“You’ll meet someone who’s right for you,” I said, and gave his arm a squeeze.
He nodded and took a deep breath, as if to compose himself. “That’s what I want more than anything else.”
A tear meandered down his cheek and I dabbed it away. Terri took the worn tissue from my hand and finished it off by blowing his nose.
“It’s not as if I’m asking for the world. Then again, who knows?” He shrugged and tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. “What I want exactly is what you have with Santou. You don’t know how lucky you are to have a true-blue guy who loves you. Believe me, they’re difficult to find.”
He was right. I counted my blessings again that Jake had been saved, as Terri pulled out his compact and fixed his makeup.
“It’s a little too early to hit the clubs. Do you mind if we stroll through Chinatown for a while?” he asked.
“That sounds good to me,” I agreed.
We crossed Broadway, also known as the Marco Polo Zone, and were whisked into a foreign land without having ever set foot in a plane. This was the area of San Francisco that I loved best. All five senses clashed in an orgy of sights, sounds, and fragrances as we found ourselves surrounded by Chinese bookstores, produce stands, pagoda-topped lampposts, and movie theaters. The nasal singsong jabber of Cantonese droned in our ears, while the scrumptious scent of barbecued pork made me very nearly forget that I’d already eaten dinner.
Grant Street buzzed on this Saturday night, its energy a neon high. Signs enticed us to stop in front of every store window, where Terri oohed and ahhed over tacky souvenirs ranging from Tweety Bird watches to bamboo back scratchers and chirping metal crickets, all authentically made in Taiwan. Not to be passed up were the “must have” laughing Buddha figurines offered at a “one time” low price of $4.99 a pop. Meanwhile, sidewalk carts stood piled high with every plastic and rubber item made under the sun, each of which was going, going, gone for the bargain price of under five bucks. It was pure catnip for tourists, who eagerly scooped them up.
Terri contained himself as we passed by two competing music shops, one of which blasted “Jenny from the Block” while the other offered the more traditional, all-time Chinese favorite, “Respect 4 Da Chopstick Hip Hop.”
It was only as we came upon a Hong Kong–style dress store that Terri finally lost control.
“Just remember, shopping is always the best way to get rid of the blues. It would do you a world of good to follow that philosophy,” he advised.
By the time we walked out, Terri had shed his leather and in its place donned sequins and silk. He now wore a tight-fitting, high-collared, pink cheongsam dress with a hot-to-trot dragon embroidered down the front. Being the Madonna of quick fashion change, Terri looked nothing less than absolutely stunning.
We soon found ourselves at the corner of Washington and Grant, standing in front of a tiny, dark dive. Above the door was a weary neon sign bearing the single word BUDDHA.
“I should have known this was where we would end up. What is it with you and these kinds of places?” Terri asked, crinkling his nose.
“They’ve got character,” I replied with a grin.
“Characters are more like it—primarily the creepy four-legged kind. All right. Let’s go in and get this over with,” he acquiesced.
We stepped inside the hole in the wall and entered a room that was dusty and dank.
“Mmm, yes. I see what you mean. There’s something truly charming about a bar where the service is surly and there are rarely more than two customers at a time, neither of whom usually speaks English. Then, of course, there’s the background music. It’s always either Kenny Rogers croaking his way through ‘Ruby’or Frank Sinatra crooning ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,’” Terri summed up. “Hand me a stack of those cheap paper squares that pass for napkins, will you?”
He placed a few under the leg of a wobbly stool and spread the rest across its seat. “What this place has is all the charm of an opium den, Rach.”
Okay. So he was right about that. But then there were also no tourists.
We sat under a dilapidated canopy that threatened to topple upon us at any moment. But that was nothing compared to the diminutive eighty-year-old behind the bar who wore a T-shirt that read, GO AHEAD. MAKE MY DAY.
“Wouldn’t you know? It’s Saturday night and look who I get: the female John Wayne and Suzie Wong, herself,” she needled in a thick Chinese accent.
“How do you like that? I’ve never been compared to John Wayne before,” Terri wryly commented.
“Actually, I think she meant me,” I responded.
“Okay girls. What will it be?”
“Make mine a Campari and soda,” Terri replied.
“And I’ll have an Absolut martini with an olive.”
“Coming right up.”
The old woman set a couple of Buds on the bar, flicked off their caps, and slid them toward us.
“There you go.”
“Perfect,” I retorted.
She poured herself a Coke, and we all clinked drinks.
Mei Rose Chang was a one-of-a-kind piece of work. Aside from bartending, she used to regularly appear as an extra on the now defunct TV show Nash Bridges. However, we knew her best as our landlady.
“Tomorrow I cook a big meal and you watch. That way you learn to make good food,” she informed me.
“I can’t, Mei Rose. I already have other plans.”
“What other plans?” she asked suspiciously.
Mei Rose had been attempting to teach me to cook for months. So far, I had managed to find a convenient excuse to escape. I’d already told her that my idea of cooking was takeout, but she stubbornly refused to give up. She must have viewed me as her ultimate challenge.
“Terri and I are driving to Mendocino tomorrow. Have you ever been there?”
“Mendocino? That’s one place I don’t want to go. Grandmother was sent there as a mail-order bride soon after the Gold Rush. She sailed from China on a sampan that took over a year and a half to arrive. Grandfather had come to this country thinking he would find gold and strike it rich. But when the Gold Rush ended, he still hadn’t made a dime. Chinese people in Mendocino, they labored as water-slingers and cooks in lumber camps for little money. Grandfather, he worked his fingers to the bone cooking for loggers, while Grandmother took in sewing and laundry and raised eight kids. It was a hard, hard life,” Mei Rose related, with a sad shake of her head. “What you want to go there for, anyway?”
“I’m looking for a man that’s searching for butterflies.”
Mei Rose eyeballed me. “You one strange girl.”
Terri finished his beer, stood up, and smoothed the wrinkles from his dress.
“So is your friend here,” she added.
“And this dive is the Taj Mahal of bars,” Terri breezily retorted. “Just let me use the facilities and we’ll be on our way.”
Mei Rose pressed a buzzer under the counter and Terri pulled open a mesh wire door. The click, click, click of his high heels echoed as they went downstairs into the basement.
“I tell you once more only because I like you. Every girl need to know how to cook. Otherwise how you expect to keep that man of yours? You think you live on love alone? Pshaw!” She dismissed the idea with a brisk wave of her hand.
“Not all women have time to cook these days, Mei Rose,” I patiently tried to explain for the umpteenth time. “They have other things to do. That’s why there are restaurants.”
“Look at me. I do everything. You’re young and strong. You should do it, too. All I know is you better be careful, or you’re going to lose that man of yours.”
Hmm. I wondered if she knew something I didn’t—especially after having heard about Vincent.
“Plenty other women know how to make chow fun and keep their man happy. You better learn quick, or some clever girl will come along and steal him away from you.”
I fidgeted on the stool, finding that the subject m
ade me increasingly uncomfortable.
“You be smart and listen to what Mei Rose tell you. I take you shopping and teach you to cook. Otherwise, you end up alone in this world, or with that nutty friend of yours.”
I envisioned myself without Santou and nearly caved in to her demands.
What are you, crazy? Snap the hell out of it! my inner voice ranted, saving me at the last possible moment from the Sergeant Bilko of Chinese cooking.
“That would be great, Mei Rose. Only I’m way too busy right now and don’t have the time.”
But Mei Rose wasn’t about to go down without a fight. She skewered me with a laser-sharp glare, until I felt like an enormous butterfly pinned to the wall.
“Then you better make time, missy. I know what I’m talking about.”
It made me wonder what Mei Rose, herself, might have been through. All that saved me was the sound of Terri’s heels coming back up the stairs. I breathed a sigh of relief as he shut the wire mesh door behind him. Even so, I could feel Mei Rose’s words trailing behind us as we walked outside.
“I finally figured out why the walls and floors of her dungeon downstairs are painted blood red,” Terri confided. “It’s so Mei Rose can easily clean up the mess after knocking off those tenants that are late with their rent.”
“Thanks for the tip. Listen Terri, would you mind if I skipped the clubs tonight and headed back to Santou instead?”
Terri smoothed back my hair and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
“Of course not, Rach. I’d do the same thing if I were you. Everyone knows that clubs are mainly for people with nothing better to do.”
This time it was my turn to blink back tears. As long as Terri and I had each other, neither of us would ever be alone. Still, he deserved to find someone to love and make him happy.
“Then I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning,” I reminded him.
I watched as Terri strolled off. Then I turned and began to walk toward home.
I was deep in thought when a chill unexpectedly settled in my bones. I quickly looked up. Just ahead stood Old Saint Mary’s Church, famous for its brick bell tower. The time-piece on the tower’s front reported the hour to be ten o’clock. But it was the inscription chiseled in the bricks below that was darkly menacing: SON, OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL.
It was enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I quickened my pace with the feeling that mischief was afoot, just waiting to pounce.
As if on cue, the sound of steps swiftly approached from behind. However, I wasn’t prepared for the hand that roughly latched onto my shoulder, nor the object that was thrust into my side.
“Hey, babe. What’s the rush? You look too good to be all by your lonesome.”
Something metal bit through my clothes and the world changed gears, as everything began to move in slow motion. Even the streetlights flickered and blurred, just like the room lights in Krav Maga class. It was my nightmare all over again, except this time it was far too real. My pulse raced, fearing that the metal object pressing into me was a gun.
“L e t ’ s f i n d s o m e p l a c e q u i e t a n d d a r k w h e r e n o o n e w i l l b o t h e r u s.”
The words were drawn out and distorted as they reached my ears, like an old 45 record being played on 33 rpm.
“J u s t d o n ’t d o a n y t h i n g s t u p i d, a n d y o u w o n ’t g e t h u r t.”
The man pushed up against me. The rancid smell of his breath turned my stomach as his fingers bit into my skin and steered me toward an alley. At the same time, he removed the metal object from my side and reached for my purse. I glanced down and saw that he held a short bolt in his grip rather than a gun.
I didn’t stop to think, but acted solely on reflex. Dropping my head forward, I rammed it back as hard as I could, catching my assailant on the nose. His hand flew off my shoulder. I quickly whirled around and threw a punch to his solar plexus, followed by a painful jab against the temple. The next thing my attacker knew, he’d been thrown up against a wall.
Only then did I get a good look at him. Oh, shit. I was dealing with a street kid who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.
He clutched his chest and struggled for breath, all the while glaring at me like some poor puppy that had been wrongfully kicked. My fear instantly disappeared, replaced by a whopping sense of guilt. More than likely he was a runaway in need of money.
“Are you all right?” I asked, and took a step toward him.
“Just stay the hell away from me!” he warned, and ran off as fast as he could.
Damn it. What the hell else was I supposed to do? I thought. Let him mug me, or possibly worse?
But no matter how I tried to justify it, there was no escaping that I’d just beaten up a kid—one with a desperate look in his eyes. The incident haunted me the entire way home.
By the time I walked through the front door, I wanted nothing more than to fall into Santou’s arms and forget what had happened tonight. However, when I got upstairs, the television had been turned off and Jake was no longer in the living room. I tiptoed in and found him fast asleep on the bed. He lay so still that I could have sworn he was dead. Then I saw the two bottles of painkillers uncapped on the nightstand beside him.
I listened to the sound of his breathing, while holding my own. Each exhalation was painfully slow, each inhalation excruciatingly shallow.
But that wasn’t all. An empty bottle of scotch lay like a passed-out drunk on the floor, and I knew that his recovery still had a long way to go.
Five
I awoke to a gray, foggy day, wondering if I’d ever get used to the Bay Area weather. Rolling over, I tried to snuggle against Santou only to find he was no longer under the covers. Then I heard the thrum of the shower. The pipes behind the wall squeaked in protest as Jake turned off the water.
Adding his pillow to my own, I stretched my arms and legs, luxuriating in the extra few minutes to remain in bed. Then I caught sight of the scotch bottle on the floor, and remembered how I’d found Santou stoked to the gills on drugs and booze last night.
Jake slowly limped back into the room wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. An angry scar snaked out from beneath the terrycloth and ran down the length of his left leg. He followed my eyes with his own, probably having already looked at it a million times himself.
“I thought maybe I’d tell people that I got it fighting the war in Iraq. What do you think?”
“Maybe so,” I said and smiled.
“Talk about a downer. Terri told me yesterday that my scar’s going to clash with the red Speedo I was planning to wear this summer,” Santou caustically joked.
“So, how’s your head this morning?”
“Still there, as far as I can tell. Why?”
“Because I thought you might have tried to kill off all your brain cells last night.”
Jake looked at me without a word.
“The pills and booze? It’s got to stop.”
“Maybe you’ve just got to learn to live with it,” Santou peevishly snapped. A second later, he hung his head and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, chère. It’s just that they help me get through the day. Believe me, you don’t know what it’s like.”
“What I do know is that it’s been nine months since the crash. You should be off painkillers by now. For chrissakes, Jake. Face it. You’ve become addicted. It’s time you change doctors, start seeing a physical therapist on a regular basis, and clean up your act.”
“And maybe you should let me handle this in my own way and try being a little more patient. You have no idea what I’m going through, and this sure as hell doesn’t help.”
“Fine. I just don’t want to come home one day and find you dead on the floor, because I damn well don’t intend to mop up the mess.”
Santou glared as he grabbed his clothes off the chair and stormed out, slamming the bedroom door behind him.
“That went well,” I muttered to
myself, and headed into the shower.
I stood under the water and let it beat down on me, conflicted by two entirely different emotions. Part of me felt guilty that Jake was in this quandary, while the other part wanted to smack him hard across the head.
Okay, so maybe tough love wasn’t the way to go. I took a deep breath and decided to give patience a shot. Quickly drying off, I dressed, and opened the bedroom door, determined to make up.
“Don’t shoot. I’m coming out,” I joked. “How about if I make us some breakfast?”
But there was no answer. I walked out to find that Santou had already left the premises.
Maybe he’s complaining about me to Terri.
I decided to pop upstairs, knowing that Terri was expecting me this morning.
Though I knocked on his door four times, there was no answer. I finally resorted to using the key.
Terri was asleep in bed with his eye mask on. I sat on the edge and gently shook him awake.
“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty. You don’t happen to have Santou under the covers there, do you?”
Terri lifted his mask and grudgingly opened one eye. “Why? Has he gone AWOL?”
“Let’s just say we had a little disagreement.”
“Terrific. What about?”
“I came home last night and found him knocked out, having downed a hefty cocktail of pills and scotch. Not even an earthquake would have rocked his world. I told him this morning that he needs to get professional help, because I don’t intend to scrape his dead carcass off the floor.”
“Good going, Rach. That was very sweet, and a surefire way to win him over.” Terri snorted.
“All right, I probably could have been a bit more diplomatic. But I also wanted to get my point across.”
Terri yawned. “As if you ever have a problem doing that.”
He was right. I now realized I was an absolute dolt.
“So, are you still coming with me to Mendocino, or should I let you go back to your dreams?” I gruffly asked, feeling thoroughly embarrassed.
“Oh, please. The Hulk is about the only one that ever shows up in them anymore. No, if I don’t get up now, I probably never will. Give me half an hour and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
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