What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

  “I had a friend who was fired,” Sunny said instead. “Taitai accused her of stealing her jewelry.”

  Little Cao sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s nothing you can do about that. Happens all the time. These employers—they expect it to happen. See, I have a theory. Human beings, right? We’re all takers. Doesn’t matter how much we’ve already got. We’ll take anyway.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Sunny said. “We don’t all do this. I don’t.”

  “I’m not saying you do. But those of us who do, it doesn’t make us bad people. We give too. There’s as much pleasure in that as there is in the taking. But the trick is to take small things regularly. Everybody takes small things all the time. Kickbacks for doing business, a little bit of embezzlement, whatever. That’s why China is not like those other countries where people are taking each other’s lives. We’ve got enough corruption built in to allow for some taking. So I take when I can. You should take when you can. Now, I don’t know if your friend did it or not, but maybe she should have. That way, when she’s eventually screwed, there will be no regrets. Am I right?”

  Sunny considered this and gave a nervous laugh. “You’re the most philosophical driver I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m probably the only driver you’ve ever met. I speak for my profession when I say we spend a lot of time waiting for people to come out of houses and restaurants and bars, so it gives a person time to think.”

  Twice that week he’d taken Qiang and Taitai out to eat alone while Sunny had stayed home with Karen. What if he had seen something happen between them? It was possible, she supposed, that he could know more about the Zhens’ marriage problems than she did. After all, he’d been working for them for years.

  “You said you take things,” Sunny said after a moment. “What do you take?”

  Little Cao giggled. “Bet you can’t guess. It doesn’t cost anything. I’ll give you a hint: the thing I take is in this car right now.”

  Sunny looked around the sedan’s cream interior—the tucked leather, the dashboard with its exaggerated gauges and dials, Little Cao’s eyes in the rearview mirror shining like black tapioca. There was nothing extraneous in this car. Just the day’s newspaper folded into the back pocket of the front seat, a box of tissues on the rear deck, and Little Cao’s canteen of tea.

  “I don’t know,” Sunny said. “What is it?”

  He stuck his hand into a cup holder and flung something into Sunny’s lap—a stack of business cards bound together by a rubber band. Sunny recognized them as the ones from Boss Zhen’s study. “You steal his business cards?”

  Little Cao raised a finger and wagged it in the air. “Flash one of these and you can get a table at any of the best clubs on credit. I keep a suit jacket in the trunk. See? I tell you my secrets too. Now we’re even.”

  Sunny turned the stack over in her hands, remembering the day she pulled them from Boss Zhen’s trouser pocket. Even then she had sensed they were more than just pieces of card stock with his contact information on them. How much more, she didn’t know.

  “What I told you isn’t really a secret,” Sunny said. “The whole hotel knows.”

  “Can’t you see I’m trying to build a relationship? Maybe you won’t tell me a real secret today. But now you’re more likely to tell me one tomorrow, shi ba?” He wiggled his eyebrows at her and Sunny couldn’t help but smile back at him.

  “You should come out with me sometime. See a Shanghai unlike any Shanghai you’ve ever seen before.”

  “I’m not really the partying type.”

  “Who says you have to be a type to party? Once I took my great-aunt out to a karaoke bar. She drank my friends under the table while singing ‘The Bird Afar’…and with perfect pitch! My dreams were once…”

  The rest of the lyrics trailed through Sunny’s mind. My dreams were once clear / Old hopes now weighed down with fear / I would have flown oceans for you / When you wanted me near…She had always wondered how that love ballad had become a popular drinking song. It wasn’t just melancholic, it was downright depressing. Wang Jian used to sing it to himself in the shower, and each time, his voice had startled her. It rang out confidently, articulate in pain. Could it be that one star has changed its course? / Have time’s wings grown weary in flight?…In those moments, she’d wondered if her husband had once been in love. Maybe she was wrong to assume that he had died before really living. It was possible he had experienced all kinds of heartbreak and happiness before marrying Sunny. For the first time, she regretted not having gotten to know her husband properly. It might have been her one shot at understanding another person intimately, and having him understand her. She had been too stubborn to try.

  “I need to pick up Taitai and Qiang from the Expo site first and drop them off at the French concession before I take you home,” Little Cao said.

  Sunny looked out the window. By now, they had exited the highway and landed in a stream of traffic. Black-on-black Audis and Mercedes made up the unofficial fleet of corporate vehicles whose drivers chauffeured the upper-level management. When getting picked up by Little Cao, Sunny and Taitai often had to squint to read the license plates to identify their own. The make and model were not enough to differentiate it from the others.

  The radio clock read 12:15. “I thought the Expo closed at midnight.”

  He dismissed her words with a wave of his hand. “The lines getting out of that place will be just as bad as the ones to get in.”

  His phone, lying in the beverage holder, rang, and an image of Taitai popped up on the screen. Underneath it were the words BOSS LADY. The photo had been taken from the driver’s seat of the car while Taitai was in the back, checking her lipstick. In it, her eyes were half closed and she was baring her teeth in a scowl.

  Little Cao picked up the call with his usual joviality.

  “Hello?” He listened for a beat. “Ah? Zhen de?” His eyebrows nearly took flight from his face, leaving the rest of his features in pure glee. “Zenme hui, ne?”

  “What happened?” Sunny asked, but he ignored her and leaned forward in his seat, affecting a tone of concern.

  “Wah…hao, hao. No problem, leave it to me. We’ll have you out in no time.” He ended the call, tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, and turned around to face Sunny. “Well, miss, it seems that an opportunity has arisen. Zhen Taitai and Qiang have—hee-hee!—have gotten themselves locked into one of the pavilions.”

  Sunny’s stomach tightened. “What do you mean, locked in?”

  “She didn’t elaborate. All I know is they are locked inside. I’m supposed to tell someone to get them out.”

  Sunny remembered how Taitai had looked with her head thrown back in flirtatious glee at Yu Gardens. Standing in front of Qiang in that moment, she seemed to have transformed into someone else entirely. Who, Sunny did not know, but what if the person she had become had locked herself in there with Qiang on purpose?

  “Supposed to?”

  “Aiya, don’t worry,” Little Cao said. “We’ll drop by the Expo first. I promise I will do my very best to free our dear employer. But it might take some time. Things don’t always go as smoothly as a person would hope. What if the Expo people are hard to get hold of? What if they’re not very cooperative when I ask them to unlock the pavilion? What if it takes quite a few hours—enough for two or three drinks, at the very least—for them to send someone out there to unlock the place?”

  “Wo de tian a,” Sunny muttered. “You’d better send me home first. I don’t want to get involved in this.”

  “Oh, come on, have a little fun,” Little Cao said. “This is a sign from the heavens! Nothing is going to happen to them for a couple hours. They’re locked away as safe as any of those prized exhibits, and we—we will be Zhen Taitai and Mr. Qiang for the night, living large on Boss’s tab. Wouldn’t that be fun? Anyway, you don’t have a choice. I’m doing this for your own good. We’re going out.”

  His expression, however—the way he
looked at her out of the corner of his eye—implied that she did have a choice. Once again, Sunny wondered how much Little Cao knew. Did he suspect that, although Lina and Qiang were trapped in the pavilion, they weren’t trying very hard to leave? That they’d called Little Cao for rescue rather than Boss Zhen because they thought he might take his time?

  “Let me ask you something,” Sunny said carefully. “What do you think about the fact that Taitai and Qiang spend so much time alone together?”

  Little Cao’s eyes twinkled. “Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the sort of gossip I’m talking about.” But when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw how serious Sunny’s expression was, he stopped smiling. “Don’t worry. I don’t think it’s like that. Taitai is too uppity for a guy like Qiang.”

  “I don’t know,” Sunny said. “I think you underestimate her.”

  Little Cao winced and rubbed the back of his head.

  “Maybe you’re right. These taitai dou wu liao. No idea how to spend their free time so they look for trouble. I’m not saying a person shouldn’t get into trouble. Heaven knows I get into trouble constantly. The difference is, I don’t look for trouble. That’s when problems come—when you have everything so the only thing left to want is trouble.”

  “Stealing Boss’s business cards, pretending you’re him, running up his bar tab. You don’t call that looking for trouble?”

  “I call that the perks of the job,” he said. “It all gets written off anyway. He doesn’t know the difference.”

  She had a sudden recollection of Boss Zhen coming toward her in his slippers, holding pen and paper in one hand, the stack of bills in the other. The moment he’d offered them to her, he’d looked happier than he had all week. He probably thought that with that one gesture, he was solving all her problems. Other people’s problems always seemed simpler than one’s own.

  Maybe she was being too sensitive. A steady stream of income was not nothing. Her job was to make sure the family members were fed and clothed appropriately, not to manage their emotional lives. Whatever they did to hurt each other was not her business.

  “So? What will it be?”

  Little Cao’s eyes were extra-round as he stared at her, waiting for her answer.

  Suan le. What she did in her time off was not the Zhens’ business either. Tonight, she would find it tough to go to sleep. Maybe a drink or two would help.

  “Hao ba,” she said finally. “I’ll go with you. But if we get in trouble, I’m telling them you took me against my will.”

  19

  After Sunny left for the night, Wei collected the remnants of his dinner and brought them into the kitchen. He hadn’t washed dishes since they lived in America and had forgotten how enjoyable it could be, cleaning utensils one by one until they shone­­ and returning the plates to the rack, bright and blank.

  It wasn’t until his phone rang from the dining room that he realized he hadn’t called Lina to let her know he wouldn’t be able to make it to dinner, and now it was too late. Abandoning the dishes, he went out to retrieve it. There was her name on the screen. He prepared himself for an upbraiding and then answered.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Lina said. Immediately, Wei sensed there was something wrong. There was no noise in the background. And Lina, for some reason, didn’t sound angry.

  “I don’t want you to worry, but we’re going to be late. We got ourselves locked in one of the Expo sites.” There was a breathless quality to her voice.

  “What?”

  “We’re in the UK pavilion and they’ve locked all the doors. We got locked in here by accident.”

  “By accident,” he repeated. “How?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I’ll tell you later. But we’ve been out all day and our phone batteries are about to die so I just wanted to let you know.”

  Wei could still taste the soup at the back of his throat, and it suddenly made him feel sick. “I’m coming over there.”

  “No, you shouldn’t—just stay with Karen. I already called Little Cao. He’s going to get hold of someone who can get us out.”

  He wanted to reach through the phone and grab her.

  “Where is the UK pavilion? Which entrance is it? I’ll meet Little Cao there.”

  “No,” Lina said. “It’s too late. I don’t know how long it will take, and there’s nothing you can do anyway. Stay home and get Karen to bed on time.”

  “Are you sure?” was all he could ask.

  “Yes.”

  “But maybe—”

  “Really, we’re fine. We’ll be home in a few hours. Just go to bed.”

  There came the sound of a bang. “What was that?”

  “Qiang’s trying one of the doors again,” she said.

  This was all his fault. He should have been there with Lina, not Qiang. Better yet, he should have been the one to take Qiang to see the Expo instead of Lina. Neither of these realizations was as painful as the recognition that in her time of need, his wife had called their driver for help before she called him.

  “I’m sorry about dinner,” he said.

  “It’s all right, Wei, really.” Lina’s tone softened. “We’ll talk about it later. See you at home.”

  After she ended the call, Wei stared at his blank screen. Then, feeling helpless, he dialed Little Cao.

  “Boss!” It was noisy, wherever Little Cao was. Besides that, he was a shouter. Wei put distance between his ear and the phone.

  “Where are you?” Wei asked. “Lina just called me. Are you at the Expo site?”

  “I’m just about to call one of the supervisors now,” Little Cao said. “We’ll get them out, don’t worry! I’ll keep you posted!” He hung up before Wei could respond.

  Down the hall, the sound of a door creaking. Footsteps like the slow patter of rain. Karen stepped into the dining room, blinking at the bright overhead light.

  “Where’s Mom?” she asked.

  * * *

  Neither Karen nor Wei knew how to work the microwave. It did look like a normal microwave, with all the expected options and numbered buttons, but they couldn’t get it to start. The digital display continued to show them promising things: HEAT, INPUT TIME, SET. But nothing.

  “Dad,” Karen said, after several minutes. Wei was always surprised by how, in a single word, Karen could express an entire range of complaints. “Let’s call Mom again.”

  “We can’t,” Wei said. “Mom’s phone is out of battery.”

  He’d said nothing to Karen about why Lina wasn’t home yet. On top of her stomachache, she had been in a mood ever since returning from his office. Wei could not bring himself to make things worse with the news that her mother was locked inside a building.

  “Look, this is what we’ll do,” he said. He opened cabinets and drawers until he found a pot, which he used to warm the soup. He also scrounged up a bit of leftover paigu—Karen’s favorite—stuck it in the wok, and fired up the stove. But as the kitchen filled with the smell of sweet pork, Karen’s mood only worsened. She leaned against the refrigerator with her arms crossed, staring down at her dad’s feet.

  When everything was ready, Wei carried the food out to the dining-room table and watched his daughter eat. Her mouth worked its way neatly around the bone—something she must have been taught in boarding school—and as she chewed, her fingers swept lazily across the surface of her phone. Here was the unexpected theme of his day: sitting at the dining table with cagey women, trying to get them to talk.

  “How’s the tutoring going with the Canter boys?” Wei asked.

  “Fine. Not much I can do about them being stupid, but otherwise it’s going okay.” She sighed and looked up. “My friend Valerie from school wants to know if I can change my ticket.”

  “What ticket?”

  “Her family said I can stay with them if I come back to the U.S. in August instead of September. I said I’d ask you.”

  Of course she was asking him. There was no way Lina would ever agree to anything
like this.

  “You’ve been here only a couple weeks. You want to go back already?”

  Karen shrugged. Wei tried to read his daughter’s face more carefully, but when she met his gaze again, he had the disconcerting feeling that she was reading him right back. “Let’s talk about it when Mom gets home.”

  “Fine,” Karen said, and she bent over her screen once more.

  Without warning, a teardrop slid down her nose and hit the surface of the phone. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand, then sniffed. Before Wei could figure out how to ask her what was wrong, she raised her face to him and said, rather vindictively, “I got my period.”

  A few seconds passed, during which they only looked at each other. Karen’s nose and lips had swollen to a dull pink glow.

  “Oh. Do you—do you know what to do?” Wei asked.

  “Sort of, yeah.” But she continued to stare at him, as though awaiting a directive.

  “Okay. Okay, xingan. Hang on.”

  Despite himself, Wei was relieved. He could not be expected to handle this kind of emergency, which meant this was not a job at which he could fail. He wouldn’t call Lina and waste her precious battery. He briefly considered calling Sunny but decided against it. The woman had already spent so many of her waking hours dealing with their family. He couldn’t hijack her sleep now too.

  Wei walked into the master bath and opened the drawers beneath the sink Lina used. Since he didn’t really know what he was looking for, it took a while for him to spot the cardboard box of tampons, each one individually wrapped like an expensive dessert. Tampons weren’t widely sold in China, and on each of Wei’s business trips back west, he had been tasked with filling entire shopping baskets with Playtex Sport. He plucked one out of the box, took a breath, and returned to the kitchen.

  Karen was still sitting in her chair but no longer touching her food. “I should have gone with them to the Expo,” she said miserably.

  “Here.” Wei held the tampon out to her, but Karen just looked at it.