The Wangs vs. the World(73)
What was the point of having children? All they did was leave you. He’d left his parents. May Lee had tossed money at hers and fled. Barbra had slipped away from hers without even telling them that she was going. At the very moment when children might emerge from the uselessness of adolescence and finally take on some of the burden of being alive, that was when they blithely severed themselves at the root with one cruel, unthinking cut. Little *s.
He left too soon. He left and let that woman have his son. Of all the things that he had lost, this was the very worst.
The air-conditioning broke down somewhere between Biloxi and Mobile. There was a smell, like every frozen thing in the world had just died, and then nothing. No matter how many times they toggled the air on and off, nothing stirred in the bowels of the car.
Despite the heat, Barbra kept her window closed, the scarf still wedged between the glass and the frame. She might choose to melt rather than sacrifice the pallor that she thought was aristocratic, but he and Grace had rolled down the rest of the windows.
By the time he pulled into Opelika, all three of them were sweating, shirts soaked through. A quartet of Obama posters—the one that looked like a piece of Communist propaganda—peeled in the window of a boutique while a McCain poster was taped to the door of a neighboring furnace-supply store. This place looked like the model for Main Street, U.S.A., each store an orderly two stories with shingled fa?ades and colored awnings. As he slowed to the town’s speed limit, Charles flipped through the radio dial until he landed on a talk station.
A nasal twang rang through the speakers. “Well, there are people in my town, I’m not saying who they are, but they know who they are, and I’m not saying I’m one of them, not that I’d say it if I were one of them, but sure, there are people here who wouldn’t vote for a man because of his skin color, sure. Not me, I treat every man the same, white, black, or purple, but there’s a lot of narrow minds.”
And then the interviewer. “A Gallup poll of Alabama residents shows that most respondents would consider voting for a black president but didn’t think that others in their state would do the same.”
Grace’s head popped up between the front seats. “I have to pee.”
The first words from her mouth since they’d left New Orleans without Andrew. Charles patted his daughter’s head.
“I think we almost there, okay? You go at the store.”
“How do you even know that they’ll be there?” she asked.
He didn’t. And, if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t even sure that they’d be able to pay him immediately, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do if they couldn’t.
“No worrying, Gracie. Ren je, hao??”
Ignoring her harrumphs of protest, Charles turned up the sound.
“And now we turn it over to Money Mike who’s in Auburn where the Tigers are getting ready to take on the LSU Tigers this weekend. Mike, who will win the battle of the big cats?”
Grace’s arm appeared to the left of his head, pointing. “There! It’s there! I can’t wait for you to park—just let me out!” He slowed the car down and his daughter jumped out the back, slamming the door with so much force that the whole rig shuddered.
“We meet at the store, Gracie!” he shouted out the window, but she didn’t turn back or respond.
Parking in Opelika was easy. The streets were half empty and Charles felt a sense of accomplishment as he pulled the wagon, shocks creaking, into place along the curb, cutting the wheel at exactly the right moment so that the U-Haul in back would line up easily. It took only a few long, focused minutes now, instead of the cursing, sweating, quarter of an hour that docking the giant metal fishtail used to take.
He turned to Barbra. “Will you come in?”
She shook her head.
Charles was glad. It seemed less pathetic, somehow, if they just saw him and Grace. He could pretend that they were in the middle of a carefree, father-daughter cross-country jaunt and had decided on a whim to make a personal delivery. There. Life wasn’t so bad after all. Smooth down the shirt. Fix the collar. Adjust the pants. Tidy the hair. Too bad men couldn’t wear makeup—he could probably use a little lip gloss and rouge, a touch of blue liner to make the whites of his eyes whiter.
Half a minute later Charles was pushing open the weathered wood door of the Magnolia General Store. He could see Grace inside, talking to Ellie Yates, who still looked exactly as he’d remembered her from the plane—tiny and golden.
“Yes. Totally. That’s what I want to do.” Grace nodded at Ellie enthusiastically as the two of them looked at something on the computer.
For a minute, Charles wanted to turn around and leave. Dump the trailer full of lotions and balms into a river somewhere so that he wouldn’t have to break in on Grace’s small happy moment. But there was no land in China without the money to find it and, most likely, to bribe some corrupt Communist official into handing it over, so he pressed forward.
“I have a special delivery!”
Ellie turned. “Mr. Wang!” As he crossed the room to embrace her, he noticed Grace clicking something shut on the screen.
“Mr. Wang, your daughter here was just showing me her style blog—she’s got herself some serious taste.”
Grace smiled.
“Ah, I think you have serious taste,” said Charles, looking around the shop. It was expertly done, at once the kind of general store that might have existed in an old American mill town a hundred years ago and a modern art gallery. Every gardening implement looked like a finely wrought weapon, the jars of penny candy were piles of gems, the few articles of clothing equally appropriate for a field hand or a gallery owner. “Everything is even better than you describe!”