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 takeout 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 a 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 this 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 and 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.”