The Refugees(38)

Mimi was sitting on a white leather couch in the living room, using a remote control to dial down the volume on the television backed into one corner. She stood up, and if she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. Her plum velour tracksuit fitted snugly on her slender body. Photographs of my mother before she was married show that she was once slim too, but by the end of her life everything about her had thickened and sagged, except for her fading hair. When she died, she was wearing the wig I’d given to her for a birthday present, woven from real human hair. Mimi’s perm resembled the wig, except that Mimi’s hair was naturally rich and abundant, rooted to her head in auburn waves, the style of a woman in her fifties.

“I’ve been waiting to meet you for so long!” she said, clasping both my hands in hers. The skin of her face was beige and unnaturally smooth, like nylon stockings.

“Thanks,” I said. Singing on the television was a girl with crimped hair, wearing a black vinyl bodice and a red leather miniskirt. Above the television was a faded lacquer version of the Last Supper, with Jesus and the disciples framed in pink neon. My father bumped into me on his way to the couch, and I said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

My father turned the volume up on the television. “He wants to pee.”

“Of course.” Mimi kept smiling as she led me down the hall to the bathroom, where I grimaced at her before I closed the door. The bathroom was immaculate and scented with potpourri, unlike the ones in the rented houses where I’d grown up, which always smelled vaguely of mildewed plastic shower curtains and ammonia. After a decent interval, I flushed the toilet. In the car I had told my father that I needed to use the bathroom only so I could see this woman’s face, and how she lived. When I checked her medicine cabinet, all I found were aspirin, beauty creams, and several varieties of nail polish. I’d expected a sample packet of Viagra, like the one my ex-wife Sam once found in my father’s toiletry kit after he asked her, without thinking, to fetch him his nail clippers.

When I returned to the living room, the television was off, and my father was reading the paper as he sat on the couch. Mimi was preparing coffee at the bar dividing the living room from the kitchen, where a skylight illuminated her stainless-steel oven and electric range. My mother had cooked on a vintage gas oven and stove with a pilot light that kept going out, and when an aneurysm struck her down last year at the age of fifty-three, she was working in the kitchen. I think it was the surprise of her dying so young that bowed my father down at the funeral, rather than grief or the shock of having found her lying on the linoleum floor, a pot of chicken bones simmering on the burner.

“Do you want milk with your coffee?” Mimi asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”

“But you just came. And I have biscotti and croissants.”

“I only came to drop my father off.” Above the fireplace was a black-and-white photograph framed in rosewood, of a gaunt man in his sixties, wearing spectacles and a dark suit. “His car was stolen last night.”

“So I heard. That’s what comes from living in Los Angeles.” Mimi noticed me looking at the photograph. “My husband passed away five years ago. He was a senator once, you know.”

“He has to go.” My father put the newspaper down and stood up. “The boy has two jobs.”

I was thirty-three, but my father didn’t think anyone was a man until he fathered children. He’d had five with my mother. All three sons had grown taller than him, but most people, including me, tended to forget his height. People noticed only that he was a broad-chested man with muscular forearms that were still as thick as they were when I hung from them as a kid. His body remained trim enough to fit into the vintage camouflage paratrooper’s uniform that he’d worn during the war. These days he broke out the uniform only once every few months, to march in the honor guard for parades and memorials in Little Saigon. He always did so with the intense stare that Sam remembered from their first meeting, when she found she couldn’t look away from him, as if she were a wild animal transfixed by the gaze of a wilder one.

Perhaps Mimi felt the same way. Her eyes were on my father as she said to me, “Come by for dinner anytime.” For a moment I believed she meant it.

My father walked me to the door and pointed a finger at his compass watch. Its face was the size of a silver dollar, the body and band scratched but still as tough as the day he’d gotten it in 1958, at the Fort Benning airborne school. “I’ll need a ride back tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he closed the door in my face.

“Sure,” I said. “You’re welcome.”

I was used to the way he was spare with most things in his life, from his words to his ’82 Honda hatchback. When he’d come to my apartment six weeks ago, everything he owned was in the car, which was original down to the push-button radio that picked up only static-thick AM channels. Wanting to be helpful, I’d reached for a suitcase. The moment I tried to lift it, I knew I’d made a mistake. It must have contained his dumbbells, and the seconds ticked by silently as I struggled with both hands to drag the suitcase out of the trunk. When I’d finally gotten the suitcase to the sidewalk, he sighed and took it from me, lifting it with one arm and bracing it against his hip. Then he slung his duffel bag over the other shoulder and turned to the stairs. He swung the suitcase up each step with the aid of his leg, leaving me with the garment bags. Last month he’d turned sixty-three, and every grunt he gave punctuated what I should have known already. Living with him now would be harder than it was during my childhood.