A boyfriend, thought Andrew. Already. Saina clearly didn’t have any problems with love. Maybe people just decided they were in love and then—bam!—they were. Everyone always said that there was nothing like first love—maybe he just had to stop looking for someone who made him feel the same way that Eunice had. Why hadn’t he stayed at school? Other people went to college without their parents’ money. Other people’s parents didn’t even have any money. Why hadn’t he just gotten a job and a loan?
Andrew stared out the window, half listening to Grace quiz Saina on how she and her boyfriend had met. They were winding down the greenest road Andrew had ever seen, verdant swamp on either side of them. Occasionally a sign would appear at the head of a narrow path snaking into the wild: ATASKA GUN CLUB/KEEP OUT. OLD BOGS GUN AND FISH SOCIETY. He imagined those secret societies, blood oaths and racist jokes over some delicious barbecue. There were so many worlds he’d never even considered—which one would be his?
二十七
New Orleans, LA
2,123 Miles
THE SOUTH wasn’t how Charles remembered it. Where were all the biscuits and black people? In the twenty-four hours that the Wangs had been on the outskirts of New Orleans with Nash, all they’d seen were various incarnations of exhausted southern gentry, old friends of Nash’s who rotated in and out of his family’s ancient estate as if it were some sort of Gone with the Wind commune. All around the edges of his acreage, brand-new “plantation-style” condos crowded in. The last time Charles had been here, some twenty years ago, they’d sat on the porch drinking bourbon doctored with sugar cubes and gazing out at the lazy rows of willows; now a gaudy funfair of banners flapped at the tree line: THE ORSINI, THE VAN HELM. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME.
Tonight, all those cousins and aunties had reassembled in an odd little bayou shack with a corrugated tin roof and rough wooden picnic tables covered with newspaper. When Nash insisted that the Wangs come along to his second cousin’s wedding, Charles had expected white-gloved waiters and polite dancing under moss-draped trees, not the honky-tonk bacchanal unfolding around them.
“Watch yourselves!”
A slick-haired man with arms covered in snake tattoos muscled a steaming colander to their table and spilled out a crimson tide of crawfish, mixed with halved pieces of potatoes, onions, and lemons. The night outside was humid. As a briny fog rose from the piles of boiled shellfish, the windows steamed up and the air inside immediately turned dense and heated. Through that mist, two women followed, one with a pot of melted butter balanced atop a ceramic bowl of steamed corn, the other carrying a tin platter piled high with blackened link sausages that still sizzled from the grill, spitting out their juices in spicy rivulets. The first woman, white-girl dreads held back by a kerchief, plunked down the corn and went around the table ladling a rich splash of butter into the little bowl at each place setting. The second set down the sausages just an inch farther away than Charles would have liked.
He unrolled the plastic lobster bib and tied it around his neck, taking care to cover as much of his shirt as he could. He reached for a pile of thin white paper napkins and unfolded four of the squares, overlapping them on his lap until his pants were completely protected.
Ready.
Barbra had stayed behind at Nash’s house, claiming that she had a headache. Sitting in the roomful of strangers, his back aching from seven straight hours of driving, feeling a creeping numbness that made him grasp at the aspirin folded in a napkin inside his pocket, Charles half wished that he had begged off, too. But Grace was next to him and Andrew sat across the table, a too-skinny Nash cousin on either side.
One of them elbowed his son. “Ever eaten a crawdaddy?”
Andrew looked at him for help, and Charles felt a familiar mix of pride and annoyance. Why was Andrew always so tentative and half formed? It made no sense the way he scuttled sideways through life. Proud! Any child in the Wang family should always be proud, instead of well mannered and unsure.