“You mean if you were in this situation?”
“No, no, I already did the same thing. I came to America when Saina’s mother died. I heard about it, and I knew I wanted to marry Charles, so I came. If I don’t come, I don’t have my life.”
He looked lost. “I don’t know, this really isn’t the same thing, is it? She was . . . she was so done with me.”
Barbra glanced down at her watch. If this boy couldn’t recognize that you had to grab at life, there was nothing she could do about it. “Okay.” She shrugged. “Then you stay here. But I think at least you should try.”
“I don’t know if I can intrude right now. It feels like a family thing.”
She looked him straight in the eye. He wasn’t as alluring as Grayson—he didn’t have that elusive thing that would make a girl disregard any failing—but he seemed like the kind of man that Charles would want his daughter to be with, someone kind and joyous, even if he was black. “A family thing. And you want to be like her family.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“I have a taxi outside.”
“I might see you there.”
He wasn’t going to come, she knew. The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.
四十八
Gaofu, China
“GYM. NAS. TIC,” said Bing Bing, returning to the car. “Like O. Lym. Pic.”
They had been stopped on the wrong side of a blockade for ten minutes before she decided to get out and investigate. “There. Is. A show. Happening. Right. Now. It will take. A long. Time. For us. To go past. It.” She passed back a crinkly plastic bag of candied winter melon, and they each took a stick of the pale-green sweet even though they were headed to a dinner of some sort.
A few years out of college, a friend of Saina’s got a job teaching English in a small prefecture in Northern Japan. Her arrival had triggered an avalanche of invitations to official dinners and gatherings—she’d even been invited to a wedding. Other friends had told her about visits to their homelands and how they were always crowded with command performances, the immigrants expected to show up whenever they were summoned. And now here they were, going to some sort of a family dinner with family they had never met.
Andrew leaned his head against the window. He had always been aware, vaguely, that there were relatives in China, though he didn’t know their ages and couldn’t keep track of their names. If he’d known that he was going to meet them, he would have packed a little more carefully.
After the imposter and his son had left, the three of them spent the rest of the afternoon napping in turns on the vacated bed while nurses came in and out with pills and charts. Whoever woke up was immediately dealt into a never-ending game of hearts that their father, despite his grogginess, was winning.
Even though he had gotten into a fight, it wasn’t a punch that put their father in the hospital. He insisted that the other man had barely managed to touch him. He swore that he’d been standing when the imposter’s coworker had called the ambulance, but when the ambulance left, he’d somehow found himself on it, regaining consciousness on a gurney next to his sworn enemy. It turned out that he’d had a stroke, and when Saina spoke to the doctors, they said that he’d been having small strokes for months and that he needed to rest before he could be sent back to America.