Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  *

  The car moved like it was floating above the pavement. Light jazz filtered from speakers in the rear. There was no partition between the driver’s section and the backseats, but the driver might as well have been blinkered from the rigid way he stared ahead.

  “Good friend of yours?” Pat joked. His throat clogged halfway through the sentence and his voice dipped into the inaudible.

  “Anyone can be my good friend,” Pang said. “What I want are old friends. Friends who stick around. I like to do favors for these friends.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what? Can you break someone out of jail?”

  “If everyone wins and no one gets hurt, why not bend the rules a little?” This guy never said anything straight. It drove Pat crazy.

  “Sure.” Pat leaned into the fragrant leather seat. He didn’t know why he’d buckled his seatbelt. The fabric chafed against his neck.

  “I knew you’d understand me.” Pang cleared his throat and his driver passed back a heavy black backpack. “Your boss, Jimmy, needs a favor. I want to help, but I’m too old for the job, and besides, it’s not quite my style. It’s brainless, really, but it takes a little extra muscle, a little spirit. If you help me here, you’ll get the money, as well as my friendship. Jimmy’s too.”

  A puff of laughter escaped from Pat’s mouth. Pang shifted forward in his seat.

  “Friendship is simply what happens when there’s too much debt to be repaid.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  Pang pinched the inside of his nostrils, hanging on to the end like a heavy piercing. “You need to loosen up.”

  “Okay, whatever.” Pat sank further into his seat. The car crept out of the lot and onto the block of apartments where William and Filipe lived. Which room in those tall buildings was theirs?

  “No need to get impatient.” Pang unzipped the backpack and pushed it onto Pat’s lap. Something hard poked his legs through the fabric. “Take a look.”

  Probing through the contents of the pack, Pat recognized everything in there, but what did they have to do with one another?

  Pang answered his look. “All you need to know is that everything in that backpack needs to be in—” The big green dumpster behind the restaurant’s loading dock came into view, its heavy lid thrown open to fit all the bags inside.

  “Set garbage on fire?” Pat wanted to laugh in the old guy’s face, the deadly serious expression on it absurd now that he understood. “You’re joking.”

  “Easy ten thousand dollars,” Pang said, some irony in his voice. “But you’d be surprised how many boys your age would say no. Men older than you too. They’ll steal, they’ll cheat, they’ll beat a man’s face in, but they won’t go near a small fire. Why do you think that is?”

  “They don’t think they can control it.” The words were out of Pat’s mouth before they’d even crossed his mind.

  “Exactly,” Pang said. “But you’re not afraid, are you?”

  Pat re-zipped the backpack. His thoughts were jamming against one another. A loud voice muscled through. He could crawl back to the restaurant—to his mommy—with a thousand dollars in his pocket, or he could take the eleven thousand and run.

  “We’re all friends now?” Pat said.

  “No.” Pang reached over and covered Pat’s hand with his. “But afterward? Jimmy and I will be your best friends. And there’s no favor I won’t do for a best friend.”

  “There’s a lot of garbage.” Pat eked his hand out from under Pang’s fingers. “The fire’s going to get too big.”

  “I’ll get you a burner so you can call 911 before that happens,” Pang reassured him. “I trust you won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “For eleven thousand dollars.” Pat touched the roll of bills he’d shoved into his pocket.

  “I’ll give it all to you now,” Pang said, pulling the fat envelope out, all the way this time. He tossed it over to Pat, who didn’t expect the load to make such a heavy noise as it landed between them. “You see? We’re becoming friends already.”

  At the Duck House’s front door ten minutes later, Pat climbed out of Uncle Pang’s BMW, holding on to the backpack, the heavy envelope, and a prepaid flip phone.

  “One last thing,” Uncle Pang called. “You got a ride? You’ll need a car.”

  Pat nodded. He had somebody in mind. “You’ll text me when the restaurant’s all clear?” He had his hand on the top edge of the car door.

  “Keep your phone on you.” Uncle Pang raised his hand briefly, before pivoting his wrist a quarter turn. The man was as clear in his gestures as he was confusing in his speech, and the meaning of his small, queer movement broke over Pat’s head like an egg. Finally on the same page, Pat shut the door as he’d been asked.

  6

  Every Monday night was a victory for Ah-Jack. Especially now that his battered body threatened to give out before Sunday. He had a special ritual, satisfying in how ordinary it was, to usher in his one day off a week. Nan would drop him home, just as the racetracks were closing, and he would count himself lucky for having worked through another race day. He would sneak a cigarette by the garage, beyond where his wife could see from her bedroom window. Letting himself into the house, he would switch off all the lights she’d left on for him. She herself would have gone to bed hours ago.

  This Monday, his forced overtime meant that he and Nan did not get to his place until nearly midnight. A security sensor clicked on when they drove past, washing the row of townhomes in wasteful light. A sunken basketball had been wedged between the grates of his storm drain. Nan, always reluctant to acknowledge what was bothering her, had been silent for much of the ride, and Ah-Jack, exhausted by the extra hours, had not tried to charm her out of her funk.

  He should have been panicking. Jimmy had been looking for a reason to fire him for months, and after tonight, despite the little boss’s attempts to keep him in suspense, Ah-Jack knew he was out. But it was hard to look at his work and feel any desire for more. Why else had he let go of that plate of lamb? He hadn’t overestimated his ability; he had known exactly how weak he’d become. He’d wanted to free himself. In that moment, two questions had sprung into his head, so powerful that they had overridden his duty toward his wife. Would he have to work until he died? How long would that take?

  Letting go of that plate hadn’t swept those questions away. They had grown louder in his head. Now he would have to start looking for a new job tomorrow. He would have to work more for less. The entire ride, Nan had ground her teeth at every stoplight. But this wasn’t what had stopped him from asking her these questions. She had an unlimited patience for telling him what he needed to hear. But she also always had the right answer. The idea that Nan might have already wondered how long he could work, already worried about him dying … He would rather have no answer at all. When she pulled up to his house, they said goodbye without lingering.

  Outside, the air was spongy with humidity and the smell of cut grass. Lawn clippings stuck to his leather shoes as he cut across his small front yard. Michelle never reminded the neighbor’s boy to bag the grass after he finished mowing. Ah-Jack reached behind the rainspout on the side of his garage and pulled out an old sneaker. He fished a stale cigarette from its toe and lit the bent end. Taking a puff, he leaned against the edge of his garage door. Michelle would kill him if she saw. She was rabid about doctor’s orders, but he enjoyed having a few secrets from her. How else could they have stayed married for five decades?

  Americans. They believed a strong marriage came from knowing their partner’s every shadowy thought. But it was knowing too much that killed love. A strong marriage came when the wedded stopped trying to plumb their partner’s depths. Life became easier when one passed the years with an amiable stranger and not a mirror that reflected back all of one’s flaws. Marriages were torn apart by empathy; to look into her eyes and find pity was to discover what she pitied in the first place. Intimacy was not to know but to wonder. Eyes that searched in their starin
g were the hallmark of every lover’s gaze. And if the search was lazy, unstructured—a slow, easy stroll rather than a rush to the finish—then in this stretch of time, forever might comfortably rest.

  After he’d forced himself to finish the entire cigarette, Ah-Jack threw the butt into the carton and put everything back in its hiding place. Michelle had forgotten to lock the door again. A pile of bills waited for him on the end table. He was so bone-tired that after looking up the flight of stairs leading to his bed, he considered settling for the living room couch. If his wife hadn’t fallen asleep there first, as she used to do. But of course she hadn’t. Ah-Jack stayed in the living room after he’d switched off the light, his eyes focused, through the dark, on the empty couch.

  The first time she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, his wife had been too weak, or apathetic, to make her way up the stairs of their townhouse. He’d often found her curled up on the couch, her naturally flared nostrils quivering as they whistled in her sleep. Back then he’d had some vitality left in his bones, and he’d carried her to bed, moving carefully so as not to clip her head or ankle while he rounded each corner. Barely five feet and denser than her height suggested, his wife had never been a slight woman. She was even less so after her treatment started. They had expected her to waste away; instead, the steroids caused her to balloon.

  Maneuvering her up two flights of stairs, he’d relished not just the eventual pleasure of unloading her weight, but the knowledge too that when she woke up the next morning she would understand that he had done right by her. All the doctor’s visits he couldn’t drive her to, all the clumps of hair she’d swept away herself, the absence of his hand on her back while she vomited vinegar and foam into the toilet, might be briefly blinked away. Ah-Jack sometimes believed that his wife had let herself fall asleep on the couch all those years ago because she trusted that his arms would be willing and strong.

  The continued absence of her body on the couch sent relief through him, and also shame for this relief, and shame again, of a slightly different shade, at the notion that this time around she was forcing herself to climb those stairs because she thought, even after she’d unexpectedly lost so much weight, that she might spare him the embarrassment of dropping her. This was what a wife was for. To save her husband and in doing so magnify his humiliation.

  Worse, if Ah-Jack remembered correctly, this Monday was three days after his wife’s most recent chemo treatment. She would have been completely drained of energy. Yet she had managed to crawl up those flights of stairs and tuck herself into bed. As he started his own climb, he allowed himself a few full seconds of loathing, not for his wife, per se, but for their situation, which was essentially a repeat of the worst year of their marriage, only even more terrible. He hadn’t expected to be in the same place in his seventies as he had been in his forties. Only now he didn’t even have his health. His left foot burned and prickled with every step.

  Finally on the third floor—he cursed his younger self for buying a townhouse with one more story than he could afford—Ah-Jack quietly slipped into the master bedroom. The room smelled faintly of mildew, even though the humidifier was turned off. A nightlight shaped like the Bay Bridge revealed the swell of his wife’s body, lying beneath four quilted blankets. He went on into the adjoining bathroom.

  He was startled to find the toilet water dyed red before remembering that chemo changed the color of his wife’s urine. She had forgotten to flush a few times in the past, and each time, the surprise drove his heart crazy, the red tapping into some animal instinct to flee. He put down the toilet cover before flushing.

  He should shower. He stank. But the overtime hours had leeched so much from him that he couldn’t imagine standing for another minute. He sat on the lip of the tub and struggled to get his ankle onto his knee. His doctor forced him to examine his feet for cuts, ulcers, and sores at least once a day; otherwise, his diabetes could take them with no greater warning. This was no treat. His feet were ugly to look at: yellow-crusted along the sole from a lifetime of waiting tables, his nails gnarled and calcified because he had trouble reaching down to trim them. Once every month, his wife cajoled him into the bathroom, where she would squat at his feet while he sat on the covered toilet. She would cut his toenails, then cover his dry, flaking feet with petroleum jelly.

  He slowly peeled off his socks, the edge of the tub digging into his tailbone. When was the last time his wife had taken care of his feet? More than a month ago. His nails were longer than he’d ever seen them. And not just long but jagged, with pointed corners that had worn small lacerations into the sides of his toes. He couldn’t feel the cuts, and he was suddenly frightened by the numbness in his toes. He couldn’t blame his wife, weak as she was, but who else could help him with his feet? He’d had to dwell many times on a future without her, but he had done so abstractly: an empty house, a grave to visit, an anniversary of death. Who would cut his toenails? Who would clean the house? Who would ask him how his day had been, and who would take his hand gently when he didn’t want to answer? Such practical matters had slipped from his impractical mind.

  He left his dirty socks balled up on the tiled floor. He tried not to think of how they might remain there, untidied, one day.

  In his bedroom, across the hall, Ah-Jack finally shucked his uniform. He took off the gold chains he wore as bracelets; he left on the ones around his neck. He yawned so fiercely that tears sprang from his eyes. But before he turned out the lights, he took a second look around. Something was different about his room. His twin bed was neatly made. The tops of the furniture gleamed. The tissues he’d used to clear his nose and throat the night before had disappeared from his nightstand, and even the plastic shopping bag that lined his trash bin was new. Not just replaced but from a “Fresh Farm Market,” a store that Ah-Jack had never been to before.

  Ah-Jack sank onto the edge of his bed and bumped his knees together. How could his wife, who couldn’t flush the toilet most days, who had neglected his broken feet, still be cleaning? Running errands? Michelle almost never left their house. She was afraid of going out alone, and even with a companion at her side, she was painful to watch. Like a bird trained only to fly from one perch to another, she reacted to the slightest change in her scenery with a flurry of panic. Once, when the bank teller had tried to promote a new deal for a debit card, his wife had grown so overwhelmed that she’d abandoned depositing his tips and gotten lost exiting the building. The only time she was at ease with others was on the telephone. She had two contacts nowadays: her second cousin, Yu, who lived in San Francisco, and Nan.

  He continued to grip his knees; even if she did have the strength and the conviction to keep house, why was she going to a new grocery store? Fresh Farm Market was not a place along his wife’s familiar routes.

  He was intrigued by the idea of his wife hiding secrets from him. A little frightened. He’d known her since they were kids; she‘d been his classmate in Mian Yang, their small southern town. They were too old to be changing. They had lived separate lives for decades, divided by his restaurant work, but she was still the girl who had followed him around, with her plump cheeks and untamable hair. The girl who was never singled out by the teacher for making a mistake, her palms never marked by the slap of a ruler. Even her penmanship was certain, every stroke in the right place. Her voice had rung out louder than others only during arithmetic recitations. He was the boy unworthy of her attention, who had carried on anyway, his charm making him fearless. He had learned to take his falls early, before he’d grown too big for the tumbles to hurt. He had purposefully pushed boundaries, showing up late to class, talking his way out of trouble, then showing up even later the next time, until he found the point where no amount of charisma could save him from a whipping. He did the same in conversations, saying whatever came to mind, telling the dirtiest jokes. The first time he’d talked to his wife, he had brought her to tears with his bawdiness. Soon, he’d had her laughing again.

  What could his c
harm do for him now? Could it chase away whatever had possessed Michelle to run from routine? His wife was still the same person, and yet, was she the person he had understood her to be? Ah-Jack fell back on his bed. A rustling noise made him sit back up. He pawed around the blanket for a moment, before unearthing a pair of newly purchased compression socks from the end of his bed. His wifey had gotten him a present! The long black socks looked like the ones soccer players wore. The packaging promised relief for aching legs and feet. He felt another kind of relief when he saw that the price tag had “Fresh Farms” stamped at the top.

  He struggled to pull the socks on, expecting the squeeze to be painful, but instead he was surprised by how well supported his feet and legs suddenly felt. The aching muted. Ah-Jack wiggled his toes. He pictured his wife speaking to a salesperson, struggling to overcome her shyness to ask about the benefits of these socks. Her thoughtfulness made the careless loss of his job all the more shameful, and finally, the panic he’d been expecting all night arrived.

  Creeping out of his bedroom, he slipped through Michelle’s half-open door. He padded as quietly as he could to her bedside. Clumsy man, he tripped over a water glass she’d forgotten at the foot of her bed. The glass skittered out from his foot, hitting the nightstand with a loud clack. Ah-Jack squinted at the lump on the bed. When nothing moved, he started breathing again. Poor wifey, she’d tuckered herself out. He gently pulled down the quilts, searching for her forehead, her lovely fat cheeks.

  But from the nest of fabric, a thick pillow emerged. Confused, he pawed the quilts down farther. He grew desperate to see her tufts of hair and chilled scalp, her familiar, clammy skin, but still more pillow showed. He tore the bed apart, throwing sheets onto the floor, and only when the mattress was bare did he stop. His wife was not home. He had no idea where she’d gone.

  7

  Nan called out for her son as she pulled her key out of the lock. She missed the days when he would drag his blue beanbag chair to the front door. When she got home from work, her first sight would be his sleeping figure slumped deep into the chair. Now she was lucky if he was home by the time she returned. He grabbed a ride from one nameless friend or another to get to and from the Duck House, barely telling her when he left in the morning, and sneaking out of the restaurant at night. In high school, he’d started getting invitations to study groups and parties. She used to wait up for him, before she decided she was too tired to spend those hours half dozing in front of the TV. She had gone to bed in an empty house and woken up after Pat had already gotten himself to school, unsure if he had even come home the night before. How quickly this had become routine.