by Jackie Lau
As Jo looked around at her family, all excited to hear that she’d begun dating again, she made a resolution.
She’d spent two years in love with Zach, and he was never going to want another relationship, that much was obvious. Two years was a lot of time to waste on a man who wouldn’t love her back.
Sure, there were lots of crappy men out there, and sure, Mosquito Bay wasn’t a big town, but she wasn’t restricted to the men in Mosquito Bay, and maybe she’d get lucky, like the other members of her family.
It was possible, wasn’t it?
She would not settle, like she had with Matt. She would keep her expectations firmly intact, thank you very much, and hope she found a guy similar to Zach, but emotionally available, or whatever you called it.
She’d enjoy her “dates” with Zach Wong, but that was only temporary.
After January 25, she’d do her best to finally move on.
Chapter 3
“By the way, I have a girlfriend.” Zach spoke nonchalantly as he dug into his fried rice, but he couldn’t help smiling as he anticipated his family’s reaction. He was at his parents’ place for Sunday dinner, along with his grandparents and Amber.
Sure enough, his announcement had quite an impact.
“You do?” Ah Ma said, practically shouting.
“How wonderful,” Mom said. “Who is she?”
“Jo MacGregor.”
“You two have been friends for a while, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and we decided...well...that we have other feelings for each other, too.” He wasn’t his smoothest today.
“Invite her next Sunday,” Ah Ma said. “I will make her a nice meal.”
Dad gave his mother a look. “You will scare her away with your horrible cooking.”
“I tease! You knew I was teasing, Zach, didn’t you?”
“I’m not having her over next Sunday,” Zach said. “She can meet everyone at Chinese New Year the following weekend, when Greg and Nick are in town.”
“Not that we haven’t all met her before,” Mom said, “but usually she’s examining my teeth when I see her.”
“I will get out my list of questions!” Ah Ma said gleefully. “Sixty-nine questions to ask future granddaughter-in-law.”
Zach choked on his rice. For multiple reasons.
“What is wrong?” Ah Ma asked.
“Sixty-nine questions,” Amber said. “That’s, um, an awful lot.”
“Sixty-nine. It is a good number, isn’t it? It always makes people laugh when I say it, so I think it must be a good number.”
Zach and Amber looked at each other.
“Um,” Zach said.
“Do you want to tell her?” Amber asked.
“No, thank you.”
“What are you not telling me?” Ah Ma demanded. “What is wrong with sixty-nine? Is it some weird sex thing?”
“I don’t know if I’d say weird...” Dad began.
“Ah, it is a normal sex thing?”
“It’s perfectly normal,” Mom said.
Zach was having flashbacks to the sex-ed talks his parents had given him when he was a preteen. He supposed he was grateful for those, but he didn’t really want to think about that now.
“In fact,” Mom continued, “Amber came home from school one day—I think she was eleven—and asked me what it was.”
Everyone looked at Amber, and Zach couldn’t help smirking, just a tiny bit, at his sister’s discomfort.
“You told her?” Ah Ma said. “Why won’t you tell me?”
“You can look it up on the internet,” Dad said.
“I don’t know how to use the internet.”
“I do,” said Ah Yeh, who had been silent up until this point.
“All you know how to do is order things we don’t need. You know what arrived yesterday?” Ah Ma pointed at her husband but looked at her son. “An avocado slicer, an egg slicer, and a cake decorating set. Why do we need those things? He doesn’t even like boiled eggs. Or cake.”
“I like cake.” Ah Yeh crossed his arms over his chest. “I just don’t like that dry vanilla cake you buy from the grocery store.”
“Wah, that is the best. So cheap!” Ah Ma said. “But this is just a distraction from my question. What is sixty-nine? I don’t want to use the internet to find out.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s best you don’t use the internet for that.” Dad looked pointedly at Ah Yeh. “You might find porn, and I don’t want to have to fix your computer because you got a virus from looking at porn again.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Ah Yeh said.
On the plus side, no one was talking about Zach marrying Jo now—Ah Ma’s comment about her being a “future daughter-in-law” was the main reason he’d choked on his rice.
But when he got home, he’d have to scrub this conversation from his brain.
* * *
Tuesday evening, Zach sat in Wong’s Wok, waiting for Jo to arrive.
The reason for this choice in venue was simple: the new owners of Wong’s Wok—though Zach should probably stop thinking of them as “new,” seeing as they’d run the place for twenty years—were friends with his family, and they would almost certainly tell his parents or grandparents that Zach had been here with Jo. Though he’d already told his family about his “girlfriend,” they hadn’t heard it from any other source—surprisingly, no one had told them about the ice cream sundae incident. This would make it look more real.
Jo walked into the restaurant a few minutes later. She removed her winter coat and toque, then sat across the table from him and smiled.
For a moment, Zach was unable to speak. He was transfixed by her smile. Good advertising for a dentist to have a nice smile, he supposed.
Then he moved his gaze lower. She was wearing a sweater that graded from light blue at the top to dark blue at the bottom. It showed more cleavage than her usual clothes, and those buttons sure were tempting.
Stop it, Zach.
He would not ogle his friend.
“Hey,” he said at last, trying to sound casual.
“Hey, Zach. How’s your week been?”
“A bit rough waking up for early morning basketball practice.” He coached the senior boys’ team. “And...”
Why couldn’t he find his words? This wasn’t like him.
But Jo really did look good today. She’d looked good on Saturday, too, but he hadn’t found himself stunned into silence.
What was wrong with him? He’d seen her many, many times over the past few years. Why was it different now that they were supposedly in a relationship? They’d both known it was fake from the start.
He shook his head to clear it, then looked around the restaurant. There were red lanterns and other decorations on the walls for the upcoming holiday.
“Should I bring anything when I come to your parents’ house for Chinese New Year?” Jo asked. “The red envelopes—how do they work? I’m sure I could get some online.”
Zach wasn’t sure how most people celebrated Chinese New Year, since he knew so few people of Chinese descent. He didn’t know which things his family did were “normal” and which were just his family—other than Picitonary—and what would vary depending on where you were from in China.
He felt like he should be aware of these things, but he’d grown up in a small town where more than ninety-five percent of the people were white, like Jo. His father had spent most of his life in the same small town.
“You don’t have to bring red envelopes,” he said. “They contain money, and they’re given to the younger generation. My grandparents and parents give them to us. I don’t know when we’ll become old enough for that to stop, but it hasn’t happened yet, and none of my siblings have kids.”
“Okay,” Jo said. “Is there anything I can bring food-wise?”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to.”
“I feel like I should.”
“Some fruit, if you like, but it’s not a big deal,
don’t worry.”
“I want to make a good impression on my fake prospective in-laws.” She smiled at him again, and he felt a strange jittery sensation in his stomach.
He reached forward and took her hand in his. “Thank you for doing this. I know it’s a hassle.”
“It’s not a hassle to occasionally have dinner together and accompany you to a family event.”
He always felt comfortable with Jo, content when they were together. Not that anyone would notice the difference when he was with her, since that was the sort of image he always projected; it was what people expected of him.
But sometimes, that image was a bit of an act.
With her, though, it never was.
“Zachary!” Mrs. Tan came over to their table. “Long time since you came here.”
Zach felt a touch of guilt. He came to the restaurant maybe once a month, though perhaps it had been two months now.
“Dr. MacGregor.” Mrs. Tan smiled at Jo. “I have appointment next week. Hope I have flossed enough! Are you two...” Her gaze traveled from Jo to Zach, then down to the table, where his hand was still covering hers.
Huh. He’d completely forgotten about that, as though it felt natural to hold her hand.
“Yes,” Jo said, beaming at Mrs. Tan before shooting him a lovesick gaze. She really was a good actor. He hadn’t expected that of her.
Zach ordered egg rolls and chow mein; Jo ordered ginger beef.
“It’s been my favorite since I was little,” she told him after Mrs. Tan left. “I’ve never seen it at another Chinese restaurant.”
“It was added to the menu in nineteen seventy-eight,” he said. “After The Trip.”
“The Trip?”
Apparently he’d never told her about this before. “The restaurant was open six days a week from the time my grandparents came here in the mid-sixties. They’d never taken more than two days off until The Trip—it was the only family vacation they had after moving to Canada.”
Zach had heard tales of The Trip many, many times. From his grandparents, his father, and his aunt. Everyone remembered it a little differently, and they’d regularly reminisce about it at family meals. At some point he’d become sick of hearing about it—couldn’t his family think of any other stories to tell?—but he smiled at the thought of telling Jo.
“For years, Ah Yeh planned this trip,” he said. “A cross-country road trip out to Alberta. He’d seen pictures of Lake Louise in a magazine once, and he’d wanted to go to Banff ever since. Along the way, he planned to stop at every Chinese restaurant he could find. Research, he said. He called it a business trip, which made Dad and Aunt Cheryl roll their eyes. Anyway, in nineteen seventy-eight, before my father’s final year of high school, they closed down the restaurant for a full month and finally went. Ginger beef was on the menu at many of the Chinese restaurants in the Prairies, and it seemed popular. Ah Yeh talked to the owners at every restaurant. They were usually happy to chat with someone else who was Chinese, and he convinced one of the cooks to show him how to make it. My grandpa did the cooking at Wong’s Wok—my grandma is terrible in the kitchen, and she ran the front of the restaurant.”
“Is ginger beef from a particular region in China?”
Zach shook his head. “It was supposedly invented at the Silver Inn in Alberta in nineteen seventy-three. A Chinese-Canadian dish.”
“So it’s not authentic?”
“Don’t get my grandfather started on ‘authenticity,’” Zach said. “These small-town Chinese restaurants in North America are kind of their own type of cuisine, adapted to fit the tastes of the people in the area. Egg rolls, General Tso's chicken, and such. In the Prairies, they have ginger beef, and in Thunder Bay, they have a rib dish. My grandparents put that on the menu, too, but I think the Tans took them off. In Newfoundland—my grandparents went there after they retired—chow mein is made with cabbage because it used to be difficult to get the noodles there, so they had to make changes.”
It was interesting how these immigrant families, many with limited English skills, had managed to make these businesses survive. Though whenever his dad talked about The Trip, he sounded like a cool teenager who didn’t want to be trapped in a van with his family for half his summer vacation. His father had recently started dating his mother, and they’d been devastated at the thought of spending the summer apart.
“So, yeah,” Zach said. “That’s why there’s ginger beef on the menu.”
“Were your grandparents upset that neither of their children wanted to take over the family business?”
“They encouraged my dad and my aunt to go to university, to get good degrees so they wouldn’t have to work at a restaurant. Running Wong’s Wok was hard work—they were always there, except for that one trip out west. Still, I think they were a little disappointed they had to sell the restaurant out of the family, even if they never said so.” His father was a pharmacist, and Aunt Cheryl worked in finance on the other side of the country.
Their food arrived a few minutes later, and Zach didn’t immediately take a bite. Instead, he watched as Jo speared a piece of deep-fried beef, covered in dark sauce, with her fork and popped it into her mouth.
“Mmm,” she said, and for some reason, it made blood rush to his cock.
What was wrong with him? It was just Jo eating. Nothing special.
A drop of sauce clung to the corner of her lip. He was about to reach over to wipe it off, then decided that would be too intimate. He pointed to the corner of his own mouth. “You have some sauce...there.”
She swiped at the other corner of her mouth.
“No, on your left side.”
She swiped the sauce off and wiped it on her napkin, but he wished he’d gotten a chance to suck it off her finger instead. His body didn’t seem to have gotten the message that this relationship was fake. He needed to have a few words with it in his stern teacher voice.
“Thank you for telling me the history of it,” she said. “I never knew.” Then she got a gleam in her eye. Why, it was almost a wicked gleam—which wasn’t like Jo at all. “Can you make this for me at home, sweetie? Afterward, I’ll...” She gave him a suggestive wink.
She was just playing around, acting the part. But his body responded nonetheless.
“I’ll ask my grandfather to teach me,” he said hoarsely. “Just for you, darling.” He emphasized the last word, as Mrs. Tan was walking by.
“Everything good?” Mrs. Tan asked.
“Delicious, thank you.” Jo smiled.
“Ungh,” Zach said. “I mean, it’s delicious.”
“You haven’t started eating,” Jo pointed out.
“Yes, but I know it’s going to be delicious.”
He finally had a bite, and it was, indeed, good. He and Jo ate in companionable silence for a while, and then she mentioned the Leafs. It was the sort of thing they’d usually talk about. There were no wicked gleams or winks.
When Mrs. Tan brought out the bill with two fortune cookies on top, Zach reached for it before Jo could.
“I’m paying,” he said.
“No, you paid last time.”
Before he knew what was happening, Jo had grabbed the bill. She took out her credit card and held it out to Mrs. Tan.
“I insist,” Jo said, turning back to him.
Well, he supposed he could allow her this, even though he really ought to be paying, because he was the one who’d roped her into this fake relationship.
After Mrs. Tan left, they each took a fortune cookie. Zach opened up the package, snapped the cookie in half, and pulled out the fortunes. Plural.
“I got two.” He and his siblings had considered that good luck back in the day.
The first fortune: You will find romance in unexpected places. Lucky numbers: 7, 10, 28, 63, 45
“What does it say?” Jo asked.
He shifted the small slip of paper to the middle of the table and turned it around. Jo leaned closer. Her hair smelled faintly of vanilla, and he want
ed to bury his head in it.
Probably that fortune was getting to his mind.
The second fortune said: Don’t be stupid. Lucky numbers: 18, 23, 2, 78, 6.
What did it all mean? That he would find love somewhere unexpected—frankly any kind of love and romance would be unexpected at this point—and he shouldn’t be stupid about it? Or would it be stupid if he found romance in an unexpected place?
Well, in truth, it would be stupid to pay attention to the fortunes in a cookie.
He popped half the cookie in his mouth as Jo opened hers up. When she read her message, her eyebrows shot up, and then she started laughing.
“What is it?” he asked.
She held up the fortune so he could read it.
Brush your teeth. Lucky numbers: 69, 23, 45, 1, 15.
Zach couldn’t help the strangled noise that escaped his throat when he saw the number 69, recalling the conversation with his family, then quickly pushed it out of his mind and focused on the first part of the fortune.
“It’s like the fortune cookie gods know I’m a dentist,” Jo said. “Terrifying, isn’t it?”
“Or maybe they could tell that you haven’t been brushing your teeth.”
She looked affronted. “Of course I brush my teeth. How dare you!”
After tossing her fortune on her plate, Jo ate her cookie, and Zach found himself staring at her mouth again.
Hmm. This really would be an unexpected place to find romance...
He quickly dismissed the thought.
* * *
“You and Jo MacGregor, eh?” Shawn Little walked into the room where Zach taught grade ten science at the end of the day. The students had just filed out the door, and Zach was tidying up a few things.
Shawn taught phys ed and health. He was Zach’s closest friend at Mosquito Bay Secondary School, and Zach had planned to tell him the truth. Just Shawn, no one else.
He beckoned his friend closer to the lab counter.
“It’s a ruse,” Zach said. “We’re pretending we’re together so my parents and grandparents don’t get up to more matchmaking, especially with Chinese New Year approaching.”