Outrun the Moon(3)

2



THE THREE O’CLOCK FUNERAL PEDDLER’S voice pierces the thin windows of our two-room flat. “Joss paper! Red packets! Lucky candy!” In Chinatown, someone is always hawking something.

I thank both the Christian God and my ancestors for the dozenth time today that my family was spared the need for such funeral trinkets.

Tom will keep my misadventure a secret. He always does, like the time I climbed up the flagpole and got stuck, or the time I made him go into the ocean with me and we almost drowned. He might have his opinions, but he’s loyal to a fault.

My brother, Jack, breathes noisily beside me as he practices hemming a towel. Despite Ma’s protests, Ba said it was time for him to learn the family business, and minor alterations were a part of the laundry trade. Jack ties a knot, then holds up his battlefield of stitches.

“Nice, but you sewed your towel to your pants.”

He slaps his head. “Not again!”

I close the book on my lap—The Book for Business-Minded Women—and nudge Jack off the old chest where he is sitting so I can put my book back where all our treasures are held. Last Christmas, after I lost my job sweeping graves, Mr. Mortimer the mortician gave me the book as a present. I was always borrowing it from the library at Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Jack quiets when I remove another treasure from the chest—our map of San Francisco, the latest 1906 edition. I spread it onto the concrete floor. “We’re exploring early this month.”

He digs around in the chest. The tea tin rattles as he pulls out our Indian head penny. Every month, the pirates Mercy the Fearsome and her first mate Black Jack toss the penny onto the map for a new place to explore.

Jack shines the penny on his shirt.

“It’s my turn to throw,” I tell him, holding out my hand. Normally, I wouldn’t insist, but with careful aim, I lob it lightly so it lands on the city’s northern edge. “Well, look at that!”

“Wh-wh-what, Mercy?” He stammers when he’s excited or nervous.

I point, and Jack leans over. “Looks like we’re visiting Chocolatier Du Lac.”

In her Book for Business-Minded Women, Mrs. Lowry attributes the success of her cattle ranch—the largest in Texas—not just to hard work but to her education at Radcliffe College. Only one school in this town can give me a similar education, and my way in lies through the chocolate shop.

Jack’s eyes grow hungry. Even with my poor French accent, he knows chocolate when he hears it, ever since I bought him a Li’l Betties chocolate drop last month.

“Let’s go!” Jack shoots to the door without bothering to fold the map or snip the towel from his pants. I leave a note for Ma, who’s out visiting clients.

Moments later, Jack’s dragging me through the narrow alleyways of Chinatown, wanting to go faster than his lungs will let him. We pass under three-cornered yellow flags denoting restaurants and pick our way around the squashed blossoms of a narcissus stand. Sky lanterns sway from building eaves, the same lanterns that inspired Tom’s Floating Island.

Though Tom’s ba, who I call Ah-Suk for uncle, expected him to be an herbalist, Tom has always been fascinated by flying things—moths, paper gliders. It had been his dream to join the Army Balloon Corps, until he learned the Corps disbanded. When the Wright brothers launched a new bird into the sky, Tom wrote to Orville Wright, asking if he needed an apprentice, but Mr. Wright never wrote back.

Jack looks back at me. “Faai-di!” Hurry up!

“English only, Jack.” Today we shall be as American as President Theodore Roosevelt himself. Folks are more apt to do business with people who do not seem foreign. “And I am hurrying. It’s these boots that are taking their time.”

Perhaps borrowing Ma’s too-big boots wasn’t my brightest idea, but Mrs. Lowry stresses the importance of looking tall when negotiating. Taller people inspire confidence, and the boots put me in the neighborhood of five foot five. Blisters are already forming on my soles, and I long to hop onto the cable car that clangs past us down the Slot. But trolleys cost a nickel per rider, and I have only one to spare.

“The longer the wait, the sweeter the taste,” I tell Jack.

He knots his mouth into a tight rosebud, and his sticky hand stops yanking so hard. The sight of his bruised knuckles where his first grade teacher tried to hit the stammer out of him squeezes my heart. Jack’s lungs and speech development were never the same after the city forcibly inoculated us against the Black Death a few years ago.

It won’t always be this way, not if I can help it. One day, we shall have a map of the world and a chest full of pennies to throw at it.

The baker’s wife stands in the doorway of her Number Nine Bakery, using a fan to sweep the golden smells into the street. The number nine sounds like the word for everlasting in Chinese, and it is hoped that a business with that number will have permanence.

A frown burrows deep into her face as we pass. “Bossy cheeks,” she mutters after me. She has always disapproved of my free-spirited ways, so different than her daughter, Ling-Ling. The girl sits as still as a vase inside the shop, a basket of buns on her lap.

I force myself not to react, herding Jack toward Montgomery Street, the main route through North Beach. Cheeks are a measure of one’s authority, and my high cheekbones indicate an assertive, ambitious nature. They were a gift from my mother, and I am proud of them, even though men shy away from women with that attribute.