edge of town, where the houses are larger and the cars sleeker. The second son imagines that the people he calls Ma and Ba are not his real parents. How could they be? Because in his heart of hearts he believes his real parents are white. They could be teachers, dentists, even mill workers. But they have craggy features, pink skin, and light eyes. They eat food as bland as their hair and skin color, and they gave birth to him, making him generic—this alone he desires, and wishes so much he believes it—possessing true potential, possessing the ability to truly become anyone and anything!
“Because America is not a democracy, it’s not a place of opportunity, he knows, if you can’t choose to be white. And because the second son despises these people he calls Ma and Ba, he doesn’t obey or honor them; he breaks a fundamental tenet of Confucianism and one of the commandments as well—and oh, he’s not so dumb, James, he knows this means he despises himself. Self-hatred is his meat and drink, self-hatred is the fuel of his emotional life, his life in the world, his soon-to-be adult life! 95
“And yet he thrives, James. He becomes an achiever. You may be wondering how he manages to thrive while burdened by so much self-hatred. How can he succeed, how can he make it, if he fundamentally doesn’t think he should exist?
“It’s because he manages to see above the wall of this disadvantage. Because self-hatred is as galvanizing as ambition. He develops the ability to see above his deprivation and to realize that, in reality, he’s lucky. Because he isn’t cherished, he’s allowed to aim beyond his parents’ petty goals. He can leave all of them behind.
“He earns a scholarship to an elite university on the East Coast, where, because of assumptions about his name, some believe he’s the descendant, many times removed, of a foundational historical figure in his father’s native country. Because of this misunderstanding, a lie of omission—for it can’t be for any other reason, although they say it’s for his wit and his sangfroid—he gets chosen to be a member of a finals club in his senior year. There he plays squash in their secret squash court and wears their not-so-secret tie. He eats the food cooked by their chef, a Chinese chef, “Mr. Louie,” a man actually from Vietnam who has trained as a pastry chef in France, and he adopts his club mates’ condescending gratitude for Mr. Louie’s labor. While eating the meals of Mr. Louie’s, he makes a number of friends whose connections enable him to find a job in ‘the City,’ where he goes with no illusions about owning it or being it. He knows ‘the City’ seduces people, dazzles them, and burns them up, but he knows not to believe and not to be betrayed. Every week he puts a sum of money away where nothing can touch it.
“The second son pays very careful attention to appearances. Because he knows that in our outer lives lie success. Because the balance sheet is a fingerprint of fortune’s favor. Because only in the numerable, the countable, can you find certainty, and only in certainty can you find truth.”
“That’s not true at all,” James hears his own voice butt in stubbornly. “Our inner selves exist. They’re unique, and they’re meaningful and mysterious, even if they are secret sometimes even from ourselves.”
Ming nods. “You’re thinking the second son is mistaken,” he says. 96“You may believe he has a special malady, a peculiar and uniquely individual malady of the soul. Certainly he thinks it’s possible he doesn’t have a soul. Although he doesn’t think it makes sense to believe in such a thing. He’s living in the twenty-first century.”
“He has a soul,” says James firmly.
“It’s possible.” Ming frowns. “And yet, who can be sure? He suspects—not believing, only suspecting—that that which feeds something like the soul—the vestigial soul—is missing, and perhaps as a result of this, he is inconsolable. Life, any kind of life, any small portion of any day in life, is unbearable for him. The little things of life others enjoy—choosing a new pair of sneakers, eating fancy donuts, going to see the opening of a superhero movie—are so baldly insignificant he can’t find pleasure in them. The more annoying details of living—getting stuck in traffic, making conversation with some stranger on the plane—are intolerable. Ordinary life or extraordinary life, neither holds meaning; he’s tried them both.
“Yes, there’s still something missing. He isn’t certain of this, because he knows that he’s dealing with the invisible realm, but he believes something is missing, and it can’t be found through ordinary means. He’s tried sex. He’s tried relationships. He steels himself against the rejection of his Asian features, makes repeated efforts until he finds white women open to dating him. And he’s come to dread the moment when a woman says to him, ‘We have so much in common.’ Are her parents laborers? Do they spend their days working with their hands, physically carrying and slicing and arranging and transforming food, no less, at the order of others? Do her parents make a hundred meals a day for people who think of them as semi-human, a smiling Asian couple like a pair of garden gnomes?
“Were either of her parents, for as little as a year, a month, ten days, five minutes, ever in such straits—such financial and situational and familial arrears—that they decided to throw it all in, trade in what assets they had, and their identities as citizens in another world, to become aliens in this one?
“Has she grown up keenly observing, scrutinizing the children around her as if she were researching the most intricate sociology report: their clothes, their games, their television shows, their preferred methods of 97cruelty, their figures of speech? Has she sought invisibility among them, hoped they would not notice her, because the least bit of attention could transform into physical cruelty?
“He has had these parents. He has done these things. How else could he have become such a success at finding cover, speaking in code? The fact is, she’s nothing like him. And if she thinks she is like him, then she doesn’t know him at all. And if she doesn’t know him, it follows that her proclamations of love are meaningless. It’s almost with relief that he understands he can be alone again, can be desolate again. He breaks up with her, remembering that, for him, none of this has ever been feasible because his heart, such as it is, is inconsolable!”
Ming raises his hand, signaling the server.
“Ming,” James says again. He has never known what his brother’s relationships were like, and now that Ming is telling him, he can hardly bear to listen.
“I want a cup of a coffee! Did you hear me?” Ming shouts. “A cup of coffee!” When he turns to James, he is wearing their father’s furious, starving stare.
James winces at his brother’s expression. And yet, hasn’t he always known this about Ming? That beneath his superiority and charisma, his hyper-competence, his high achievements, there existed this inconsolable self-hatred?
“He understands,” says Ming, “that through all of this, he’s been seeking solace from a source where it can’t be found.
“He searches for a new answer to his questions. And he discovers it. It’s hiding in plain sight; it’s something he has known since childhood: that all of the stress and discomfort, the dullness and insignificance of his daily life, the only life he has—can all be undone by money. The more money he has, the more his troubles can be undone. Why has it never occurred to him before, despite his immersion in spreadsheets, in other peoples’ monetary deals? Why has it not occurred to him that with a large sum of money, all of the problems in his life can be transformed into tiny, insignificant data points, and he can forever be free of them?” 98
“Really?” Is it possible? “How much money?”
“Fifty million dollars.” Ming peers sharply at James. “Hear me out. Invested at only five percent, that equals an annual income of two-point-five million dollars. Fifty million dollars would mean complete freedom. And I wouldn’t be the only Chinese man who’s put my hopes into my ‘Life Savings.’”
Ming signals to the server. “We should order dessert. Just so they know we’re still paying customers. But James, little brother, if you can find or earn enough money, you never need to squeeze onto a crowded subway car. Never eat at a bad restaurant. Never worry about anything that can be solved by purchase or payment. I’m working on a deal in Phoenix that’ll make my career, I’m aiming for managing director.”
James asks cautiously, “What about dating an Asian woman?”
“You know I never date Asian women.” Ming raises his hand. “Pie! That’s what we need right now.” The server approaches the table, and he raps out, “Two slices of pie. What do you have? Apple? German apple? All right. Listen, James,” he says when the server is gone. “Here’s why I invited you here to talk. Your good deed hasn’t gone unpunished. The dying man you gave CPR to? He was carrying his Life Savings. In his luggage. His relatives somehow know the money has disappeared. Instead, they were given a gift of jia li jiao.”
Their two pieces of pie arrive, warm, each with ice cream. Ming scrapes the ice cream off of his pie and sets it to the side. He fixes his heavy-browed gaze again on James.
“The man in Union Station was apparently carrying some money—not a huge sum of money, but quite a great deal for him. An EMT told his family about the nice boy who tried to help him. She remembers the boy’s name, Chao. What on God’s earth made you tell her your name?”
“I picked up his bag,” James says. “I was going to check inside for his contact information but forgot about it. I’m almost positive I switched it from your rental into the Ford when you dropped me at the restaurant. Do you remember me putting it in the trunk?”
“It was dark,” Ming says. “I was on the phone.” 99
“Where is it? What do I do now?”
“Finders, keepers.”
“I have to give the money back to the family.”
“Then whatever you do, don’t tell Dad. You need to find the bag before he does. Check at home. Check inside the Ford. He took the other car to work today.”
James stares at his plate. “Ming, I’m scared.”
“What’s to be scared of?”
“What if it turns out that, entirely by accident, I stole someone’s life savings?”
“Fair exchange for trying to save his life.”
“What if Ba finds it first and won’t—won’t let me give it back?”
“Well, then, make sure you make Dad give you half.” Ming shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I’m getting out of here. I have a flight tonight. I want to beat the snow.”
James remembers the snatches of Ming’s conversations with O-Lan. “Is that what you and O-Lan were talking about?”
Ming appears startled, then impressed, as if he’s surprised James can eavesdrop. “She warned me a storm was coming,” he said. “She said if I left tonight, I might get stuck in the snow. I told her it was fine, I’d rent a car and drive back to New York if I have to. I don’t want to be stuck here for Christmas.”
“What’re you doing for Christmas?”
“I’m going to take the day off. I just don’t want to do it here.”
“Do you hate it here that much?”
Ming looks directly into James with his implacable black eyes. James averts his gaze. Ming says lightly, “I’ve gotten over it. Dad and Mom, the house.”
“The restaurant?”
“Especially the restaurant. I’ve gotten over the fact that we—you and me and Dagou—were raised to work at a restaurant in a hellhole in the middle of nowhere, that as children we had less than we deserved. I’ve gotten over that we were given no resources and no head start on the 100world. That we were, in fact, starting with a serious disadvantage. That we were bullied—look, I pay the bullies here to make dinner for me now! We have our intelligence, our talents and ambitions. We work hard. And if we come from a place to be ashamed of, I got over it.”
He pokes at the back end of his pie, breaking the crust with his fork. He takes a small bite. “And if I were you, I’d get over it, too,” he says. “There’s hope for you, if you give up on Dagou.” He shakes his fork slightly at James. “Your ice cream is melting all over the place.”
True enough, the ice cream has slid off of the pie. He spoons up a bit, but he’s lost his appetite.
“They’ve made their choices; you’re not responsible. You must live your life.” Ming signals to the server. “Our meeting here is done,” he says, pointing at the clock. “I’ve got the check. I’ve got to catch my plane, so you get going, kid.”
James looks at the clock; his heart skips. It’s after four. He’s supposed to meet Alice in less than an hour. He has to take a shower; he has to change. “Thanks for dinner, Ming. Safe travels. Merry Christmas.”
“Sure.”
James leaves the diner and walks away, down the snowy street.
During his time at college, he’s forgotten he never had to pay for a meal when one of his brothers was around. The habit is engrained in them: the older family member taking care of the younger. It goes all the way up to Leo and his restaurant. James has never thought to break free of it. Walking wearily toward his father’s house, he wonders how this idea of family love—this hierarchy of responsibility and of obedience—has helped to create Big Leo’s kingdom. The elder takes care of the younger, and in return, he is obeyed. The father, above all, obeyed.
In one of James’s earliest memories, he is standing outside, in the backyard—close to this very street—with his mother. The backyard is surrounded by a fence—they have no dog, at that time, but they bought the house and put up this fence with the understanding that someday they would have one. He and his mother stand at the clothesline under the afternoon sun, next to a basket of soap-smelling, cool wet 101laundry. James, please count for me three clothespins. Bending to the bucket of clothespins and counting one, two, four. Winnie, smiling down at him, taking the wooden clothespins from his hand. One, two, three. Ming can say everything he wants, but James knows that he himself was once, and is, specifically, very much loved.
Leo’s Ford waits in the snow-covered driveway.
James stops for a moment by the car, distracted. There’s something Ming told him to do. He can’t remember; it’ll come to him later. He lets himself into the house. Upstairs he showers, puts on a clean shirt, and goes back down to wait for Alice.
In the months since Winnie’s departure, the first floor of the Chaos’ house has taken on a resemblance to a catacomb. The pile of dog bones in the corner of the living room has grown to the size of a gopher mound. Most are long shank bones from the restaurant; here and there, oxtails gnawed to pointed disks poke from the pile like the snouts of giant bats. In the light cast over Leo’s solitary chair, you can see a worn path around the clutter where the carpet has been burnished by the ceaseless energy of Alf. The dog trail runs to Leo’s chair, around his piles of Chinese magazines and videotapes, and up the carpeted stairs.
James and Alice leave Leo’s light on, over his chair. But they’re careful not to turn on any other lights. The house has glass doors and many windows, making its first floor easily spied upon. They don’t want to be seen from the outside.
They enter James’s room. He looks self-consciously at his possessions. A nearby streetlamp casts a silvery glow over his poster of Bruce Lee. There’s a little flock of trophies at least ten years old, from the year when he begged his parents to let him stay after school to play chess and soccer. Just for a year. Even then he sensed that something made him different from the other boys in the after-school program, but he did not understand what it was until the end of the year, when these activities 102were abruptly discontinued and he went back to the restaurant, where he folded napkins and ran errands. It was Ming, considered too smartass and lazy to work, who joined the math team, the track team—“anything to shut his mouth,” said Leo, “Mr. Know-It-All.” It was true Ming had spent a good deal of time telling their parents how they might save money, increase business, and update the place. He had talked endlessly about the newer restaurants near the big-box stores out on the edge of town. His sophomore year, when Ming officially left the restaurant, he became a school celebrity, earning larger and more legitimate trophies for his brainy prowess. James is glad that Alice won’t see Ming’s old room.
“It’s messy,” he says. Alice sits on the bed—does this mean she wants to sleep with me?—and James also sits, immediately, next to her, searching her profile. A glow from the window outlines her nose, her chin, and the curve of her cheek, but the eye is in shadow.
“The way he spoke about your mother at the Spiritual House,” Alice says.
When James doesn’t reply, Alice continues. “My mother thinks that was why your mother got away—I mean, why she wanted to live at the Spiritual House. Because she didn’t want to be around him anymore.”
“Maybe.” She must be right. “Maybe she waited until I left for college. It was that, I think.” How can he make his mind large enough to accommodate both his father and his mother? “But it was more than that,” he says into the dark. “I think he was only a part of what she wanted to give up. There was something in herself.”
“My mom says your mom needed a break.”
“Something like a break,” he says. “Maybe from possession, from possessiveness. She let go of the restaurant, my dad, the house, even Alf.”
“My mom called it generous. Do you remember how your mom used to bring food, whenever you came to visit? After my father left, and before we started the store.”
James remembers helping his mother haul the plastic bags, whenever they went to visit Fang and Alice’s. “My parents fought about how my mom used to be,” he says. “I guess you could call her extravagant. 103There’s this story my dad tells about how when they first came to Haven they were super-broke, but my mom still wanted to buy three kinds of meat for soup.”
“What meats?”
“Pork and chicken, and fish, I think. She used to like to make a chicken soup with a ham bone and seafood. She used to love meat, especially pork.” He pictures the greedy pucker at the corner of his mother’s mouth. Maybe his mother and father are fundamentally alike, and their three sons are bound to be the same. Dagou, Ming, and himself: there is no hope for them.
“Do you think we’ll ever talk about anything except our parents?”
“I don’t know,” James says truthfully. He thinks of what his father always said. “They gave up everything for us.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I know anyone else.” Alice shifts position. “So much of what I know is tied up with my mother. And I wonder if that’s bound to—to freeze some part of me in place.”
James envisions a science project from fifth grade. The teacher brought into school five blue chrysalids of monarch butterflies. Four hatched on schedule, bravely pumping up their wings, and these were let go into the field. But the fifth butterfly got stuck somehow in development, so one of its wings would not stretch taut, but beat feebly back and forth like a sheet of crumpled paper.
“That won’t happen,” he says. “You’ve already changed, grown up a lot, since I left for school. You’re beautiful.” He’s grateful she can’t see him blushing.
“You went to college and left us,” she says.
“I didn’t mean to!”
“It’s okay,” she says, and her warm fingers curl around his. “We won’t always be together.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer his question. “My mom thinks you’ll come home to Haven, to your mother.”
“She thinks I’ll be like Dagou?” 104
“No, she says you’re a nice Chinese boy. She thinks you’ll go to medical school and come back to Haven to be a doctor here. She says that out of all you brothers, you are the child who really loves his parents.”
“That’s harsh on Dagou.”
“Yes. But everyone knows he has a hard time with your parents. My mother says, ‘too much.’”
“Too much food, maybe. Dagou’s planning like crazy for the Christmas party. He says if he pulls off a big bash, it’ll impress Dad.”
There is a tiny tick-tick of a pulse in the muscle at the base of Alice’s thumb.
“Alice,” he says. “Why do you think your mom would like it?” He stops, his mouth dry. “Why would she like you going out with me?”
“There are several reasons,” says Alice, sounding a bit like Fang. “You’re a nice boy, you’re a hard worker, and you’re going to be a doctor. And I think she thinks this would mean she won’t be alone, that I won’t ever leave Haven because you will c—”
“What do you mean, ‘alone’? What about Fang, isn’t he here? And do you want to leave Haven?”
“I never thought about it before, until talking to Ming at the Spiritual House. He says he knows some people in New York who hire artists parttime for dog-walking, housekeeping, babysitting.”
James jiggles his knee. He wants to wrest the conversation back and start it again.
“Ming asked me if I had any interests,” Alice says, “and I told him I was interested in art.”
“Yeah,” James says, now on solid conversational ground. “You’re great at art.”
“Do you want to have intercourse with me?”
James turns to look at her, but she’s staring at the ceiling. He feels watery in all of his joints.
“You should know I’ve never kissed anyone,” she continues, as if she thinks it sensible to lay out the facts. “What about you?” 105
“I made out with Shelley Achetel a lot. A long time ago, junior year. She used to come to the restaurant and we’d go into the office.”
“Then what?”
“Then she graduated and moved to Waukegan. No one knows about it. Are you sure you want to?” He needs to ask her if she wants to make out with him, specifically, or if any boy will do.
“It was my idea.”
“Alice,” James says, “do you even like me that way?”
“I feel safe with you.” She releases his hand and puts her warm fingers on either side of his face.
James leans toward her. For several minutes, he struggles to kiss her, but he can’t relax. What if she doesn’t like to be kissed the way Shelley Achetel taught him? What if she hates it? Is his tongue too big, does his breath reek of eggs and bacon? What if he is ruining her first kiss? She tugs on him lightly and the world goes sideways, and soft. He opens his eyes. They are lying on his comforter in a faint patch of light. Alice’s eyes are closed and she is wearing a look of concentration. James tightens his hold on her. He is seized by a bolt of urgent, desperate desire. It’s over in a moment.
“My fault,” he says.
“What happened?”
“I came in my underwear,” he says sheepishly. “It’s over.”
“We can try it again sometime.”
In the bathroom, James wipes at the stickiness. He goes back to her, relieved they won’t have to try again until the future. He slides an arm around her, and they lie back on the comforter, as naturally as if they always had.
“Alice,” James says. “How did Dagou start running up credit?”
“I think I’m starting to feel desire now.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
“No.”
James waits for a moment or two, then repeats his question about 106Dagou. “I want to know,” he says earnestly, although this is, in many ways, a lie; he doesn’t want to know—can’t bear to know.
Alice often takes a while to answer factual questions. It’s as if she is coming from far away, traveling through elaborate corridors of her mind, to reach the question; then, having reached it and registered it, returning to some interior room of her own, for the answer.
Finally, she says, “When Dagou took over, after your mom left, he started running up the bills. He had a plan to serve better food—fresher food, more authentic. But he couldn’t get more money from your dad. And so he started paying more slowly, running up a tab. My mom let it go at first, mostly because Dagou didn’t want her to tell your dad. But it’s gotten to the point where we can’t afford it.”
“Is she going to tell my father?”
Alice is quiet for moment. Then, “Not yet. No. But she says she can’t give Dagou any more credit.”
“What do you think—” he stops, his chest tight.
“I want to make out again, James. Only this time, could you take off your shoes? It’s dirty to wear your shoes on the bed.”
James obeys. Alice lies back experimentally and lets him lean over her. He feels intense desire again, but this time the desire is less sexual in nature and more a kind hunger. He wants to consume her somehow—her eyes, stubbornly open this time, and her lips, now softer from being kissed, and the bridge of her curved nose, and the coarse strands that grow from the exact center of her hairline. He kisses all of these things. They kiss until they’re both thirsty.
“I’ll get a glass of water,” James says.
“No, stay here.”
It is some time before he becomes aware that the phone is ringing, in bouts, again and again. Someone is calling his father’s landline over and over.
James stumbles out of bed and down the stairs. He grabs the wall phone and stands in the dark kitchen, surrounded by windows, peering out. It is a moment before he notices the tire tracks on the glittering, 107snowy driveway. Someone must have been to the house while he and Alice were upstairs. The Ford is gone.
“Hello?” His tongue feels thick and strange.
“James,” says a woman’s voice. It’s Mary Wa. James’s hair rumples all along the back of his neck. How can she know what he and Alice have been doing?
“James, where have you been? It almost eleven o’clock! We’re texting and calling your cell phone for one hour! Your mom not good. We think it might be stroke. You hurry to hospital.”
It is Dagou who has taken the Ford Taurus. Has parked his truck and plow on the street, switched to the Ford, and driven off. He makes his first stop at the Spiritual House, where the usual quiet has deepened with the night. The temple’s public face is hidden now; even the dogs are asleep. He follows a brown-robed nun down dim corridors to his mother’s little room, where he sits helplessly on her wool blanket while two women pack a bag with clothing and supplies. Forgetting to say thanks, he grabs the bag and hurries back to the Ford. He restarts the engine, trundling, revving, and slipping over the unplowed roads toward the hospital.
Dagou parks in the almost-empty, snowy lot. He grabs the bag from the trunk and hurries through the automatic doors. Flowers—he must bring flowers. But the gift shop is closed. In the lobby, there are dozens of poinsettias clustered at the information desk, on end tables, and all around the Christmas tree. Dagou scoops up a large pot of scarlet blooms. He can’t arrive both late and empty-handed. He makes his way into the hushed and darkened inner units. The night hospital is a netherworld, its general bustle reduced to the whoosh of machines, the beeping and flashing of monitors. It’s the perfect time, everyone knows, for a human soul to slip away from notice, to hover for a moment before vanishing from this world.
He joins the small crowd waiting for news. His father and a few of 108Winnie’s friends stand outside the visitors’ lounge, consulting anxiously with Corey Chen, a boy from Ming’s high school class who has gone through medical school and is now doing a training shift in Haven. Of course, they’re all dying to talk to Corey, a doctor, even though he’s a baby doctor living at his mother’s house for eight weeks. No one notices Dagou, or cares if his own mother might be dying. They’re all busy looking up to Corey, except for Mary Wa, who, always practical, is looking to God. She’s bent over her phone, texting the bad news to everyone and begging them all to pray.
Ken Fan, the diplomat, detaches himself from the group and comes to talk to him. “How are you doing?” He grips Dagou’s arm. “Those flowers are beautiful! You’re a good son.”
“What took you so long?” It’s Leo.
“You know where I was! You texted me to close up the restaurant!” Dagou sputters. No matter how much he’s expecting his father’s accusations, they’re always unforeseen and outrageous. “I did everything you told me to! Then I had to drop the truck off at the house. Then I went to the Spiritual House to pack some clothes for Ma—”
Leo frowns. “You took my Ford?”
“I had to. The truck still had the plow on it.”
Leo’s face becomes impassive. Anyone who knew him would almost think he’d been transported to a poker game. Then, as if turning on a switch, he brings himself to the present. “I came straight here,” he announces. “I got here first, but I stepped out for a smoke. It was only a smoke! I watched from outside. I saw a doctor walking by, like death, all in white. I couldn’t believe he was coming for her. I thought he was coming for someone else! Some other person, a loser. I thought, She’s too strong for them. She wouldn’t do this to us. So instead of going inside, I had another cigarette. I was on my third, maybe, when the nurse came and found me. She had to repeat herself a lot, because all of a sudden I couldn’t hear. I kept thinking, I left her in there to die alone. I left her in that horrible room to die alone.” 109
“Shh. She’s still alive.” Ken Fan points to the door.
“Stop being so literal, you moron. Then when I went in to talk to her, this other nurse came and told me to leave! This ugly, menopausal—”
“How’s she doing?” Dagou asks.
No one answers for a moment. “She’s awake,” Ken murmurs. “We’ve been letting her rest while we talk to Corey. He says your mother had a transient ischemic attack. At the Spiritual House. Mary was with her.”
“Can I see her now?”
“Of course,” Ken Fan says.
Leo Chao repeats, “I was here first.” But everyone knows Winnie wouldn’t want to see him. Ken Fan, his lips set, moves Leo off into the lounge.
Following the darkened, hushed corridor toward his mother’s room, Dagou imagines a future menu for the night nurses. Winnie always said, “A little food never hurts.” These nurses might like the basics: chicken and broccoli, shrimp with pea pods, garlic eggplant, and house special lo mein. (But for his mother he will concoct a special bone soup with a beaten egg white, seaweed for iron, and black wood ears for lowering the blood pressure.) The nurses might take special care of Winnie if he feeds them, chats them up, and flirts them up, because a little flirting never hurts; maybe respectful flirting will make them respond more quickly when she rings her call button in the wee hours. Maybe they’ll turn a blind eye at mealtimes and let her have the special food he brings her. If he cooks and flirts attentively enough, Winnie will get well. She can’t not get well. He urgently needs her candor and her company, the safekeeping of her warnings and instructions. Without her, he’s lurching headlong into peril and uncertainty.
But when he sees his mother, Dagou shudders. He shoves the bag of clothes into the closet, gets on his knees, and tries to fit his big face into her bony shoulder. Hers is not the worst case, according to Corey Chen, 110but her force of life is flickering. He can sense it in her pale color and her fish-eyed expression. He isn’t ready for this. It can’t be possible that the future must come at such expense.
She murmurs something unintelligible. She’s wearing an automated blood pressure cuff that makes mechanical sucking sounds. He leans closer.
“Christmas party—tomorrow,” she mumbles.
“Not without you, Ma.”
“You—you have to do it. You take it over.” She must have forgotten Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s warning.
He takes hold of her cool hand. “I’ll make all of your favorite things,” he promises. Is that a hint of a smile? “I’ll make a red stew, and fish with ginger, everything I can get my hands on. For you.”
She murmurs again, and he leans closer, ready to do anything she wants.
“Your father.”
“Ma—”
“Apologize to him.”
His breath seizes. Specks of color swim before her face. “Let’s not talk about it. Ma, I can’t apologize to him. You have to understand.”
“Zhu Chi shuo le,” Winnie mumbles.
“I can’t. No matter what she says. I can’t take it anymore. I don’t know how you ever did.”
This confession—or more like a plea for permission; no, an accusation—is followed by a long silence. Dagou stares at his mother’s skinny chest, watching it rise and fall slightly under a white cotton blanket. He’s waiting her out. With him, of all her sons, she never hides her grievances.
“You look down on me,” she mutters at last.
“Of course not.” He’s struggling to keep the emotion out of his voice.
“You think I was … blinded by duty.”
Dagou blinks through a sudden spurt of tears. “Yeah, I did. I guess I did. I guess I thought you should have left Dad a long time ago.” 111
Winnie winces slightly. In her wince, he sees something both entirely worn out and also pained. It’s like a shrug, an attempt to disregard the suffering that had driven her out of her own house. His chest heaves. He’s sobbing now despite himself, with rage and shame and sorrow.
“How could you keep forgiving him?” he bawls.
“I didn’t,” Winnie says, louder now. At his display of misery, even now, sick, malfunctioning, she’s back in control. “I didn’t really forgive … I just—tried.”
“Tell me, Ma. Tell me why you did that.”
She’s the last person on earth. Someday, if not now, she’ll leave him for good. She’ll fly away from him and never come back. She’s getting ready, she’s taking flight; but even now she turns to him the way a hawk, once trained and then escaped into the wild, will sometimes turn in the sky and plunge back to the lure. He knows he’s the one who will never break free of her.
“You must love your father,” she says.
Dagou shakes his head violently, trying not to listen.
But she persists. “If you don’t love your father, how can you begin to love the world?”
He struggles to speak above the roar in his ears, above the hiss and push of her blood pressure cuff. “And if I can’t begin to love my father,” he asks, “or the world?”
“You still have to obey him.”
“I can’t. I just can’t! The whole time we were growing up. You worked way too hard, you wrecked your health because he wanted to make money! You used to fight all the time—about him cheating. Don’t tell me that was love.”
But it was, it was. His mother loved his father, even though she had left him. Perhaps, he perceives, it was why she had left him. She’d fled her love. Or, if it wasn’t love she felt for him, she was so fundamentally fused to him that her emotions weren’t a necessary part of it. Something must have happened. Something had finally shaken even this foundational core—and she had fled. 112
“That was a long time ago,” she whispers. “Forget about it now. None of it matters—forget about possession. I don’t believe in it. When I die, I’m leaving everything to the Spiritual House.”
“Of course it matters!” Dagou insists, ignoring the thought that she might die. “It matters to you. You set us an example. I remember everything!”
Winnie shuts her eyes.
“I’ll get James,” Dagou mutters. He’s been calling James all night, but James hasn’t picked up.
He presses his fiery lips against her forehead. He leaves her room and makes his way down the dim corridor of colorless light.
James is nowhere to be found. Corey Chen is now talking to Mary Wa and Fang. Leo is entertaining Ken Fan and the Chins. Leo is cheerful again, because even Winnie’s grave illness can’t long shake his unwavering self-dedication. Dagou can’t bear to confront his father again. Still, he can’t turn away. There’s a smile playing around Leo’s mouth. He’s saying, “No need to worry about her! She’ll find another job. If she needs help, she only has to come to me and ask!”
Who is he talking about? Is it O-Lan? Is it Lulu? Or is it the only other female employee, could it possibly be—surely, it cannot be—?
Leo turns to him, eyes bright with anticipation and a kind of hunger. “How’s your mother?” he asks. “Is she happy now? After dragging us out here in the middle of the night, just to get a little attention?”
Dagou struggles against the light-headedness of sudden fury. “Shut up,” he manages. “You have no right—”
Leo sniggers. “Look at you. Tears in your eyes!”
“You’re the one who put her here!” His voice shakes. “You couldn’t help tracking your shit into her temple! Even there, you had to torment her!’
“Mama’s boy!” Leo sneers, his face grotesque and knowing.
Something shatters in Dagou’s mind. He lunges at his father, fingers reaching for his windpipe. “You deserve to die! I hate you. I’m going to kill you!”
Leo is pushing back. He’s a strong old man, but Dagou has not been 113working out for nothing. Dagou brings his father closer, tightens his grip on Leo’s throat. A woman is shouting, giving orders, but Dagou can’t listen. He feels his father’s pulse: hot, human. Leo’s eyes bulge. Then Dagou is jerked away. Someone has him in a headlock. It is Corey. Panting, he tries to fight off the men and nuns who close in upon him, seizing his head, his arms and shoulders. He is forced to let go.
Here is Dagou Chao, ten minutes later, steering his father’s Ford down the vacant boulevard, away from the hospital, streetlights flashing by. For several blocks, the traffic lights holding green. Catching the edge of yellow, Dagou pulls through an empty intersection, past the Jiffy Lube, the Red Owl, the bright, empty Taco John’s. Only the McDonald’s is open. Dagou tightens his grip on the wheel. At the next light, full red, he screeches to a stop. He makes out, above the engine’s hum, his own ragged gasps of panic. He puts the car into park, lets go of the steering wheel, and hammers his fists upon it, feeling the car bounce softly.
He hears the echo of his own voice: I’m going to kill you! An almost visible miasma slips into the car, an unfurling ribbon of acrid smoke. Darkness presses into him, pushing him against his will toward the dream, that very darkest dream, the source of violence and hope and absolute peace. It’s always there these days, beckoning patiently. In his very worst moments, he has only to open the private chamber of consolation, comfort. He’s descending into the basement of the restaurant. He’s at the bottom of the stairs. His father is there, in the room. Dagou reaches inside.
He stabs blindly at the window switch, gulping in the frigid air that fills the car, clearing away the dream.
Who was Leo talking about, in the hospital? Was he talking about Brenda; is Brenda about to be in some kind of trouble?
At the next red light, Dagou pulls to a stop. The avenue is clear, but 114the cross street is badly plowed, blocked with pale-blue snow. He thinks with longing of this morning, plowing the parking lot. Nothing but fresh snow and work to be done.
Dagou turns around and drives, more slowly, away from the city. This time the McDonald’s is closed. Near the entrance to the highway is a gas station and convenience store. The parking lot is empty but Dagou can see, in the lit store, a single clerk, a boy. Dagou pulls into the lot.
He walks into the empty store, hushed and humming with refrigeration units. The clerk sees him, pales slightly against the wall of cigarettes, tobacco tins, and liquor.
“A bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Dagou mutters. “And give me”—he thinks desperately—“twenty Powerball tickets.”
The clerk is older than he appeared from outside. He has a blackbird’s wing of dark hair, empty flesh around his chin, and tiny old craterous acne scars. He brings down the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and scans it.
“Have to ring them up separately,” he whines. “Jack Daniel’s is twenty-four dollars. Powerball tickets three dollars each.”
Dagou gets out his credit card.
“Have to pay for the Powerball in cash.”
The clerk rings up the Jack Daniel’s. Dagou opens his wallet, adding the bills that tumble out. There are two fives, eight ones. He begins digging change out of his pockets. There are three dollars and ninety cents’ worth of quarters and dimes. He recounts the quarters, hands shaking. His entire body is convulsing so violently that he bites his tongue and tastes the tang of blood.
“You don’t got it,” says the clerk, smirking.
Dagou doesn’t answer.
The clerk leans over the counter. “Do. You. Understand. What—”
“Shut up!” Dagou thunders, and slams his fist on the counter. Coins jump. He counts the nickels in his sweaty palm. There are only six. His hands are still shaking as he totals up the pennies. He cleans out both pockets and takes out his wallet to make sure something hasn’t dropped between the cards, folds. Miraculously, a quarter. Then the entire wad 115of papers shoots out of his hand and spills across the floor. The clerk is reaching under the counter to press a button. Dagou pushes the tickets back at him, grabs the edge of his jacket, scoops up bills, change, receipt into this makeshift pouch, and hurries off.
On his way out of the door, he runs smack into a stocky, older white woman. Change, bills, receipts fly in all directions. Recoiling, he tries to barrel past her, but she stands her ground. “Watch where you’re going!” she says.
“Screw you,” he mutters.
She hisses, “Have some manners, you big—”
“Fuck off!” he shouts, checking her with his left hip. There’s the wheeling sensation of a heavy person losing balance, but he doesn’t care. He takes off running. He reaches the Ford, slams the door, and guns away as fast as he can. As he turns onto the avenue, he catches a glimpse of the woman on the pavement, the clerk emerging from the door. He runs the red light at the intersection, turning left without a pause and then onto the highway, where he takes his place among the other cars, hoping to be invisible. They can’t give chase; they don’t have his license number. He remembers they have his credit card information. He remembers he left the Jack Daniel’s behind.
Who can he talk to? Who is there to tell? Not his mother, who no longer has the strength. And despite her yearning toward detachment, she’s still a Christian in her heart: “Love your father.” Some Christian love, Ma, more like martyrdom! In the end, even you gave up, exhausted, and opted for peace. How can you tell me to keep trying, after what it did to you?
“I can’t do it!” he hollers into the night.
If only he could talk to James. He pulls out his phone and dials. But the call goes immediately to voice mail. He hangs up. Anyway, how can he tell Snaggle? Snaggle looks up to him, Snaggle believes he is a man.
He makes a U-turn at the next intersection and heads back into the older neighborhoods, toward Letter City.
He thinks about the afternoon when Brenda appeared at the restaurant, 116drawn by the help wanted sign or driven in by the rain. Brenda emerging out of a summer storm after more than a decade, her dripping dark curls clinging to her face, her wet lashes and blue-gray eyes gleaming with curiosity and hardness. Ordering only white rice and eating it with a spoon. Not even a fork, a spoon. From the kitchen, he stood noticing her lush body and those alive, oddly resistant eyes. Feeling an old tug of want, deep in his plumbing. The sight of her hurtled him back to senior year of high school. He’d been infatuated with her, but unsuccessful: a skinny Asian orchestra nerd while she was with the captain of the football team.
“You want that girl to eat your Chinese cock?” His father taunted him weeks later, after she was hired as server. “Why so slow? If you don’t make a move, I will!”
They were already fucking. Turns out that was—is—not the real problem. In college, after a well-spent summer at the gym, he found a small rainbow of women willing to try him on. Quietly rebellious girls, raised in comfortable homes, happy to trade their good intentions for a big, exotic music major who knew how to make a very good cup of coffee. For a while, anyway. He’s not afraid of white women, not the way his father thinks.
The problem was, and is, that he can’t afford to keep her. “I want someone to take care of me,” she’s always said—she’s never hidden it from him! “I want someone who can give me the life I always wanted.” She has described, to him, that life. Membership at a country club. Two boys and a girl. A house with a four-car garage in the new development, Southlake, and a second home in Marcos Island. “I’m over sex,” she’s said to him. “I’m over sex for the sake of sex, that is. In two years, I’ll be thirty-five. My goal is to secure a comfortable life through marriage.”
“I understand,” Dagou has said. He can’t buy her a first home. He’s blown most of his stash on the two months’ rent and deposit for the penthouse. Unless Leo comes to reason and ups his salary, he won’t be able to make any more rent.
How has he found himself enraptured, enthralled, by a woman to 117whom he’s only an Asian fuck boy who can cook? It just happened. He let it happen. He loves her! His heart is a rose in bloom. For the last month, he’s found it hard to look into her eyes when they’re together. He’s afraid of what she’ll see. A man tortured by desire. Not a rich man, not even a good man; only a man who is, for her, willing to entirely give over his life.
The windows of her house are dark and rimmed with snow. The car is not in the driveway. She’s out tonight, with a group of friends from high school, home for Christmas. He can see the faint tracks where she pulled out of the driveway and into the street. The city plows haven’t touched her street for days—this misbegotten neighborhood is not a priority.
Dagou pulls over and jumps out of the Ford. He stands on the rickety front porch and knocks. Rings the bell. Knocks again. Paces. His feet grow numb with cold. What now? He frowns at Brenda’s snowy driveway, recalls the shovel in the Ford. With relief, he heads back to the car and pops the trunk, paying no attention to the various objects there, and grabs the shovel. He wedges the backward blade into the trampled snow on the top step and goes to work.
He digs out the steps and the front path, starts on the driveway. It’s a cracked, narrow driveway, and the sharp-edged blade gets stuck on chunks of frozen weeds remaining from the summer. Her house is filled with warm colors, soft cushions, and glowing lamps—she’s even painted inside—but her awful landlord lets the property go to hell. Well, she won’t have to put up with it much longer. For a moment he allows himself to envision the two of them pressed up against each other in the gleaming penthouse, gazing out a wall of windows at Lake Haven. If he can only make the rent!
With his mind eight floors over Lakeside, heaving snow with the force of a train, Dagou huffs with panic and desire. The shovel slams into a crack, jarring his hands. Dagou spins the shovel over frantically and hacks out a section of impacted snow near the corner of the apron.
Seventy years old! If only he would retire, then their problems might be solved. But Dagou knows, more than anyone, that his father is beyond mortal time. 118
Headlights prick his eyes. Her snowy car turns into the shoveled driveway. The lights go off, the door opens, and she steps out.
She looks tired, and not happy, and although she doesn’t seem disgusted by his sweaty presence there in her driveway, her eyes don’t light up when she sees him. There’s a single poinsettia flower pushed into the top buttonhole of her coat. “That’s nice,” he says. “Where did you get it?”
“I went to fill the tank,” she says. “I bumped into Ken Fan. He told me about your mother. I’m sorry, Dagou.”
Dagou doesn’t want to talk about his mother now. “I went to see her. I can’t think about it. Listen, my Dad said something tonight, at the hospital, and it made me wonder if he was talking about you. About you and the restaurant. Are you thinking of quitting your job? I was going to just text you but I thought I would come by and—”
“Shovel out my driveway?” Is it a flicker of affection on her face? Or concern, or merely distraction? “No,” she says finally. “I’m not leaving my job. Not yet. But, Dagou, I’m so tired of being broke. Thank God somebody bought the drinks tonight. For all of us.”
Rounds of mixed drinks for half a dozen people, hundreds of dollars. It must be an old flame, home for Christmas. “I’m going to help!” he says. “Give me more time.”
Her smile is a little sad. She does not invite him into the house.
Driving away, Dagou agonizes. Hands clutching the wheel, squinting through the tunneling drifts. Tires churning in the snow; around the car, galaxies whirling. Someone was there tonight. Someone was trying to impress her in front of all her friends. Undoubtedly a man, a competitor. He must hold on to her. He must show her who he is, what he can do. And there’s a chance for him, tomorrow, at the Christmas party. All he needs is cash.
Dagou parks the car behind the darkened restaurant. He gallops up the snow-filled stairs, slipping, flailing, almost falling. His key pierces the keyhole. He throws open the door and races through the kitchen, leaving big wet tracks on the floor. He darts into the bedroom, kneels at the foot of the king-sized bed, and digs cold hands under the corner of the 119faux-fur. There it is, the remainder of his secret stash. It’s a stone in his gut, a secret kept even from James. No one knows, except for Katherine.
He’ll spend it all tomorrow on the Christmas party. He’ll show her at that crucial and momentous event. He’ll show the whole community—Brenda, his father—what a man he can be. Everyone will see that he, Dagou Chao, is the true source of generosity, of power, of magnificence. Kneeling over the remainder of his stash, Dagou understands he must plan the Greatest Christmas Party anyone has ever seen.