Sami and I lit candles on a chocolate cake and sang “Happy Birthday.” Eileen blushed and smiled wordlessly. Then Sami brought out her present. At the sight of the watch, Eileen said to her, “Thank you, dear. But you shouldn’t have spent so much. This must be outrageously expensive.” She didn’t try it on, but instead put it aside and let it lie in the velveteen case with the lid open.
I then handed her the tiny red envelope containing the earrings. “Please take this as a token of my gratitude,” I said.
“You bought this for me?” Eileen exclaimed as she opened it. “You’re so kind. Thank you!” She dangled the earrings before her daughter. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Sure they are.” The girl grimaced and ducked her head to avoid seeing Eileen’s happy face. She glanced at her own gift lying beyond her mother’s elbow. I was embarrassed.
Color crept into Eileen’s cheeks and her neck turned pinkish. For a moment her eyes wavered, then blazed at me. Her fingers never stopped fondling the earrings. I guessed that if Sami had not been there, Eileen might have tried them on, though the holes in her earlobes might no longer accommodate the wires.
“When’s your birthday, Dave?” she asked.
“October twenty-third.”
“Ah, just two months away. I’ll mark my calendar and we’ll celebrate.”
Her words warmed me because they implied she would still employ me after Sami’s fall semester started. I needed the income. I noticed Sami observing me intently; she must have surmised my thoughts. I said to her, “So you’ll have to bear with me a little longer.”
“I won’t give up on you,” she said, then grinned almost fiercely, her small eyeteeth sticking out.
Not knowing what to make of that, I turned to Eileen. “Please don’t trouble yourself about my birthday.”
“Come on, you’ll help Sami go through the college applications, won’t you?”
“Sure, I’ll be happy to do that.”
“Then you mustn’t abandon us.”
Sami stood and turned away as if in a sulk. Eileen grasped her daughter’s wrist and asked, “Why are you leaving?”
“I have a migraine and I need to be alone.” She shook off her mother’s grip and with a pout made for her room.
Eileen said to me, “Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.”
And then something — a cup or a bottle — shattered on the floor of Sami’s room. The thought of her late father hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
Sami began volunteering on Friday evenings at a nursing home on Forty-fifth Avenue, doing laundry, a service project that she could include on her college applications. She said the laundry room smelled like vomit. However, the old people liked her, because unlike some of the staff members, she didn’t yell at them. She often talked to me about the place and claimed she’d rather kill herself than go to a nursing home when she was old. Once, the night-shift supervisor asked her to help towel-bathe some bedridden old women. Her job was to hold their shoulders while a nurse rubbed and washed their backs, some of which were spotted with sores. One patient, shrunken like a skeleton, screamed in Cantonese, which Sami didn’t need to understand to know the crone was cursing her. Another one, who had a full head of white hair, sobbed the whole time and whined, “Such a nuisance. I better die soon!” Sami held her breath against their odors of sweat and urine.
She told her mother of the same experiences. Eileen was worried, afraid that her daughter might be more upset than she acknowledged, and asked me if Sami should quit. I assured her that Sami would be all right as long as she could talk it out. In fact, the girl wasn’t that fragile, though she seemed to lack willpower. I believed the service would toughen her up a little, and also she could ask the nursing home’s manager for a letter of recommendation, which might help distinguish her college applications. Eileen agreed.
When one of Eileen’s employees took a week off to attend his son’s wedding in Minneapolis, I offered to help in the afternoons. I didn’t know how to operate the printing machine or the computer programs, so I mainly did photocopying and other clerical jobs. One afternoon Mr. Feng dropped in and began to bicker with Eileen about his novel. I was collating a handout in the inner room, where the company’s motto was inscribed on two scrolls hung vertically on the walclass="underline" “To Publish Books by Anyone / To Disseminate Stories of Everyman.”
“No, no, the first printing should be at least one thousand copies,” I heard Mr. Feng say in a raspy voice. I looked over at him and Eileen, both seated at the long table with teacups in front of them. The old man held his chin in his knotted hand, his elbow on the tabletop.
“Please be reasonable,” Eileen said. “We can’t possibly sell that many copies, and neither do we have the storage space for them.”
“How many copies do you plan to bring out, then?”
“Two hundred at most.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“We’ve never done more than two hundred for a novel. If you want us to print more, you should deposit a sum for the production cost.”
“What are you driving at?” The old man sat back as if in horror.
“You should buy the extra copies you’ve ordered.”
“I’ve no cash on hand at the moment.”
“Truth be told, we cannot lose too much money on this book.”
Mr. Feng coughed into his fist. He sighed. “Well, I guess I must bow to reality here. I used to have eighty thousand copies for a first run.”
“That was back in China. Don’t be angry with me, Old Feng. If there’s the need, we can always rush to print extra copies.”
“All right. I’ll hold you to that.”
“You have my word.”
With puffy cheeks, the old man slouched out the door. Eileen heaved a long sigh and massaged her temples with her thumb and forefinger. Outside, a truck was unloading steaming-hot asphalt on the street, flashing its lights and sounding warning beeps, while a worker in a hard hat directed the traffic with an orange flag.
I wondered how long Eileen could hold on to a publishing business that was unprofitable and too much for her to manage alone.
One afternoon in late September I sprained my ankle while playing tennis with Avtar. For several days I couldn’t go to the Mins’, so Sami came over to take her lessons. She was excited to be in my studio apartment, which in spite of its shabbiness provided an intimate setting for the two of us. Her brown eyes were often fixed on me when I spoke to her. She laughed freely and loudly. As if we had known each other for years, she would pat my arm, and once she even pinched my cheek when I called her “kiddo.” She worked less than before and talked more, though time and again I managed to bring her back to her textbooks. She sniffed the air, her pinkish nostrils twitching a little, and said, “Hm. I like the smell of your room.”
One night I couldn’t find my black undershirt. I’d worn it three days before and had dropped it beside my laundry basket, which was overfull. Nobody but Sami had been to my apartment that week. The thought that she had taken it alarmed me, because she was just a kid, and because I’d never known any woman to be fond of my smell. My first girlfriend said I stank to high heaven and always made me shower before bed. She wouldn’t even mix her laundry with mine. My second girlfriend never complained, so I seldom used deodorant.
Then Eileen phoned and said she didn’t feel comfortable with her daughter away from home in the evenings. My ankle was improving, so I agreed to return our sessions to their home. I missed her cooking. But to my surprise, the next afternoon Eileen appeared at my apartment in person, carrying a basket of fruits — tangerines, plums, apples, and pears. She apologized for not warning me. I was elated; for days my mind had been straying to her. She sat as I made her herbal tea. Her face, a bit tilted, shone with happiness.