Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  He knew what Annie had seen from her hostess stand: A garish Chinese restaurant. Uppity, gloating, and hopelessly Oriental. But if she’d look a little harder, she would see what a magical establishment her grandfather had built. She might understand the limitations and expectations her father and uncle had managed to surpass and the lives they had affected. Almost every waiter had a house in a nice neighborhood because of the Duck House. Waiters who had never finished high school, who came to America with nothing, now had savings, healthcare, SAT tutors for their children. Yes, a handful of these waiters were past the age of retirement and still working, but they told him they liked the job. It kept them young.

  Without the Duck House, Johnny himself would still be toiling in a research lab, getting passed over for promotions year after year while his better-connected colleagues were bumped up. The day the biggest idiot in Johnny’s lab, Chris Anderson, got his own office was the day Johnny finally accepted his father’s job offer. So he was damn proud of his father’s restaurant, no matter what his daughter thought. He could understand embarrassment or frustration—these were things he also knew—but never would he have expected her to protect the boy who’d destroyed her family’s legacy, especially when she could see, right under the same roof where she did all that sleeping, the chaos the fire had caused.

  Johnny made himself take deep breaths through his nose while he drove. He recognized, in his frenetic thoughts, the guilt he was trying to extinguish, or at least smother, with his anger. He hoped Nan understood why he’d had to have Pat arrested. His list of reasons lined up in his head, like a row of soldiers. Pat would certainly have set another fire. Their family needed the money to continue. Pat was young enough to receive a lenient sentence. Most important—a reason he would not share but that gave him the greatest strength of all—the system would break down the black pillar of anger that had grown inside the boy. With force but a necessary force, which Nan had never been able to use against her son. Her gentle, nervous love couldn’t begin to scrub Pat clean. Only punishment could fix him. Just as Jimmy had been fixed, for a time, by his rehab stint. Some people needed to have control thrust upon them. It was a good sign that Nan had invited him over, an even better one that she had been kind enough to take his errant daughter in. But was it wise to take in another person’s child when her own child was so clearly in need? Wasn’t Nan’s distracted kindness in some way the reason Pat was in jail in the first place? He hated to say it, it went against the grain of his own core beliefs, but after a certain point compassion hurt more than it helped. He felt stronger as he found Nan’s street and took the turn. He was doing the right thing.

  *

  Nan had gotten home before him. Before he could ring the doorbell, the handle twisted open.

  “I’m sorry for this trouble,” Johnny said, when she appeared at the door. He immediately turned red. He’d only meant to refer to his daughter. “Annie is a dramatic girl,” he tried to clarify. “I’ll get her out of your hair.”

  “When I can see Pat?” Nan asked, once Johnny had stepped inside. “You know police well?”

  “I’ll talk to the sergeant,” Johnny said, which he told himself was not a lie. Just because the police had barred him from seeing Pat at the station did not mean Johnny had no clout at all. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. They’ll probably put him in his own cell.”

  “He is not alone?” Nan wrung her hands, which looked like they’d been recently dunked in ice water. “He be with killers?” Her voice was hitting a volume that Johnny had never heard her reach. He felt a tingle of irritation in his jaw and he was ashamed to wish that the woman in front of him would just calm down.

  “You can speak Chinese,” Johnny said. “If that’s easier.”

  But the switch in language did nothing to mute Nan’s alarm.

  “I need to call the police chief,” she said. “How could they put him with dangerous people? He’s a kid!”

  “He’s protected,” Johnny said. “I know you have to worry, but he’s a seventeen-year-old Chinese boy. No one will hurt him.”

  Nan looked at him with dark eyes. She seemed to have rooted out from his placid words his desire to shut her up. With deliberate slowness, she ran her tongue along the front of her teeth.

  “Annie’s sleeping upstairs,” she said. “Come with me. There’s something you should know.” He followed her into the living room. A TV sat in the corner. A pile of what looked like bedsheets lay next to it. Her hand went into her pocket and came back gripping an old cell phone.

  Johnny took a seat on the couch. But Nan began to pace in front of him, switching the phone from hand to hand.

  “I’m sorry about Annie,” he said, scrabbling for an appropriate foothold. “We tried to teach her how to be considerate of other people’s time—”

  “Look at this.” Nan shoved the cell phone under his nose.

  His eyes blurred, then refocused on a picture—Pat, pixelated and grainy, holding two bottles stuffed with cloth. The fire investigator had used a term: “Molotov cocktail.”

  “I appreciate you showing me this,” he said, confused. “I suppose now we know for certain—”

  “Look at the next picture,” Nan said. Her impatient finger shot out and pressed the button for him. Again his eyes blurred and he had to hold the phone away from his face. His irritation with his farsightedness quickly died away.

  “What’s Annie doing here?” His daughter looked drunk, a lewd sneer on her face. Her small hands barely fit around the bottles. His finger moved to delete the photo, but Nan was faster. She snatched the phone away and tucked it into her back pocket.

  “Now you know a fraction of how I feel.” She was pacing again. “You took my son away in handcuffs. You made me watch. I can do the same thing to you.”

  Waves of heat then ice crashed over Johnny’s body. His knees would not stop shaking. He put his hands over them, but he’d lost the strength to keep his body still. He couldn’t have imagined this; it had not even entered his mind. The picture of his baby girl pulsed in his eyes, her soft shirt ripped in two, her little belly exposed for the camera. She was only nineteen. She hadn’t even declared a major. Anger licked at his sides, threatening to consume everything, but he breathed through the impulse to rage.

  “My daughter—” He was too winded to talk. “She—” He faltered; he fell out of his seat and without thinking he clambered over to Nan’s feet on his knees. “She’s only a—” He dug his fingers into the carpet’s heavy piling. He pressed his forehead to her feet. Staring at her slippers, he came back to his senses. He felt like an animal and a fool, and in his shame, he was able to force this vibrant, terrifying part of himself to lie back down.

  Breathing heavy, he propped himself up on the arm of the sofa and wiped his forehead. It was soaking wet. “You do what you think is right,” he managed to say.

  “If I do what is right, your daughter goes away.” Nan pushed the phone in front of his face again. “She’s not like my son. She’s an adult. She has a record. You want to send your baby girl to prison? You think that’s what you should do?”

  “Yes,” he gasped. His head throbbed from the tears he wouldn’t let fall. “That’s the correct thing to do.” His wife would kill him. His mother would tear him to pieces. “I would be a hypocrite to make Annie the exception.”

  Nan made a strange growling noise, rising in pitch until it became a screech.

  “What are you?” She seized his head between her cold hands. The hard plastic of the cell phone pressed against his temple. “You call yourself a good man! Yet you would do nothing for your child. You coward. You snake.” Her face was fierce from crying.

  “Your tears are so big.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He wished the phone would crack his head open.

  “Everyone, they called you cold, or difficult, or prideful, but you’ve always tried to be a good boy. I see that. You have your own ways. But if you send your daughter to prison, you will never forgive yourself.” She
released her hold on his head and touched the side of his cheek gently. “There is a bigger picture. Believe me.”

  Johnny had forgotten to breathe. The shock of Nan’s soft touch forced his lungs to expand and suck in, and the sweet relief of air in his chest, the release of the chokehold he’d had on himself, in its small way convinced him to listen.

  He folded his body into the deep cushion. He closed his eyes and tried to find peace in his choice. “What should I do?”

  “You have to save Pat too,” Nan warned.

  “Your son burned down my family’s restaurant,” he said. “I had to turn him in.”

  “It wasn’t just him,” Nan said. “Mr. Pang was around that night, He had a huge fight with Jimmy. He must have been the one to give Pat the orders, for revenge.”

  Johnny realized how white his face must have gone only when Nan reached toward him. She looked as if she thought he might faint.

  “Pang,” he whispered. “Oh God.”

  “So Pat is innocent.” Nan looked down at the picture on her phone.

  “He isn’t totally guilty,” Johnny said. He was, miraculously, starting to feel awkward. Was this how his brother had felt the other night?

  Nan pressed her hands into her chest. “We can turn Pang in,” she breathed.

  “We can’t.” Johnny rubbed at his knees, which still felt the impact of the carpet. “He’s untouchable. He’s like the moon. He might shrink, but he never goes away. Otherwise my mother would have gotten rid of him decades ago.”

  “Feng Fei knows him.” Nan chewed on the cell phone antenna, her teeth leaving soft marks on the plastic. Johnny wished he had something to chew on too.

  “He controls your family, but he controls more than the Duck House, is this true?”

  “He has connections, yes.” Johnny massaged his jaw. “He got Jimmy out of trouble. He could have helped Annie with the shoplifting.”

  “Can he help my son?” Nan was beyond embarrassment. Johnny’s vanity should have been struck dead too. But his flesh continued to prickle, mortified.

  “Maybe.”

  “Call him now and ask.”

  “Not me,” Johnny said. “But…”

  “Your mother.” Nan went through the jacket Johnny had folded across the back of the couch. She grabbed his phone and shoved it under his nose.

  He didn’t feel the need to catch Nan up on how his family worked. Forgiveness was harder to come by when family wronged family than if a stranger had done the hurt. But whereas he did not have a thing to offer Uncle Pang, he knew what his mother wanted. He rose unsteadily from his seat.

  “Give me a little privacy, please.”

  *

  The first thing out of his mother’s mouth was, “Are you in trouble?”

  “I might be,” he said. “I need you to call Uncle Pang.”

  “After everything you put me through.” His mother laughed on the other line, no performance behind her glee. “You need help?”

  Johnny could have thrown Annie’s predicament in his mother’s face. That would shut her up. But he would never forgive himself if he dragged Annie into this grave inheritance. He leaned the hot phone against his cheek.

  “We made a mistake with Pat,” he said. “You need to ask Uncle Pang to get him out. He’s just a boy, and we don’t even know for sure if he did what we say he did.”

  “You keep talking nonsense,” his mother said.

  “I’ll give you back financial power.” He knew this wasn’t enough. “And I’ll give you the Duck House. I’ll make sure Jimmy signs it over to you.”

  “Why would I want the Duck House?” His mother could barely hide the yearning in her voice. “Throwing money down a hole.”

  “That place was your vision.” His sweat made the phone slick against his temple.

  “Uncle Pang won’t listen to me.”

  “Don’t play dumb, Ma,” Johnny said; he couldn’t help himself. “He calls you Little Feng, for God’s sake. Just tell him you’ll owe him a favor. That’s all he cares about.”

  “I don’t like this rudeness,” his mother grumbled, but then she spoke slowly, thinking her words through. “He can’t move mountains. Pat set the fire, and that’s what we’re telling the insurance company. We’ll see about the sentencing.”

  Johnny expected his mother to hang up. All the cards had fallen in her favor. But she stayed on the line. A silence like taffy stretched between them.

  “This change in you,” she said. “It’s not terrible.”

  “Thank you,” he said. The line went dead.

  *

  He found Nan sitting on the stairs. She hadn’t gone more than halfway up. Her free hand gripped the railing and she didn’t let go, even after he’d walked up to join her.

  “She’ll call him,” Johnny said. He stopped a few steps below Nan so that their eyes were even. “He’ll fix everything, as best he can.”

  “Thank you.” She finally released the railing. She held out her hand to him. “I’m sorry for Pat.” They pressed their palms together, a strange bridging that lasted for seconds, neither of them speaking, neither of them turning away.

  Nan let go first. She pulled her work uniform straight and hefted herself up.

  “Should I go to my daughter?” The doubt sat strange in Johnny’s throat. He did not talk in uncertain terms. He started to move up the stairs.

  For a moment, Nan seemed torn. She looked over her shoulder, staring up at the second story. Then she stretched her arms across the staircase, blocking his path.

  “I need you to take me back to the police station,” Nan said.

  “I don’t have the power,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Nan pressed her palms to her eyes and rubbed them hard. “I locked the door from the inside. She’s fast asleep. I gave her too much wine.”

  After all they’d been through, Johnny wished he weren’t angry. He wished his first impulse wasn’t to throw Nan aside to get to Annie.

  “They have to let a mother see her child.” Nan chewed at the dry skin on her bottom lip. “I need you to speak for me.”

  Johnny’s anger was no smaller, but he found himself relenting. He had always considered Nan to be like a sweet aunt. A woman without temper, blanched of desire. How totally wrong he was. He saw her for the first and last time not as a waitress or a manager, not as a struggling single mother, but as a person in his life, who had taken up more space than he’d understood. He wanted to give her a parting gift. It was rare to find a person who’d seen an entire arc of his life play out.

  “Okay,” he said, and then, the first thing that came to mind: “You win.”

  Nan patted his arm. The way she breathed in and out sounded almost like laughter.

  “What have I won?” she said. She was gentle, but Johnny still felt reprimanded.

  “Yes, of course.” He patted his pockets for his keys and wallet. “I’ll drive.”

  “That would be good.” Her eyes shook loose a few forgotten tears, which streaked down her face almost too quickly for him to see.

  Johnny wanted to close the space between them, to stride up the stairs and hold her. The woman in front of him had always embodied the qualities he most valued: generosity, evenness, good humor, a backbone. But she was a vessel for so much else, which he had never thought to consider. He felt, in her mystery, that he no longer knew himself. He wanted, in this moment, to take her away to somewhere exotic, with sights that might distract from her life’s tragedy. But while the thought of helping another soul usually lifted his, for once, Johnny stayed flat on his feet. He stuck himself in this difficult moment, with no escape, and no distraction.

  25

  Few moments in Ah-Jack’s life had compelled him to move too quickly for memories to form. Hours had passed and he could not remember how he had gotten to the edge of Michelle’s hospital bed. His wife was dozing. Her monitor beeped gently. Black and metal equipment hung overhead.

  Just as the sensations in his body finally arrived—how
his hips and knees ached from rushing around—so too did the questions. What would happen with his job? Had he lost it, or had Nan done her magic? Did she have the ring box? Where was Gary? When would the lunkhead be back to check on Michelle? And could asking these questions keep him from thinking about the one question that pressed against him with the silky insistence of a cat: What was wrong with Michelle?

  Nan, always right, was right again. His own queer intuition had also paid off: Michelle had checked in to the hospital that morning after a sudden, terrible pain in her hip made her faint in the bathroom. They hadn’t talked about what had happened outside the most pertinent details.

  Instead, they talked about Nan. Ah-Jack started out apologizing, but Michelle interrupted to tease him about his bad household habits. She asked if he was also leaving Nan’s sponges soaking wet and shedding his little gray hairs all over her bathroom.

  “Gary looks like the gassy type,” he shot back. “He says hello with a burp and leaves with a fart, doesn’t he?”

  “You’re one to talk,” she said, catching her breath from laughing. “Before I switched you to soy milk, you were passing gas more often than you were talking.”

  “I am the man with two mouths,” he agreed.

  Then she had winced and pressed her hands against her back: twin twinges from her kidneys. He’d gone to find a hot-water bottle, and when he came back, she was fighting to stay awake. The sight of her fluttering eyelids nearly choked him. There was his sweet, steady wife.

  “Take a nap,” he told her, one hand cupping her right cheek. He smoothed a sunspot that had formed when she was fifty. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  “There’s a TV.” She pointed to the corner of the room. “You can watch the races. But no betting.”

  “I wouldn’t waste my luck,” he said, stroking that soft little spot.

  *

  When perching at the end of the bed started to hurt his back, Ah-Jack dragged a plastic chair over. He was glad that Michelle had a private room. She was so shy around strangers. What a fluke that she’d managed to find herself a lover. Ah-Jack pinched his wrist for the nasty thought. Now that he had time to think, he was surprised he could be in the same room with his wife. Everything had changed between them. She was in love with Gary; he had betrayed her with Nan. But when they were together, all he wanted to do was make her laugh. Perhaps they were too old to discount all the years they’d passed together. Why throw away decades because of a few months of hurt? But the pain … He’d really expected to be beyond the age of such sensation.