The force of their father’s sorrow and anger flattened the Wang children. They listened to him rage, sinking farther into his pillows with every bitter word.
“It make you so angry,” said Charles. “Angry to death.”
A shard of fear pricked at Grace. “Not to death, Dad. But really, really angry.”
And then the imposter, the man who ruined their father’s hopes and dreams, the gambler and pretender, appeared on their side of the wall in a wheelchair, his foot propped up in a cast and his son, the crazy guy in the red hat, pushing him. The imposter was somewhere around their father’s age, with a remarkably similar pair of aviator-style reading glasses. He looked straight at Grace and smiled.
“Xiao meimei hao piao liang.”
Grace looked at her sister, and then at her brother and father. They were all frozen by the strangeness of the situation. What was wrong with that man? He’d stolen all of their land and then ridden out here on a wheelchair to say that she was pretty? Sometimes Grace hated being a girl.
Her father closed his eyes.
Andrew looked at the two unfamiliar men who had somehow become so entrenched in their family story. “Uh, shushu, ni ying gai zou le.” But the man didn’t leave. He continued to look at Grace, and then at Saina, and then finally turned his milky eyes towards Andrew. “Wang Da Qian shen le san ge hao hai zi. Ta yi jiao ni men jiou lai.”
Was this man jealous that he only had one child, and their father had three?
“Hao le ba,” said the weird man, who Andrew realized was actually not much older than Saina. “O-kay, o-kay,” he added, looking at them. A nurse with a clipboard came into the room and handed the man in the wheelchair a sheaf of papers and a pen. Without a glance, he passed the forms to his son and continued to stare at the three of them.
They waited there, all six of them, until the last of the forms was filled out.
“Should we say goodbye?” Grace whispered to Andrew.
“No!” said their father, opening his eyes. “He does not deserve you to talk to him.”
Andrew was torn. The man was in a wheelchair, but he was like Professor X or something, just sitting there like a boss when he was the one who had messed everything up to begin with. Andrew felt like he should finish what his father had started and break the man’s other leg, but instead he allowed them to wheel out of the room, that other father and that other son.
四十七
Helios, NY
BARBRA COULD HEAR their voices from the vestibule of the restaurant where a lonely pair of green rain boots sat under a battered painting of sailboats.
“There’s nothing wrong with calling.”
“But what do I say? I don’t really have another explanation.” It was Leo.
“I don’t think you need to explain. I just think you need to tell her that you’re invested in the relationship.”
“Gay men are very smart about girls,” said Barbra, peeking her head into the main dining room. “Leo, you should listen to your friend.”
“Oh, I’m not gay,” said Graham.
“He’s just a hipster,” said Leo.
What was a hipster? The term was vaguely familiar to her, buried somewhere between beatnik and hippie, but it wasn’t important now. She pulled out the keys to Saina’s house and placed them on the bar. “Here, Graham. Saina said I should leave these for you, and you would go water her garden.”
“Oh yeah, okay. So are you off to China now? Did your passport get renewed?”
“Yes, I’m going to pick it up, and then I will fly to China.” What was it that Saina had said? How strange it was that she’d ended up here, in a farmhouse in upstate New York? “You know, I never thought I would go there.”
“Aren’t you from there?”
“No, no, I grew up in Taiwan. Very different.” She studied the restaurateur, who didn’t seem at all offended that she’d thought he was a homosexual. “Why didn’t you tell Saina?”
He blushed suddenly and raised his hands. “You gotta choose some loyalties in life, I guess.” That was true, though she’d never thought that it was the sort of truth this ready-to-laugh young man would know. “Anyways,” he said, “I think intent matters with lies, and I knew Leo wasn’t trying to screw her over, he was just trying to keep it real.”
“A lie does not sound very real.”
“Yeah, okay, well, he was just trying not to get dumped.”
Barbra had seen young people in L.A. with tattoos like this, their whole body covered like Saina’s notebooks in high school, but she’d never had the chance to speak to one of them before. She tapped his forearm. “Is this pig your friend?”
Graham looked down and laughed. “They’re all my friends,” he said, pointing at the row of dancing vegetables on his other arm and the knife that loomed above them.
Saina’s boyfriend had built a tiny bridge out of the discarded straw wrappers on the table, twisting them together until they had enough integrity to stand. “Leo,” said Barbra, “I know what you should do.”
He looked up. “What?”
“Go with me.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“To China?”
“Why not? I’ve done the same thing.”