As a native of California, where a cloudy day makes the TV news, Rafferty is thrilled by Thailand’s enormous weather. Its sheer magnitude seems a kind of wealth, spending itself extravagantly day after day: thunderous rain, blinding heat, clouds as greasy and dark as oil shale. Nothing makes him happier than being in his apartment with Miaow, all the lights on in midafternoon, as monsoon-force winds lash the rain around and rattle the glass door to the balcony.
And now Rose will be there, too. As his wife.
The lie he told Rose in bed that morning nags at him. In fact, he had tried to find his father. Within two weeks of his graduation from UCLA, he had returned to Lancaster and ransacked his father’s metal box. Two days later he was on a plane to Hong Kong. Once there, he used the decades-old names and addresses he had copied into his notebook to track his father across China, where he ultimately found the woman-fat and blowsy now-for whose decades-old memory Frank Rafferty had left his wife and son behind.
His father had refused to see him.
The only thing Rafferty owes his father is that the search had brought him to Asia, where he has been more or less ever since.
Frank has a yellow heart, his fierce mother had said, the one time she allowed Rafferty to raise the subject of his father’s disappearance. At the time he’d thought she meant he was a coward. Only after he realized that he, too, had a yellow heart did he grasp that his father simply loved Asia, could not live anywhere but Asia. Rafferty’s mother, half Filipina herself, had understood her husband, although that didn’t stop her from hating him later, with that special talent for hatred that Filipinos carry in their blood, mixed in with gaiety and music.
A yellow heart, he thinks.
“Sawadee, kha,” someone says behind him. He turns to see a girl, perhaps ten years old. She wears a pair of shorts more or less the same yellow as the pastries behind the glass and a much-laundered T-shirt that says happy together above a picture of two fat hippies whom Rafferty recognizes as the singers in an old-time band called the Turtles. She is as brown as a paper bag.
“Sawadee, khrap,” Rafferty says. “Caffee lon, okay?”
“One hot coffee,” Happy Together says. “It will coming up.” She looks past him at the rain, and her lips move experimentally. Then she narrows her eyes and takes the plunge. “Have raining, yes?”
“Have raining, yes,” Rafferty says. “Have raining mak-mak.” The Thai phrase for “a lot.”
“Hokay,” Happy Together says proudly. “Talking English, na?”
“More or less. You speak it well.”
“Ho, no,” she says. “Only little bit.” It sounds like “leeten bit.” “Where you come from?”
“U.S.A.”
She raises an index finger as though she is going to lecture him, but the message is mathematical. She says, “U.S.A. numbah one.”
“No,” Rafferty says. “Thailand is number one.”
“Hah.” Her grin is enormously white. He has passed the national test. “Caffee lon now.” She disappears behind the counter, only the top of her head visible. She is no taller than Miaow.
Miaow, he thinks. Miaow is Rafferty’s family now. Rose is Rafferty’s family now. It has taken him years to assemble a home, and now he has one. I’m really hasip-hasip now, he thinks. I have a Thai family. With his mother’s Filipina blood evident in the high bones of his face and his straight black hair, he has often been mistaken for half Thai, although he’s only one-quarter Asian. Still, he thinks, he’s genetically entitled to his yellow heart.
The coffee, when it is slapped down in front of him, is thick enough to whip. He lifts the heavy china mug and stares at the rain.
“Think too much,” Happy Together says, standing beside him. “Think too much, no good.”
“Thinking about good things,” Rafferty says. “I’ve got a little girl at home just like you.”
“Thai girl?” Happy Together gives the operatic rain a disdainful glance. She’s used to it.
“One hundred percent,” Rafferty says.
Happy Together glances at his face, looks again. “You, what? Hasiphasip?”
“Part Filipino.”
“I know where Pipinenes are,” she says, pointing more or less east. “Over there.” It comes out “Oweh dah.”
“My daughter’s smart, too.”
She thinks for a second, pushing her lower lip out. “Some farang no have baby, right?”
“Right.” He has been asked this question before. Most Thais cannot imagine an adult choosing not to have children.
“Why? Why not have baby? No have baby, not happy.”
“I don’t know. But you’re right. Babies are necessary.”
Happy Together fills her cheeks with air as she checks the dictionary in her head and then squints at him. “You say what?”
“Necessary,” Rafferty repeats, following it with the Thai word.
“Word too big,” she says decisively.
“Not for you. You’re smart.”
She goes up on tiptoes. “You know twelve times twelve?”
“One hundred thirty-eight.”
“Ho.” She punches him on the leg, hard enough to raise a lump. “You joking me.”
“See how smart you are? And look, you’ve already got your own shop.”
She balls her fist to punch him again and thinks better of it. Maybe her hand hurts. “My mama make shop. But I make caffee. Good, na?”
“Excellent.” Rafferty brings the cup to his lips and watches as someone comes into sight through the window, shrouded in rain. A woman, her clothes pasted to her slender form. She does not keep her head down against the downpour but shields her eyes with a hand, obviously looking for something or someone. He watches idly for a moment, wondering why she hasn’t ducked inside to wait out the storm, and then, with a start, realizes who she is.
He pushes back his stool. “How many baht?” he asks Happy Together.
“Twenty. Caffee no good?”
The girl has passed from sight. So he was right; she had reversed direction, then turned around and followed him again. “It’s excellent,” he says. “But I just saw someone I know.” He gives Happy Together a bright blue fifty-baht note and hurries out into the rain.
The moment he sets foot on the street, a sheet of lightning flattens everything, turning the raindrops ice-white and freezing them in midfall. The boom that follows feels like his own skull crumpling. He starts walking, as fast as he can without breaking into a run, waiting for the girl’s form to solidify through the gray curtain in front of him.
He had meant to tell Prettyman to call off the trackers. He decided over his morning coffee to drop the book idea as too risky for someone with a wife and child, kicking off the first day of his new life with a firm resolve that made him feel briefly adult, despite a twinge of resentment; the book’s topic had interested him. But now things were different. He had responsibilities. He’d write magazine articles. He’d review books-that sounded safe. Maybe he’d do advertising copy.
The prospect had all the allure of a glass of warm milk, but his wife and daughter would be happier. He and Rose would economize; they’d pay Miaow’s tuition, and then worry about everything else. He’d left the apartment with every intention of abandoning the project. Then he had been distracted, thinking about the conversation about Elson, and he’d forgotten to tell Prettyman he was quitting.
Or perhaps, he acknowledges, he likes the excitement. Or maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the advance money.
But now he can clear it up.