The Refugees(40)

“Not as highly as he speaks of you.”

“He says you work in the medical industry.”

“I sell hearing aids. In the evenings I’m a night watchman at a high-rise.”

“I see.” We heard the running water stop.

“It’s an expensive apartment building,” I offered. “The women wear fur coats just because they can afford to.”

When Mimi smiled at me again, a gold tooth glinted in the far reaches of her mouth. “It’s not good for a boy your age to be without a woman,” she said. “Your father tells me you’re not even dating.”

“I’m recovering.”

Mimi ignored my comment and began describing the young women she knew at her temple, as well as the ones from her old neighborhood in Can Tho, everyone searching for husbands with American passports. Vietnamese women, she informed me, leaning close and putting her hand on my knee, were much better mates for men than American women, who were fickle and demanding. Vietnamese women took care of their men, doted on them, and these same women wanted men like me, neither too American nor too Vietnamese. She nodded at my father, who had appeared in the doorway, already dressed in a button-down shirt and wrinkle-free slacks. Ignoring her, he looked at me and said, “Today we’re going to rent a car.”

“Are you coming back tonight?” Mimi asked.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Now hurry up and drink your coffee before the ice melts.”

As soon as I’d finished, he ushered me out. He said nothing to me in the car, jingling the keys in his pocket until we came to a complete stop where the Harbor and Hollywood freeways crossed. A squadron of news helicopters circled lazily over the freeway some distance toward downtown, its towers only ghostly silhouettes hidden by a curtain of smog. I lit a cigarette, and my father rolled down his window. After my mother died, he quit his pack-a-day habit, even though she’d never objected to his secondhand smoke; she just complained about the migraines that forced her to turn off the lights in her bedroom and lie down. “It’s my head,” she would moan. “It’s my head.”

“When was the last time you talked to her?” he asked.

“Who?” I thought he meant my mother.

“Sam.”

“Months ago.” I blew smoke out the window. “She called to say she was sorry about Ma.”

“How will you get her back if you don’t talk to her?”

“None of your business.”

“You give up too easy.” Sam told me the same thing soon after we first met, our senior year in college. “Look at you,” he said.

I checked myself. “What about me?”

“You’ve gained weight. You haven’t combed your hair.” He plucked at my pants. “And you haven’t ironed your clothing. A man must always iron his clothing.”

“I thought Ma pressed your clothes.”

“The point is that you look terrible.” He slapped his hand against the dashboard for emphasis. “How many of those cigarettes are you smoking every day?”

“Six or seven.”

“Put it out.” When I did nothing, he snatched the cigarette out of my mouth and tossed it out the window, then grabbed a handful of the fat around my waist, squeezing it hard. “You even feel like a woman.”

“Jesus Christ!” I pushed his hand away. “Don’t do that!”

“You’re never getting Sam back looking that way.”

“Who says I want her back?”

“Don’t be an idiot. You were only half a man before you met her, and you’re back to being half a man now.”

Through my window, I could see into the low-slung Mitsubishi next to us, where miniature television screens, embedded in customized headrests, broadcast a scene of a crowded highway. The camera zoomed in on a team of highway patrolmen in tan uniforms with their guns drawn, surrounding a car. It was our highway, captured live from a news helicopter.

“What about you?” I said. “Are you going to marry that woman? And then find yourself another one on the side?”

Someone behind me began honking, and soon cars all over the freeway took up the noise. I remembered my mother pulling me aside once, when I was eleven or twelve, demanding to know where my father disappeared to on Friday nights. I had no idea. For some reason her question terrified me more than the time she chased him into the bathroom. When he locked the door against her, she tried to beat it down with a chair, the legs leaving fist-sized holes in the hollow door.

“Sam’s a good woman.” My father reached over and pressed the horn once, twice, and a third time. “You should never have let her go.”

As if to prove how little of a man I was, I started crying.

My father stared straight ahead, and I knew he must be thinking of the funeral. He hadn’t shed a tear during the mass, and neither had I, but when I drove him from the church to the cemetery, something broke inside me, and the tears gushed out. My father had stopped speaking then, too. He was worried, I think, about the chances of my crashing the car. Only when I finished crying did he resume talking about the wake. But today, with horns honking all around, my father sighed and said, “That’s enough. It’s time we did something about you.”

Traffic began moving. The horns stopped, and my father turned on the radio, picking a soft-rock station where Paul -McCartney and Stevie Wonder were singing “Ebony and Ivory.” I didn’t know what he meant by “doing something,” which was what he said whenever he was about to punish my brothers or me. It was also what he said the time I came home one day in the fourth grade and reported that a kid up the street had spat on the lunch of sardines and rice my mother had packed. Then the kid called me a slant-eyed fag.