“I knew that. I guess I just didn’t think about the money part—”
“How did you think I bought the house?”
“It’s upstate New York. I just figured that a down payment out here was like rent in New York.”
“I don’t have a mortgage.”
“Whoa.” That was Graham again. “Okay, that’s probably like the most baller thing you can say as an adult. From now on, my goal in life is going to be to say that someday. Mortgage? I don’t got no fucking mortgage!”
Saina laughed and turned back to Leo. “Are you mad?”
His hands returned finally, one spanning her waist, the other back on her arm. She felt instantly warmed and leaned against him. This was what she’d missed, what had made her seek out Leo as soon as Grayson had packed up his pile of T-shirts: Their shared physical shorthand, the way they responded perfectly to each other’s bodily cues so that they knew when to entwine and when to separate without a word of discussion.
“No, Saina. No.” He kissed her, inhaling slowly as his lips pressed against her cheek. “I’m just surprised. And I like us to tell each other things.”
Saina turned to face him, pressing her body against his. “I know, but this was a hard thing to tell. I guess, in a way, it’s easier to say it to you now that the money’s all gone.” Gone. The word echoed in her head and she repeated it. “Gone.” It echoed again, making her feel hollow inside, her brain tumbling down her throat and pounding against her heart, as if the money were the only thing that had filled her up and kept everything in its proper place.
“Hey, you don’t know that, right? You said might.”
“It’s just . . . nothing’s worth as much anymore, but the loan is still for the same amount, you know? So they’re going to sell off the house where I grew up and pretty much everything in it, and all of the factories and stock, but I don’t think that will cover the original loan, and that’s when the bank will go after what I have. Not this house, I don’t think, because the title’s under my name, but everything that’s still tied to my dad in name, probably.” She leaned closer to Leo, pressing her forehead into his chest.
“What’s your dad going to do?”
“Oh god. He has this crazy plan where he thinks that he’s going to roll up to the old village in China and somehow be able to reclaim the land that his father lost.”
“Wait,” said Graham, “are you a princess or something? Or, like, the Last Empress? Who just has land to reclaim?”
“And what would he do with it?” asked Leo.
“Become a farmer? You can give him tips. I don’t know. I don’t think he’s thought that far. To be honest, I think he’s lost his mind a little bit.” She paused, picturing them. Generations of Wangs that had things, and then three that lost things. “It’s just old family land. I don’t even know if it’s real. He says it is, but he’s never even been back to China.”
“Why not?”
Why not? Saina wasn’t really sure. When he was living in Taiwan, travel between the two places was restricted, but America had lifted its ban before he’d immigrated. “He probably didn’t want to go unless he could own the whole country.”
“But he’s coming here now?” asked Graham.
“Yep. Plus my stepmother and my brother and sister. They stopped off at my uncle Nash’s house in New Orleans, but I think they’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”
Graham nudged Leo. “Ready to meet the in-laws?”
Leo looked at her. “Are they ready to meet me?”
“I think so. They’ll just be glad that you’re not, well, that you’re not Grayson.”
“See,” said Graham, “one step up already!”
Saina looked at them and for a moment she was bitterly, intensely jealous. Life was so weightless for some people. She wanted to call her father right now and tell him not to come. Just wash her hands of the Wangs altogether, never mind that family was family and she should be glad that she was going to give hers a home. A homeland.
Should she even tell her father about this latest setback? He was probably counting on her reserves to finance the pursuit of the land in China, but what was that going to get them? Leo was right, what could her citified father possibly do with it? Even if he got it, which seemed impossible, it would probably be farmland out in the middle of nowhere. Saina tried to picture him out there, far from the modern towers of Beijing or Shanghai, demanding that some poor peasant boy make his cappuccino bone-dry, asking villagers if there was a better restaurant in town, realizing that he couldn’t gossip about the man next to him in Chinese—which sometimes seemed to be his and Barbra’s sole pastime—because everyone around him would be Chinese.
Her father, sweating through a custom-tailored suit, armed with a bespoke hoe, trying to raise ghosts on that long-lost land.