“Are you going to the police?”
Her question works on him like a jinx, his thoughts suspended.
“Why didn’t you go to them the moment you flew in?” she asks, her voice still mild. “Why didn’t you go straight from the airport? Surely if you were going to turn me in, you would have done it already.”
“It was you who killed him! You!”
She shrugs. “Do you believe yourself?”
Ming can feel his jaw drop slightly open, a parody of stupidity, and yet he can’t close his mouth.
“I,” she says, “am a desperate person, an illegal immigrant, an alien whose smallest noticeable action could get her deported. I have only my job and my employer. Why would I do something to put myself at so much risk?”
“You’ve got nothing to lose.”
Ming eyes the food on the table. The red radishes with the faint cracks where she has whacked them with the back of the cleaver. The thin-sliced lotus roots, their crisp white lace of bones.
“You’re hungry.”
“No.”
“Eat with me.” She pours a second cup of tea. “You’re afraid of my food?” Mocking him. She brings two bowls and two pairs of chopsticks to the table. She pulls the stool from the kitchen and sets it opposite the single chair. “Would I poison you?”
Flushing, Ming sits down. He picks up the chopsticks and raises a radish slowly to his mouth.
“Try it. Hong luobo have enough vitamins to keep the blood moving, even in your veins.”
The blue circlet of flame dances on the stove. She moves the wok over the flame, adds the oil, and waits, tilting the wok and watching for telltale rivulets of heat. She adds a few sliced mushrooms, and they sizzle in the hot oil.
“How did you feel when you walked into the restaurant? Finding him, finally.” The cracked radish, peppery and crisp, holds enough marinade for surprising flavor. Ming takes another. “Did you—” He stretches his mind toward cruelty. “Then did you want his approval, his love?”
O-Lan shrugs. In this gesture, for a moment she seems not as old—not past her childbearing years. She’s healthy, and the nibs of flesh under her arms are, after all, nibs of extra flesh.
Ming needs to say this: “You’re not required to live out the wishes of your parents.”
O-Lan turns to him. Her lips twist. “You grew up in a country where some people have the privilege to believe this is true. How would you know about my relationship to them? To anyone?”
“I have my brothers,” says Ming, surprising himself.
“You’re ashamed of your brother.”
Ming can’t stop eating the radishes. There’s a sharp sizzle, but controlled, as she adds the other vegetables to the oil. “You may hate my father,” he says, continuing his thoughts, “but you have no reason—no reason!—to frame my brother.”
Again, she shrugs. “You think not? He was legitimate, the official oldest child in the family, and I was not. He is known, he is acknowledged, and I am not. He’s Big Chao’s child, and I am not. But I’m many of those things: born legitimate, oldest, and Big Chao’s child.”
She lets the vegetables sizzle untended for a moment, then faces him. “You yourself think William is an embarrassment. You’d be very happy if he weren’t your brother.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
She lifts the lid from a small pot and the smell of cooked rice fills the room. Ming picks out a lotus root; it crunches softly. Suddenly he is ravenous.
“You’re still trying to believe I killed Leo Chao?” O-Lan asks. “You’ll feel better when you confess. In the deepest, most knowing well in your heart, Ming Chao, you believe someone else is the killer of Leo Chao.”
“No, it was you—” He’s salivating, choking on his words so the statement is less commanding than he had intended. He clears his throat. “You, Chao O-Lan. Chao O-Lan is the killer of Leo Chao.”
“No, it’s you, Chao Ming.”
She brings the wok to the table and he looks eagerly into it. There is celery and sliced, pressed tofu with mushrooms. Wordlessly, she ladles him a full bowl of rice. He bends toward his bowl, scooping the food into his mouth with chopsticks.
She speaks calmly in English, with little inflection. “I may be a monster to you, but I don’t eat like a monster, and you do. You’re barely human, your hands are barely warm, you don’t hold heat.”
She puts rice into her own bowl. “I’ve seen you checking your pulse, your steps, your runs, your calorie counts. You don’t cook your own food, you eat raw vegetables that have been washed by strangers, your condiments come in plastic, you eat meat that has been sitting for days in the refrigerator, stuffed between pieces of bread, and you eat alone.
“You think you can get rid of them? Extract your family from your body if you give up Chinese food? Extract your own blood from your body?”
Ming can’t stop eating to speak, so he only points at her with the chopsticks.
“True,” she says, “I also eat alone. But I have no one to eat with, and you do. You could be with that Katherine. You only have to let her know and she would recognize her feelings. But you push her away. Your brothers, also.”
Ming reaches for more rice.
She puts her chopsticks down. “Why do you push her away? It’s because of what she is. You don’t want to be with a woman who looks the way you do. What kind of human being are you?” She observes him calmly. “How many times were you warned what was going to happen, and you did nothing?”
Ming’s throat closes again. “I was in the Hartford Airport at the time!”
“You were.”
“You persuaded me to go. You made me go!”
“No, you chose to fly east. You went even though you knew there was a giant storm.”
Steam rises from his rice; Ming wipes his face.
She looks puzzled for a moment. “When you decided to go to New York, in full awareness of the weather, you were acting in full knowledge of what would happen. You wanted it to happen.”
Ming shovels in food. He’s breathing loudly while he eats, like a laborer, a coolie. It’s delicious: the white rice, the savory tofu, the tender, slippery mushrooms, the celery, so crisp and yet so easy to swallow, because she has stripped away by hand the tough fibers from the outer layer of green. He has a sudden vision of his mother cutting through a stalk of celery to this layer of green, then, with a flick of her wrist, pulling the long sinew of fiber from the stalk. She removed the fibers only for meals she made at home for them, Monday nights. This was when he was a small boy, before they had risen up against her food and started eating TV dinners. Ming remembers how much he used to despise everything about the pressed tofu: its flavor of anise, its brown skin, its origin in the humble bean.
At last, all of the food is gone. There is only a single radish left, and a fragment of bone.