“You all come back whenever you like, alright? I do mean that. And take care of each other on the road.” Charles tossed back a fistful of nuts, marveling at their cardamom scent and meaty crunch. Mouth full, he nodded at Ellie, chewing at attention as she walked back to the store.
As soon as she was out of sight, Charles shoved another few nuts in his mouth and knelt down next to the hitch. He was jiggling it, trying to figure out how to undo the thing without tools or assistance when Barbra stuck her head out of the car.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up at her.
She had gotten tiny. Somewhere between California and Alabama, Barbra had lost the fullness that she carried and become skeletal.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“You are going to just leave this here? Throw away more money?”
Charles shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. By now nobody pay that card. I go return it, they ask for money. I never return, they never find.” He felt almost giddy until he looked up and met Barbra’s eyes. Contempt. The way that she’d looked at the boys who worked in the kitchen under her father. Yes, he remembered her from the beginning, had admired her naked teenage determination even though he liked to tease her and say that he barely knew who she was when she arrived in America so soon after May Lee’s crash.
“Why didn’t you know?”
“Know what?” Even though, of course, he knew what.
“That all their things would ruin! Wo men lai je me yuan, you she me yong?”
Charles turned his head away, trying to shield himself from her anger.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, okay, okay. Bu yao zai shuo le.” He hoisted himself up and walked the long way around to the front seat. Tonight, after dark, he would pull up to the back of a Walmart or a McDonald’s and throw away these boxes full of wasted effort, and then the next morning, before Barbra and Grace woke up, he would drive to the closest U-Haul office, fifteen miles outside of Opelika, and return this trailer, feign surprise when the card on record didn’t go through, and pay with two of the hundred small-faced Benjamin Franklins that were stacked in a manila envelope in the bottom of his suitcase. But he wouldn’t tell Barbra that yet. She shouldn’t think that her anger could make him do things.
Charles thought about that meager emergency stash he had stowed away so many years ago, back when ten thousand dollars seemed like an impressive sum to have on hand. Now it had to get them to Saina’s house and then wing him all the way to China. But once it did, once he got there, he’d fix everything.
三十二
Atlanta, GA
2,594 Miles
GRACE MADE small noises from the other bed. They could be snores or sighs. Since Barbra had left Taiwan, she hadn’t spent a single night sleeping in the same room with anyone other than Charles. She didn’t know how to decipher anyone’s noises of sleep but his. Until now, of course.
She could hear the clatter of silverware on ceramic outside, the smell of cheap bacon and sweet buns, the wail of an angry infant—all unmistakable signs of a free breakfast buffet, which every fat family in this motel would be lined up for. Barbra thought about the way that the pulpy, from-concentrate orange juice always glugged out of big plastic jars at the far ends of those buffet lines and felt vaguely nauseous.
Was it true that she had married Charles for his money?
Yes.
And he knew it.
In fact, she was fairly certain that he’d loved her for it.
The question, then, was obvious. Without the money, did she still love him?
In the months before news of May Lee’s death had filtered back to Charles’s old friends in Taiwan, Barbra had been working in a stationery shop downtown. Every day she wore a pink smock and shuffled notebooks into orderly piles while her boss, dirty old Lao, devised reasons to send her up the storeroom ladder. He would watch her climb through his smudged glasses and she would fume inside—it was unfair that she got all the burdens of being a woman with none of the benefits of beauty. Every evening at five o’clock, she would turn down his dinner invitation and head back to the cook’s quarters at the university, where she was still living with her parents.