by Lillian Li
*
She heard Pat before she saw him. His laugh. He was with a group of waiters at their station, eating the restaurant’s family lunch—a stew of leftover chicken and rice. They were in that lull between lunch and dinner service. He caught her looking over at him. How was it possible for him to look so normal? He gave her a wave, as if they were friends standing on opposite sides of the street, and then he was striding over to meet her.
“Long time no see.” He leaned an elbow against her stand and smoothed his lower lip with his thumb. “Where’ve you been?”
“Trying to get out of this job,” she said. The Glory’s hostess stand was a wispy little podium, with fake birch branches stuck on the sides. She felt exposed behind it.
“That sucks. How much you getting paid?”
“Twelve an hour. Before taxes.”
“No tips?” He reached into his blazer pocket and pinched a roll of bills. “Thought you had the family connection.”
“I don’t want to serve people.” She bent the edge of her newly laminated seating chart. “I’d rather save a little dignity.”
“Your dignity must be expensive.” He leaned in closer.
She leaned in too. His face registered her smell. He took his elbow off her stand.
“You look stressed out,” he said.
“How about deleting those pictures of me?” she said.
If Pat had touched any part of himself, his pocket, his blazer, she would have pounced and torn through the fabric to get that phone back. But he stayed still, with his arms crossed. She bit the tip of her tongue as hard as she dared. She wouldn’t cry.
“I think I’m going to keep them,” he said. “But you can trust me.”
“You can trust me too,” she said. “Just let me see the pictures.”
“You want to see if you look good?” His voice was teasing, but his eyes were restless. He lowered his voice and gripped her shoulder. “Look, they just want to close the case.”
“But what if they want to talk to me?” Annie was having trouble breathing. “I can’t lie to them. Shit!”
“Come on.” Pat put his hand against the small of her back. “You’re taking your break.”
He bought her a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store on M Street. They sat on a ledge across from the movie theater. They hadn’t been alone together since the fire. Their smoke drifted over the late-afternoon traffic. Annie counted two typos on the marquee.
“I don’t usually smoke,” she said. “Except at parties.”
“Some party this is,” he said. A mosquito buzzed a figure eight around their ears. “Are you feeling better?”
She said yes, though she couldn’t meet his gaze. It was easier to be angry with Pat than to admit that she also missed him. He was good at noticing her in moments when she was certain no one was watching. Even the cigarettes he’d bought were the menthol ones she liked to bum off others. His attention didn’t just flatter her; it used to make her feel safe. If she ever went missing, he’d know. She wanted to lean into him and her stomach turned from her own desire.
“What if I never feel better?” she said, after a couple of slow drags. “What if I crack? I don’t want to, but—”
“Then you’ll go to jail.” His tone was abrupt, and cold.
Annie sprang back and dropped her cigarette. Her cheeks burned. She regretted every second of softness she’d felt toward him. “You’ll go away for longer.”
“I’m a minor.” The way he held his body, hunched and shrinking, made him appear as though he were apologizing to her. “You’re nineteen with a record.”
“How do you know about that?”
“The whole restaurant knows about the shoplifting.”
“I’ll say you forced me to.” She was thinking in bursts. “My family can get me the best lawyer in the state.”
“You can’t be serious.” He reached out to touch her hot cheek. She turned her head away, and his fingers ended up in her hair.
“I fucking hate you,” she said.
She wrenched her bun out of his hand, but his grip tightened.
“Careful,” he said. “What’ve I got to lose?” He held up the Bic he’d used a minute ago to light her cigarette.
Suddenly he withdrew his hand. A look of pain crossed his face. It was as if her body had moved on its own to strike him. But Annie hadn’t budged an inch. Pat backed away from her. He shoved a fist into his pocket and pulled out a thin gold chain. A green-gemmed pendant swung at the bottom of the loop. He thrust the necklace into her hand. His clammy fingers pushed her dry ones closed. He turned sharply and walked away, disappearing down the first alley in his path. Annie looked around for anyone who was watching, but the faces in traffic looked ahead, bored and disinterested. Her image reflected off a storefront’s side window. Her hair stuck out in odd tufts; her mascara had melted onto her bottom lid. She looked alien in her hostess dress, her body wrapped tight in a cocoon-like sheath of unforgiving fabric. She undid the clasp that was constricting her throat and massaged the spot.
Dangling Pat’s present in front of her nose, she tilted her head back and opened her mouth. The heavy pendant clacked against her teeth, then hit her tongue with a brassy tang. The chain came next, pooling on her tongue. She swallowed, but the pendant stuck to the back of her throat. She coughed it out into her hand. She picked the necklace up and fastened it carefully.
Dragging her feet, Annie headed back to the restaurant. All around her were one-way streets and souvenir shops. The glinting jewel bounced once against her skin, then stuck to her throat, sweat and spit adhering. The strange roads were already turning familiar.
*
Pat didn’t recognize where the alley had taken him, but he had to keep moving. Of course Annie would hate him after what they’d done. But a part of him had hoped that maybe, since they were the only two people who knew what had happened, they would be bonded for life. Losing Annie meant losing the one person who might keep him from going insane.
For the past week and a half he’d been out every night, drinking and getting the level of stoned that guaranteed a black, dreamless sleep. When he woke up, with no idea of how he’d gotten home, his clenched jaw would ache from nightmares he couldn’t recall. His sheets would be wrapped around his neck. His work didn’t suffer. His hangovers didn’t last past noon. He could, theoretically, do this forever. But picturing a future of unremembered nights shot panic through his body. His lungs became too squeezed to let air in.
The one thing that helped was walking. He walked miles to get to his friends’ parties. He imagined he must have walked those blacked-out miles to get back. The constant movement calmed him, or at least distracted him. He’d developed the trick in kindergarten, when he’d be the last one left at after-school care. His mother’s lunch service didn’t end until four-thirty, an hour after his class. He cried the first time, when he looked up to find all the other children gone. But when his mother finally did show up, her dress shirt untucked and stained, she took one look at his tears and made a face so tired he immediately stopped crying. The next day, when he found himself alone again with the teacher’s aide, he got up from his chair and walked the perimeter of the small room. He repeated this square loop, soothing himself, until his mother came and he could collapse into her arms.
Would they let him walk in prison? Or would he have to pace the tiny quarters of his cell until he tumbled over? He played out these scenarios while trying to find his way back to M Street, sweat dripping down his armpits. But the late-afternoon sun felt too good against his face; the usual dread failed to overwhelm him. He must have tortured himself with these thoughts before. He couldn’t remember when; he just felt their familiarity, like worry beads still warm from his touch. Then the Glory sprang into view, the waterfront a dirty mirror. The knotted muscle of memory opened.
*
The day of his first fire, the one with the garbage can, Pat had forgotten his cigarettes at home. The principal found this most suspi
cious, as if a lone book of matches revealed sinister intentions.
“What were you planning?” the man kept asking Pat in his office.
Pat didn’t feel like explaining that he used matches because he liked the hiss of sulfur hitting the air when he lit them. He sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that the smell made him think of birthday parties. Pat and his friends had been in this foreboding office a number of times already. None of them had ever been suspended. So he didn’t think to defend himself; he didn’t think to lie.
The truth of why he set the fire was obscure even to him, but the truth of how he came to set the fire was not. He’d been cutting English class. He’d wanted to leave school, but a security guard was waiting by the exit, staring at him as if he’d been shown a picture of Pat’s face. Pat had turned around and dipped into the bathroom. At least it beat a PowerPoint on whatever dead poet they were reading. But being in a stinking boys’ bathroom for nearly an hour was worse. The stalls were painted puke-green; clumps of paper towels had been stuck over the mirrors. He started lighting matches to do something with his hands and to make the smell go away. He would watch the flame burn down the wooden stem, holding on for as long as he could before dropping the match in the garbage. Each time, a small flame bloomed up from the mass of paper towels in the can, but each time, the flame put itself out. He came down to his last match. Easy to drop it, like all the others; easier to leave his fingers unburned.
Maybe he didn’t think the fire would catch. But then it did, and all he had to do was run to the sink and throw water on the flames. Still, he stood there. He wasn’t frozen, at least not by fear. He could move; he just didn’t want to. He wanted to watch. He wanted to let it grow out of control. The smoke grew heavier. It tasted awful. Tears streamed down his face as he coughed and coughed. He had to be dragged away by the same security guard who had forced him into the bathroom in the first place.
Security had him change into lost-and-found clothes after he was partially doused by the fire extinguisher. When his mother showed up an hour later and spotted him in a lime-green hoodie and too-big track pants, she looked almost hopeful. She said his name like a question. Then her eyes found his face. Pat had no such near-mistake of thinking she was anyone but his mother. She’d come to school wearing her work uniform. But he had wished for a stranger also.
Sitting behind a big, cheap desk, the principal couldn’t have been a less intimidating figure—thick in the middle, with a short neck and round face, he looked like an egg perched on top of a larger egg. The students called him Principal Humpty. To Pat’s surprise, as soon as his mother sat down, her body seemed to cower. She bore no resemblance to the woman in Uncle Jack’s stories, the one who could shut down even the most difficult customers.
“This one woman brought an old piece of meat and snuck it onto her plate when the carver wasn’t looking,” Jack once said. “Told everyone she’d been served this duck. It looked more like a piece of steak.”
“Anyone can eat at a restaurant,” his mother had said, sharing a smile. “The poor carver kept trying to reason with her, even offered to get her a fresh duck. With some people, you can’t be so nice.”
“But Nan here.” Jack wrapped Pat and his mother up in the cozy blanket of his story. “She pointed out that the old meat was the twenty-ninth slice on the plate. All ducks offer exactly twenty-eight slices. So there was no way that slice came from our duck. Even if it did—and here, she grabbed the thing and threw it right onto the carver’s tray—well, didn’t that solve everything? I swear I saw that woman smile. Tell your son how much she left you as a tip.”
“Ten dollars on a forty-dollar bill.”
But whatever powers his mother had over other people clearly faltered when she left the confines of the restaurant. She apologized to his principal and guidance counselor so effusively with her terrible English that Pat couldn’t tell if the two men were embarrassed by what she was saying or how she was saying it.
“Pat is a good boy,” she kept repeating, when she was at a loss for words. “He do a bad thing. He need the best principal, best teacher to help him be good.”
Pat wanted to tell her to get out of the office. Every word that came out of her mouth made his skin hot. He itched all over from invisible pinpricks. He couldn’t sit still, and he didn’t know if he was angry or mortified. Finally, he shot out of his chair.
“I set the fire on purpose to get out of class,” he said, just to shut them all up.
He left his mother behind in the principal’s office, left the school, and walked the six miles home. Kicking rocks into the street, he entertained thoughts of punishment that he knew, with flippant certainty, would never come to pass. Yet if they threw him in prison, how unfair it would be! His offense would pale in comparison; he would be the victim. His mother would cry buckets, and then she would have to stand up and fight for him. She couldn’t leave him behind bars and go to work or look the other way and pretend he was at summer camp. He would finally get to see her at her most ferocious, all for his sake.
The entire time he was playing out his liquid fantasies, he kept an ear ready for the hum of approaching wheels. Car after car zoomed past without stopping. After the first few miles, he stopped looking over his shoulder. His daydreams stopped too—gone stiff and clumpy, like cold oil left in a pan. His mom wasn’t at home. She’d gone back to the Duck House.
The next day, with two weeks left of school, Pat was expelled. A few weeks later, after his hearing, he was at the restaurant. Now he was here—so many miles away that he could walk all day and still not find his way home.
17
The first unofficial night and the Glory was Unexpectedly packed. Familiar faces dotted the open dining room. Jimmy had sent out a soft-opening invitation to the Duck House mailing list a few days earlier, expecting a small assortment of guests to show up on Thursday. Who would drive in from the suburbs and brave the city’s weeknight traffic? He didn’t need many, just enough to iron out any kinks in the days leading up to the grand opening. But a trickle of customers at the start of the dinner hour had fattened into a stream, and now nearly every table was full. Jimmy should have been pleased by his old customers’ loyalty, but he was just as equally bothered. Had these people shown up for his sake or his father’s? Worst of all, the Glory could not turn any of them away.
Already, the kitchen was backed up. The food was not even that complicated. The chef Uncle Pang had been in the process of luring away from a trendy Thai bistro in Adams Morgan had started screening Jimmy’s calls, and he’d had to simplify his dream menu to a shell of its former self—one appetizer, three entrees, a dessert, and the duck. Jimmy worried about the few D.C. locals who had wandered in, attracted by the activity inside. They did not have nostalgia to soften the edges of their impatience. Jimmy checked his phone. Janine’s dinner reservation was not for another fifteen minutes. He sent two busboys to sweep around her table one more time.
She’d said she was bringing a date, which meant she was bringing her son, Eddie. For all Jimmy knew, the boy would hate Chinese food, hate duck, and hate him on sight.
“If I find a single scrap over there,” he said to Osman, the Duck House’s former head busboy, “I’ll make you vacuum the entire restaurant, including the seat cushions.”
Osman nodded as he went to put the broom away. He was the one amigo who’d agreed to commute to D.C. If he was upset about his demotion, he’d yet to express it.
Jimmy walked over to Janine’s table in the center of the dining room, obliged to chat with each table on the way.
“The Mister and Missus,” he said to a couple who’d waved him over. Names were Johnny’s domain. All Jimmy knew was that the woman was finicky, always asking for paper napkins to blot her food. The man tipped well only after his third scotch. “Thank you for considering the Glory this Thursday.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t keep the Duck House’s menu.” The husband wiped his mouth on the napkin his wife handed him. “I was r
eally craving your kung pao shrimp tonight.”
“Oh, he’s teasing,” his wife said. “This is a lovely new space.”
“New space, new menu.” Jimmy planted his hands on the edge of their table. “Expand your culinary horizons, right?”
He set off before the uneasy laughter died down. The next three tables made similar small talk, and each time Jimmy said the wrong things.
“Why would you want pork lo mein?” he said, while faces grew tight around him. “Try the miso-wasabi frog legs. Or the grilled ginger tofu.”
But the guests continued to ask if they could order off the Duck House’s menu, their tone growing icy and clipped when Jimmy politely refused. By the end of the first hour, in an attempt to decongest the kitchen, Jimmy was forced to oblige. The most popular items on his father’s menu took no more five minutes to prepare. He had to feed his customers. He supposed he should feel lucky that he had forgotten to cancel the Duck House’s deliveries last week—though what was the point of a soft opening if no one ordered from the new menu?
He kept an eye out on the few customers who had gotten their food on time. One of them had finished only a quarter of her bulgogi burger before pushing it aside. She filled a small saucer with her date’s fried rice. Jimmy beelined for their table.
“What’s wrong with your burger?” Jimmy knew he was standing too close. “Not to your liking?” A sticky puddle of brown sauce had pooled under the bun.
“It’s fine, it’s great.” The woman smoothed the cloth napkin in her lap. The lamps above gave everyone’s skin a sallow cast. “I’m just taking a little break.”
“Don’t fill up on that fried rice,” he said. The woman’s eyebrows shot up. “But if you do, the burger is great the next day. Perfect as leftovers.”
“Actually, would you mind boxing this up for me now?” She pushed the burger plate toward Jimmy. “I’ll save it for lunch tomorrow.”