“Baba! You know why! I want to get there in time to sign up for the open mic. It says on their website that sign-ups start at seven, and we’ll probably go to the hotel first, and then I’ll still have to find it, and maybe I can take the car or something?”
Barbra chose that moment to break her angry silence. “It won’t ever happen! You lose the business, okay. Okay. I understand. Sometimes businesses get lost! But now how much do you spend on that lawyer? Maybe he speaks zhong wen, but he is not in zhong guo! What will he be able to do? Is it so hard for you not to be a big man? You can’t just get that land and be a big man again—it won’t happen. Communist Party never let it happen. Why they want to give it up?”
“Well,” Charles heard Grace say to Andrew, “that might be the most words I’ve ever heard come out of Babs’s mouth.”
Charles bit down gently on his tongue and worried it between his wolf teeth. His wife didn’t deserve a response. She deserved to be put out on the side of the road, left to fend for herself in the desolate fields of West Texas. The scarf could go, too.
“Andrew,” he said instead. “Okay, yes. You take car, go to stand up.”
“I’m hungry,” said Grace. “Can we at least get french fries?”
Charles swerved to the right, just making it onto the off-ramp before it, too, flashed by, lost forever. As he coasted down towards the golden arches, he stretched a hand out towards his wife, reaching for something to pat, to reassure. Her hand, a delicate little bag of bones, found its way into his. Her body still faced the window, but she let him take her hand in his and squeeze it, tight.
二十四
Austin, TX
1,612 Miles
MAY LEE and Barbra had the same birthday, and it was today.
Barbra hadn’t even known that they shared a birthday until six months into her marriage, when Charles came home and told her to get dressed for a special dinner. Pleased, thinking that he’d forgotten, she hurried into her closet and was happily laying out jewelry when she heard him down the hall telling Saina and Andrew that they would all be celebrating tonight. She remembered feeling a pang of disappointment at the thought of sharing the evening with the children, but that was nothing compared to Saina’s wail when she saw Barbra descending the stairs in a new dress.
“Why is she coming?” Saina cried, pointing up at Barbra as if she were a murderess. There had been very few such accusatory moments. From the start, Barbra had kept her interactions with Charles and May Lee’s children cordial but distant, always allowing them their way, rarely displaying any sort of softness, never encouraging any kind of reliance. It was a very satisfactory arrangement. She did not trouble herself over her relationship with her husband’s children and they, in turn, barely paid any attention to her. This, though, had seemed beyond the pale, and Barbra let the anger show in her voice when she’d responded, “Well, it’s my birthday.”
“Daddy! She can’t take Mommy’s birthday! That’s not fair!”
Ama stood in the doorway with baby Gracie in her arms, smiling, pleased, no doubt, that Barbra was being embarrassed. And Charles? Charles was trapped in the middle of the foyer, the enormous chandelier casting a prism of shadows over his face as he looked at each of the women left in his life, utterly bewildered.
It had felt like a nightmare, but now Barbra thought that it was more like a fairy tale. One of those American Disney stories where malevolent spirits switch two babies born on the same day—in those tales, one child is always beautiful and good, and the other, the Barbra, is ugly and wicked. She was the Evil Queen, usurping Snow White’s place next to the prince.
Except that these days, Charles was more like the frog. When had he become this scared and secretive man, hunched down in some swampy deep? Barbra leaned her head against the lush silk of her scarf, bumping against the hot glass that it covered, and let the moment he first told her replay in her mind.
There it was, over and over again—that awkward swoop of his arm, like a magician whose cape had gone missing.
And now here was the man left behind, still holding her hand. Her husband, who shrank a bit each day in the ceaseless desert sun, diminished by his lack of surety and, more than anything else, by his strange new secrecy. Barbra had loved Charles for his brashness; she loved him for the forthrightness of his desires, the way he took what he wanted and never lied about wanting it. What right did he have to change those things? Fortunes might shift, but character, at least, was supposed to be constant.