The Wangs vs. the World(25)
“Sorry, Daddy, yes—I’ll help you. What do you want me to do?”
Charles looked down the alley. It was past sunset and all the workers at the factories on either side of his had long since gone home.
“Daddy’s key not working. You just climb in the open window up there and open door from inside, okay?”
One long look from Grace, and then a smile that he wasn’t expecting. “Good one, Dad.”
“Not a joke, okay? Daddy too old to climb things, right?”
“Oh, no, I know, I don’t think it’s a joke. Just a good one,” she said, winking.
Teenagers were such a mystery. Parts of Saina and Andrew had turned unknowable in those years, too. There was a time when he thought that Saina might be someone else forever, back when she was entangled with that fiancé of hers. Grayson.
Charles shook his head. A terrible name. Cold and limp, followed by a diminutive. The son of something boring and colorless could only be even more boring and colorless, yet somehow his brilliant daughter had been taken in by him. It was true that the boy had been good-looking. Charles suspected sex was the lure, though he didn’t quite want to admit that to himself.
“Okay, I’m ready.” Grace had taken off her ridiculous fur vest and little boots, and slipped on a pair of those fabric shoes that Charles had noticed on the feet of more and more of his friends’ children recently. Ugly shoes, like the ones that poor people in China wore. “What if we pull the car over and I stand on the hood? I think I can boost myself up from there.”
She could, and now her head poked out the back door.
He’d never seen the warehouse so empty before. It was infuriating that someone would take hold of his business and sell it off in pieces instead of letting Charles turn it back around. Because he could. Even though Lehman Brothers filed Chapter 11 yesterday and interest rates were down to 2 percent, he could have turned it all back around because America still needed makeup. He knew, with the certitude of someone who had grown up calling this land across the Pacific Mei Guo—Beautiful Country—that, more than any other country, this was one that would never reject improvement. Even those signs along the freeway said it: KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL. But the bank with its unimaginative managers had refused to see things his way. They’d rather pull down the entire country than believe in Charles Wang.
Shafts of streetlight filtered into the building through the dusty windows, giving off just enough of a glow for Charles to find the pile of boxes destined for Opelika.
“So why do we need these?”
“We make personal delivery.”
“Okay, but why these?”
Why these? Because it was one of the few orders he’d personally sold since his business had grown. Ellie and Trip were a glowing young couple that he’d met on a flight to New York. They’d been bumped up to business class and refused his offer to switch seats, instead including him in their enthusiasm over the warm mixed nuts and free mimosas. The pair were en route from one friend’s wedding in Malibu to another’s on Cape Cod. Afterwards, they were moving back to her Alabama hometown to open a new-school take on a traditional general store. Handmade clothes, vintage hoes, and whole grains. Enchanted by their entrepreneurial drive and soft southern accents, Charles found himself recounting his first flight to America—the nausea, the revelation in the bathroom, all of it.
“I come to America to get rich, and now I am!” he’d finished.
“So you came here for the American Dream!” said Ellie, pleased.
Charles had laughed. “Not only American Dream! Everybody, every country, have same dream! Al Gore think he invent Internet, America think they invent American Dream!” And then he found himself convincing them to develop a line of magnolia-scented lotions and candles. “Magnolia oil you get local, send to me, I do everything else, you sell and say ‘local magnolia’ and everybody will buy!” he’d enthused, imagining it as the beginning of a southern beauty empire for them, a surefire melding of gracious tradition and modern style. Pooh-poohing their lack of capital, Charles waived his minimums and promised that they could spread out their payments, that their orders could grow as their business grew.
He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realized potential.
Vampires must feel like that.
“Because I sell to them personally, and I make them spend all their money, so Daddy feel bad if they lose. Besides, we never go to Alabama before.”
“But couldn’t you just mail it?”
“Business is all about the personal.”
She looked at him, considering. “Okay, that’s a good lesson. I’ll remember it. Business is all about the personal.”
Love surged in Charles. Gracie wasn’t lost. Living away from home those two years hadn’t ruined her. Family was still family. “Good girl, xiao bao,” he said, reaching out to pat her on the head as she loaded the dolly with boxes.
Grace straightened up and smiled at him, then skipped ahead. She was taller, and she’d loosened up the prim, baby-doll manner she’d had as a girl, all quiet voice and shy eyes. It had been such a shock when Grace, at fourteen, ran away with a boy who flattered her into thinking he was in love with her, who tricked himself into thinking the same thing. A Japanese boy, no less, a fact that Charles felt was a betrayal of the entire nation of China and everything she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. He would have expected that kind of treachery from Saina, maybe, but not of his youngest, a girl who had never so much as ordered a pizza on her own and still liked to be tucked in bed each night by Ama. She was fourteen and the boy was fifteen, so they didn’t get far; Saina had come home and tracked the wayward lovers to a family friend’s empty beach house in La Jolla. A new Gracie had ranted and raved and called it a Shakespearean tragedy; Saina had insisted that she was being more like silly Lydia Bennet, the runaway youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice, than a Bel-Air Juliet; and Charles had privately lamented and rejoiced at the irresistible beauty of his daughters. But when Grace responded to his order that she never speak to the boy again by wailing at the dinner table every night and trying, again, to run away with him, Charles had packed her off to Cate, which, besides being the only boarding school he’d heard of in California, also used its feminine name to make him think at first that it was an all-girls school. A week into the semester, he missed Grace terribly and was increasingly upset that the school was coed, but by then it was too late to go back on his declarations.