Emergency Contact(5)
“Okay, then,” said Al, glancing over at Sam as he left. Just to make sure.
Sam dipped another donut in glaze. His hands were bony and veiny and moved quickly. His arms, lean, tanned, and blanketed in tattoos, would have looked at home on a Russian convict. Sam had a lot of tattoos. All over his chest, back, and calves.
He wiped up a bright fuchsia dribble of icing with his left hand and continued dipping the remaining three donuts with his right. He was pleased with the results.
Some guys wouldn’t call baking or the ability to make a Pikachu foam cappuccino topper particularly manly pursuits, but Sam wasn’t just any guy. He didn’t concern himself with how fist-pumping frat dudes with crippling masculinity issues and no necks spent their time.
Fin came in and immediately eyed the racks. There were six trays with four immaculate donuts cooling on each.
“What are these, limited-edition?” he asked. “We’ll sell out these shits in an hour.”
“Nah, they’re off-menu. I’m making these for someone,” Sam said. Fin huffed the sweet donut steam.
“You can’t bake for these girls out the gate, Sam. You’ve got to manage expectations.”
Sam smiled his wonky smile.
Fin studied him warily.
“Dude. Please.” Fin’s shoulders slumped. “Come on, tell me these aren’t . . . Please tell me you’re not dating lyin’-ass Liar again,” said Fin, hands up in a defense pose. “Yo, I get it. She’s hot—no disrespect—but the last time y’all broke up, I didn’t know if I was going to make it.”
Sam ignored any mention of the Great Love of His Life.
“Seriously, Sam, you were in a bad place for so long,” said Fin. “Monster-ass chem trails coming out of your ears, man.”
“They’re not for her,” Sam said.
Fin hung up his backpack, threw on an apron, and glanced at the rack that held bloopers. “Can I kill these?” Sam nodded, and Fin took down a misshapen glazed in a single bite. “Mmmm,” he said, cramming another half into his mouth. “These are way too good for her anyway.”
PENNY.
It was the big day. Penny considered feeling sad. It was supposed to be bittersweet, wasn’t it? Leaving home and going off to college was A Thing. She blinked for moisture—no dice. Along the lines of having a sneeze you can’t find or an itch that lives too deep under the skin, college felt surreal, conceptually out of reach. Even the application process felt like it was happening to someone else. It was unimaginable that there would be any consequences to filling out the forms and writing the essay. She applied to only one place—the University of Texas at Austin—and got in. By law. Everyone in the top ten percent of their Texas high school did.
Penny’s new phone chimed next to her on the bed. It was Mark.
Good luck baby!
Text me when you get there!
Penny rolled onto her back and smiled. She considered what to write back. The screen beneath her thumbs was so shiny. God, her phone was beautiful. Rose gold, in a black rubber case that read, Whatever, Whatever, Whatever, it was easily nicer than anything she’d ever owned. She wiped down a smudge with her T-shirt. It was way too pretty to be desecrated with nudes. Especially with a 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution at 458ppi. Penny sent a generic smile emoji back.
She went downstairs. While Penny’s walls were bare, every other surface in Celeste’s home, much like her car or her desk at work, was covered with keepsakes.
According to Penny, her mom wasn’t very mom-like, much less Asian-mom-like. It wasn’t solely that she dressed like a fashion blogger and was younger than other moms. Celeste didn’t monitor Penny’s homework or insist on piano lessons. Okay, so maybe Penny’s idea of an Asian mom came from the movies, but she hadn’t grown up with a lot of Asians in her life. Let alone Koreans specifically. Penny had a Korean name and it was bogus. It was “Penny”—not even Penelope—spelled out phonetically in Korean characters so it didn’t actually mean anything.
When she was three they’d visited her grandparents in Seoul, but she’d been too little to remember anything and they’d never gone back. Celeste did, however, dedicate a Korean corner in her home. An altar of sorts. It included a miniature Korean flag and a framed poster of the 1988 Olympics with the cartoon tiger mascot. There was also a small laminated picture of the pop star Rain in a white suit from years before he went into the military for mandatory service. The first time Penny’s friend Angie came over, she asked her if it was a photo of her brother.
Elsewhere in the house there were snow globes galore, Eiffel Towers of varying sizes and framed pictures of World-Famous Art—two renditions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (one on a tea towel), Monet’s water lilies, and several of Degas’s blurry ballerinas. Penny called the whole lot “fridge magnet art.” Stuff you’d seen enough times that you could imagine the factory workers in China rolling their eyes about having to keep churning it out.
The only memento Penny prized was a framed picture of her parents. She’d carefully wrapped it in a T-shirt and stowed it in her backpack to bring to school. It was the only photo she had of them, possibly the only one in existence, and Penny treasured it. It was the source of 50 percent of the material in her “dad” dossier. Other information included: