The Wangs vs. the World(27)
Oh, dinner at Ama’s daughter’s house. Barbra couldn’t bear the thought. A casserole. A can of soup hastily heated in a dinged pot. An iceberg salad. Or, even worse, something that had been labored over and was still nearly inedible.
Chicken à la king. Beef stroganoff.
Any one of those horrid American cookbook concoctions that Ama’s daughter probably tried to solder together out of supermarket ingredients in her desert shack.
But Charles, dutiful to his Ama if nothing else, kept the car on the highway and didn’t even glance at the cluster of fast food joints as they zoomed past.
“Do we have to stay there?” asked Grace. “Like, for the night?”
Charles peered at her over his shoulder, trying to gauge his daughter’s tone. “Maybe we stay. Rest and leave early in the morning. Ama invited us, so it not so polite to refuse.”
Oh dear. Barbra hadn’t even considered that possibility. Scratchy Kmart sheets and thin bars of soap. It would be a preview of every motel they were due to check into on this journey, probably with a desperately chugging swamp cooler dampening the hard carpet and sun-faded patches on the vulgar sofas. Back to a life she thought she’d left behind.
Grace said nothing, but Barbra could hear the girl shift in the backseat, and a moment later, she felt a pair of teenage knees jam themselves into her spine. May Lee’s daughter. That’s how Barbra thought of her sometimes. The last productive thing May Lee ever did. Saina felt like Charles’s daughter, and Andrew was a sort of free agent, sunny even in the aftermath of his mother’s death and strangely impervious to parenting. Grace was the one she had known from infancy and probably the one who came closest to her practical outlook on the world, but a polite distance always remained between the two of them.
Even in close proximity like this, there was a barrier. Barbra felt her seat jostle and sat up slightly, turning her attention to the dusty world outside the car. She had never really seen the point of the desert. It was a useless landscape, more a failure of evolution than a valid ecosystem. Scorpions and cacti, leftovers from Mother Nature’s rebellious phase; shouldn’t She have gotten past all that by now?
十四
Twentynine Palms, CA
328 Miles
THE HOUSE was way tinier than Grace had been expecting. Of course, she’d seen bad neighborhoods before, but they were always places that you passed through on your way to somewhere else. First of all, the walls on the outside were metal. And not a cool metal, like titanium, which would have made it look maybe like a giant MacBook. No, instead they were something flimsy and dinged, probably tin or even aluminum. A foil-wrap house. Second, there was a bouncy castle out front. Like the kind people rented for little kids’ birthday parties. Except that Ama hadn’t said anything about it being one of her grandkids’ birthdays, and the half-deflated castle was covered with a layer of grime, as if it had been sitting on that same patch of dying grass for months, years maybe.
To be fair, this didn’t even really seem like a bad neighborhood. Just weird. If you thought about it, this combination of spaceship house and dusty lawn and bouncy castle wouldn’t ever exist anywhere else but out here in the desert. Or maybe Vegas—though Grace had never been there before—it’s just that whenever ugly things happened people usually said that it looked like Vegas or Florida.
What if the money really was all gone and they ended up having to live somewhere like this? God, suicide really would be better than that.
Ama had gone quiet. Grace tapped her on the shoulder.
“I haven’t seen Kathy in a long time.”
Ama didn’t turn. Just said, “Mmm,” in response.
“Maybe almost ten years, right?”
“Kathy hen meng.”
“Busy? With the little ones?”
Because Kathy didn’t just have kids, she had grandkids, too. Already. That was like her dad having grandkids. Which meant that it was like her having kids.
Wait, that didn’t quite make sense—Ama had been her father’s wet nurse, she was older than Grace’s father. But really not by much. Ama had only been eighteen when she came to take care of him, cast out by her landowning-class family because she was a wayward daughter who had a baby—stillborn, discarded—out of wedlock. She’d been taken in by the neighboring Wang household because they’d had the misfortune of birthing a child who had thrived in the aftermath of a world war. Almost forty years after that, Ama had arrived in America with a teenage Kathy, whose father was an American GI stationed in Taiwan, though no one ever spoke of it.
Ama’s daughter followed in that unfortunate military tradition by finding herself married to a Latino man who discarded a promising beginning as a line cook at Michael’s in Santa Monica to become an army chef. Kathy was pretty much a single mother even though she was technically still with her husband; in reality, he spent all his time with hot broilers in Bahrain and giant saucepans in Mosul and none of it at their house near the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms.
And then Kathy’s own daughter had gone and wasted her perfectly lovely face—a face that, Ama always said with a sigh of relief, was still Chinese despite her diluted blood—by actually joining the military herself. When she went and married a fellow soldier whose family happened to be from the Dominican Republic and popped out two coffee-colored babies in quick succession, Ama didn’t even try to contain her dismay.