“I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”
“Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”
Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”
“They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”
“Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”
“Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”
Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.
“Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.
“You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”
“He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.
It is almost seven by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.
But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.
This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.
“That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That-that American-”
Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.
“It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”
“It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.
And stares down into it, still as stone.
Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”
16
"She’s your sister,” Frank says. “Say hello, Ming Li.” From beside Frank, Ming Li says, deadpan, “Hello,
Ming Li.” She sounds as if she finds nothing out of the ordinary, as if meeting her half brother for the first time in an abandoned garage, after she’s had someone cave his head in and he’s tried to assault their father, is nothing to get ruffled about.
Rafferty is pinned to the chair again, his hands cuffed behind him. His launch toward his father had been aborted by Leung’s hand grabbing his shirt. He’d belly flopped on the cement floor, gasping for breath with the chair flat on its back behind him, as the Chinese man snapped the cuffs back on, set the chair upright, and plopped Rafferty into it as though he were no heavier than a puppy. Leung is a lot faster than Rafferty.
“I should have known,” Rafferty says. He’s so angry at himself he feels like spitting in his own lap. “She looks as much like you as it’s possible for a beautiful Asian woman to look.”
“Looks like you, too,” Frank says. “It’s the bone structure.” He is sitting in a chair about a yard away from Rafferty, his face haloed by a fringe of white hair. Ming Li stands beside him, a pale hand resting on his shoulder.
Rafferty regards Ming Li, who gives him a cool downward gaze. “You and I don’t look alike,” he says to Frank.
Frank shrugs. “You may not want my bone structure,” he says, “but you’ve got it.”
“I hope that’s all we’ve got in common.”
Frank pushes his chair back a couple of inches. “Why don’t we postpone all that for now? Recriminations and hurt feelings and so forth. It’s not very appealing under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t them. I’ve kept up with you, Poke-from a distance, obviously. I’ve read your books, checked into what you’re up to here in Bangkok. You’re making a nice life for yourself, aren’t you?”
“Checked how?”
Frank shrugs again. “Usual channels.” Except for a slight stoop, a lot of missing hair, and that shuffling walk, he looks surprisingly like the man Rafferty remembers from all those years ago. He has to be in his seventies, but time has barely laid a glove on him. It strikes Rafferty for the hundredth time that serenity and selfishness aren’t that dissimilar. They both keep people young. His mother, even with her Filipina blood, has aged much more than his father has.
Rafferty says, “I don’t know what ‘usual’ means to you. I don’t know anything about you at all. And I didn’t get much help from that woman in Shanghai-”
“Ming Li’s mother,” Frank says evenly.
“-from Ming Li’s mother. And of course you couldn’t be bothered, could you? You were busy or something.”
“I was impressed you’d found us.”
“Well, that makes me feel warm all over. Imagine what a home run it would have been if you’d said it in person.” He shifts in the chair. “You can take the cuffs off.”
“You’re sure?” Frank seems amused, and Rafferty realizes he has seen precisely the same expression on Ming Li’s face.
“It was an impulse. It’s passed. I’d still like to bust you one, but you’re safe in front of your daughter.”
Ming Li laughs, and after a long moment Frank joins her. “Go ahead,” she says. “Hit him. Frank gets hit a lot.”
“I’d imagine.”
“Get the cuffs off, Leung. He’s going to be nice.” Frank watches as Leung emerges from the shadows to move behind Rafferty and free his wrists.
“Another of yours?” Poke rubs his hands together to restore circulation.
“No. He has the misfortune to be a friend.”
“No problem,” Leung says. He twirls the cuffs around his index finger. He has high Tibetan cheekbones, narrow eyes of a startlingly pale brown, and a wide mouth that smiles easily, although the smile does not make him look any more cheerful. For all the effect it has on his eyes, it might as well be on someone else’s face.
Rafferty looks at Leung’s smiling, cheerless expression and recognizes one of the people who don’t like other humans because they’ve seen too much of them. This is the group from which professional killers are recruited. “Aside from all the obvious reasons,” Rafferty asks, “why is it a misfortune to be your friend?”