THE HOUSE was way tinier than Grace had been expecting. Of course, she’d seen bad neighborhoods before, but they were always places that you passed through on your way to somewhere else. First of all, the walls on the outside were metal. And not a cool metal, like titanium, which would have made it look maybe like a giant MacBook. No, instead they were something flimsy and dinged, probably tin or even aluminum. A foil-wrap house. Second, there was a bouncy castle out front. Like the kind people rented for little kids’ birthday parties. Except that Ama hadn’t said anything about it being one of her grandkids’ birthdays, and the half-deflated castle was covered with a layer of grime, as if it had been sitting on that same patch of dying grass for months, years maybe.
To be fair, this didn’t even really seem like a bad neighborhood. Just weird. If you thought about it, this combination of spaceship house and dusty lawn and bouncy castle wouldn’t ever exist anywhere else but out here in the desert. Or maybe Vegas—though Grace had never been there before—it’s just that whenever ugly things happened people usually said that it looked like Vegas or Florida.
What if the money really was all gone and they ended up having to live somewhere like this? God, suicide really would be better than that.
Ama had gone quiet. Grace tapped her on the shoulder.
“I haven’t seen Kathy in a long time.”
Ama didn’t turn. Just said, “Mmm,” in response.
“Maybe almost ten years, right?”
“Kathy hen meng.”
“Busy? With the little ones?”
Because Kathy didn’t just have kids, she had grandkids, too. Already. That was like her dad having grandkids. Which meant that it was like her having kids.
Wait, that didn’t quite make sense—Ama had been her father’s wet nurse, she was older than Grace’s father. But really not by much. Ama had only been eighteen when she came to take care of him, cast out by her landowning-class family because she was a wayward daughter who had a baby—stillborn, discarded—out of wedlock. She’d been taken in by the neighboring Wang household because they’d had the misfortune of birthing a child who had thrived in the aftermath of a world war. Almost forty years after that, Ama had arrived in America with a teenage Kathy, whose father was an American GI stationed in Taiwan, though no one ever spoke of it.
Ama’s daughter followed in that unfortunate military tradition by finding herself married to a Latino man who discarded a promising beginning as a line cook at Michael’s in Santa Monica to become an army chef. Kathy was pretty much a single mother even though she was technically still with her husband; in reality, he spent all his time with hot broilers in Bahrain and giant saucepans in Mosul and none of it at their house near the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms.
And then Kathy’s own daughter had gone and wasted her perfectly lovely face—a face that, Ama always said with a sigh of relief, was still Chinese despite her diluted blood—by actually joining the military herself. When she went and married a fellow soldier whose family happened to be from the Dominican Republic and popped out two coffee-colored babies in quick succession, Ama didn’t even try to contain her dismay.
It was a misfortune that had been amply conveyed to the Wangs.
Before Ama had even managed to shuffle her stockinged legs towards the yard, the house door flew open and two adorable little kids came running out. Grace didn’t even like kids—they were always so sticky—but these kids were like baby cocker spaniels or something, all light-up sneakers and squeals with their hair in two miniature Afros. They ran towards the bouncy castle and clambered in, but it sagged so much under their weight that Grace was pretty sure they’d bounce all the way down through the dirt.
“Ama! Are these them? Look at them!” Grace hated girls who squealed over teacup Chihuahuas, but she finally understood the impulse. Now the two little ones were tumbled together in the middle of the castle, the half-inflated floor sandwiching them as they giggled and waved coquettishly at the strangers. Grace waved back and grinned at them. Maybe the next test would be babysitting these kids or saving them from kidnappers or something—that wouldn’t be too bad.
Before Grace could walk over to the little duo, the door opened wider and Kathy came out. Dressed in an oversize gray fleece zip-up and anonymous sneakers, she looked almost Ama’s age. For just a minute, everyone was quiet, and then Grace’s dad bounded forward and threw an arm around Kathy’s shoulders.
“Ah, it is good to see you again! So many years!”
Why was he always bouncing? If Grace didn’t know her dad, she’d probably think he was gay. Kathy didn’t seem that into him either. Instead of returning the hug, she shrank back, pulling her reading glasses off her head and putting them on.
“Alright,” she said. “Okay.” Turning towards the castle, she shouted, “Nico! Naia!” and a second later the kids were at her side. “Say hi to uncle and auntie,” she instructed them, as Barbra leaned over and patted each of their cheeks for a moment.
“So cute,” said Barbra, and then, cocking her head towards Charles, she said, “Hwen de hao.” That was another one that Grace knew.