by Kathy Wang
“Dark blond.” Then, not wanting her to have the impression that he was dating one of those, an Asian with tattoos and thick-winged eyeliner, Fred explained, “She’s from Europe. Hungary.”
“Ah. Delightful country. I visited Budapest once, right after college. Euro trip.” The beautiful Korean finished wrapping the scarf and then suggested he add a small leather trinket in the shape of a padded horse. They had just arrived, she said, and were one of the store’s best sellers. “Many of our customers purchase three or four. They can be dangled from a handbag.” Fred was fairly certain she was attracted to him; if he wasn’t clearly about to purchase an item for his girlfriend, he might have asked for her number.
After he held firm in politely refusing a silver fragrance atomizer, the assistant disappeared and was replaced by an older Frenchwoman. It was only at the register that he discovered the leather charm alone was $500, and that together with the scarf and taxes, the purchase rang up close to $1,000. “Can I remove the horse?” he asked.
“I can allow a store credit,” the woman said, giving him a severe look. “Once we ring up an item, it’s considered a sale.”
Back in the car, Fred mapped out the most efficient route to the Fremont apartment. He felt an anticipatory shiver over the altruistic credit he was about to receive. He could imagine Erika’s face, the pout that couldn’t help but lift into a repressed smile when she saw what dangled from his hands. He realized he had missed her more than he thought. Perhaps they would end up getting engaged. What was the point, otherwise? He would never be able to land anyone better. Maybe if Opus went remarkably well, but he might be near fifty by then, the equivalent of thirty-five in female years. Linda had recently discovered how to share links and had inundated his inbox with articles about aging sperm, how if you waited too long your child might turn out slow in brain and gigantic in stature. Apparently Stanley wasn’t the only one whose body was capable of betrayal.
He returned a call from Auntie Deborah, Stanley’s only sister, up visiting for the week from Southern California. Deborah had always been his favorite relative. Short, contendedly fat, and exceedingly confident, she was one of the few people who both knew the full extent of, and could manage, Stanley’s temper.
“Fred,” she whispered when she answered. “Fred. What are you doing?”
“Hi, Auntie. I’m at work.” He installed an air of harried importance in his tone, insurance in case she was going to cajole him into joining them for dinner. “Things are busy. Is there something I can do?”
“Not for me. But you need to go to your dad’s house, right now.”
“What’s going on? Aren’t you there?”
“No, we’re still driving from Los Angeles. We had to bring my mother-in-law last minute; we couldn’t find anyone to take care of her. Big surprise. So we have to drive very slow, take many restroom breaks. I think I’m going to go crazy.”
“Is she asleep? Why are you whispering?” Fred had never met Deborah’s mother-in-law, but he was pretty sure she didn’t understand English.
“Oh.” Her voice returned to a normal volume. “I don’t know. But listen, I think you need to go to your dad’s house. As fast as possible. I just talked to Mary on the phone, and I think she’s trying to move him out.”
“Move him where? Didn’t he just go home?” He swallowed a little pill of guilt; he hadn’t visited Stanley since he’d left the hospital.
“I don’t know, but she was asking me very many things. Questions about property values, home prices when there might be bad feng shui. She really doesn’t know anything.” Deborah in her heyday had been the top-ranked real estate agent in San Marino; she still harbored a healthy disdain for anyone with less than encyclopedic knowledge of the various levers of home values in California. “You know your dad is giving her the house in his will, right?”
“Yes.” Kate had informed him earlier, via a cowardly text, before she left for a business trip. Something had gone wrong, she wrote. Linda had agreed with Stanley on a certain plan. Then, the plan had changed. Predictably, Linda was furious.
“You know your dad paid off the whole mortgage for her?”
“What?”
“Oh yes, yes,” Deborah said, sounding both indignant and excited to be the bearer of bad news. “He wrote her a check. Who knew he had that kind of money? Not to say your dad isn’t doing well, but you know, it was always your mom who was really smart. She’s pretty tough, huh. So anyway, Stanley must have sold some stock to cover it. And everyone knows the market is no good right now! You know your dad’s friend, Shirley Chang, the tall, fat one? She advised him to do it for Mary, walked him through the whole thing. I just spoke with her, right before you called. Now that Shirley has the whole story she regrets helping, of course; she says she never thought Mary would try to move Stanley. That Shirley thinks she’s so smart, but look! Falling for Mary’s sad tales just like any stupid old Chinese man.”
“I still don’t understand.” How much had the mortgage been? And why was Shirley Chang getting involved? He couldn’t make sense out of the events being described. “Why would Mary want my dad out of the house when he just moved back into it? Where would she move him to?”
Deborah sighed loudly, exasperated by his slow comprehension. “The house will be completely Mary’s now, when your father goes. And from her questions I got the feeling she is trying to move him so that he will not die at home and lower the real estate value. Maybe to a nursing facility. Can you believe it? Even I wouldn’t kick out my own mother-in-law, though she’s been here for at least two years past the date she told us she would definitely die, and for eighteen months now I’ve had a very expensive stationary bike just sitting in the garage, because her bedroom was supposed to become the exercise room. It’s very important at our age to do cardio, you understand. So now I have to walk outside every day, even when it’s hot! So dangerous!”
Fred endured another wave of nausea. “Is Mary out of her mind?” he sputtered. “Dad’s explicit wish was to be at home. Even I know that!” He didn’t want to deal with this. Why had Kate chosen this exact week to be out of town?
“Ah yes, but Mary, she is so greedy! You have no idea; you were born in the States. Some of these women from China, they can be ruthless. There are so many rich ladies there now, why couldn’t he have married one of those, or some AI genius? But then of course they wouldn’t want to be with . . .” Her voice broke into static. “Plus the income on the house alone, after Mary rents it out, is probably $4,000 a month! Because she will rent it out; her type never wants to sell right away. I keep telling her, if it is a rental, you do not have to say anything about a death, just let the tenants move in, no problem. But anyway, well, I just have a bad feeling. So better go now.”
Chapter 16
Kate
CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show held every January in Las Vegas, was colossal, one of those events where booths stretched out to infinite lengths and even the air smelled neon, and everyone on the floor not actively engaged in sucking up (to partners, customers, press) looked pissed. Each year X Corp blew its wad on a few products specifically for the event, frantically accelerating schedules and stretching out acceptable time frames of preorders to make their announcements. Lately other companies had moved toward private events, as they sought to avoid rubbing shoulders with the dingier Kickstarter crowd; rumor was that X Corp would soon follow suit. Until then, however, there was only CES.
The first time Kate attended, it’d been one of the first work trips of her career and she’d been thrilled with the excitement of business travel. Tasting menus and free-flowing booze, all paid for by a company that normally calculated per diem expenses via complex algorithm; acrobatic shows and lavish corporate parties, the pale and nerdish holding court in the costliest seats and booths. The temporary social reversal lending a potent fervor to the air, as executives both male and female cavorted with research analysts with whom, in the natural wild, they would never share close oxygen. Kate herself wasn�
��t immune to the atmosphere: on the second night she took three shots of tequila and indulged in a drunken makeout session with one of the Irish sales partners who, to her ongoing mortification, still worked at X Corp.
Despite the novelty of such daily—and occasionally gratifying—excess, by the time the trip was over, Kate had felt bloated and unsatisfied. The week had left her with a sensation of smut and ill health, and she had scrambled over the weekend to make up for all the day-to-day work she’d missed while away. Each year was worse, as she grew older and the idea of free alcohol completely lost its allure; with time she had begun to recognize the sort of coworker who lived for these events, the week of riotous release it allowed from their drab everyday lives. The cubicle dweller who began moaning about the trip long in advance at home, to prepare their spouse for why they had to stay through Friday and fly out the weekend before; the sort who was always badgering everyone to linger for just one more drink after dinner, hit up another bar.
In the past Denny had joined her at CES, taking advantage of the X Corp–expensed hotel room and laxly guarded complimentary snack buffet to do his own networking on the cheap. During those periods Linda had been entrusted with the care of Ethan and Ella, a service she’d been performing with rapidly decreasing enthusiasm. She was getting older, she complained, and Kate’s parenting choices meant the children regularly expected sojourns to a selection of filthy play yards and activity zones, any number of which could very well be harboring an array of germs lethal to a senior citizen such as herself. This year, Kate had expected Linda to finally make her stand, a battle to which she’d already conceded mental victory to her mother and planned for accordingly. This CES was supposed to be her out—there weren’t any relevant product launches, and she’d weighed the moral implications of the “my father could go at any moment” card and found them tolerable. But then Grommix had come along, as well as what appeared to be a significant improvement in Stanley’s condition. His doctors assured Kate she’d have ample time to return should any developments occur while she was gone—Vegas was only an hour away.
Linda, too, seemed to join in the conspiracy. Arriving at the house unannounced a few weeks before the event, she gathered the kids to her and cheerily pulled from her Bottega Veneta tote a variety of brochures, previewing the special grandma time to come. She’d even done her own research, locating a small farm forty minutes away, where the children could ride tractors and taste goat cheese.
“Will you play with the animals too, Wai Po?” Ella asked.
“Well, no,” Linda said, wrinkling her nose. “But I’ll be on the side watching so you can look for me. Wai Po has a good time when she gets to sit. And then the day after we’ll go to Costco. You can have lunch there.” She snuck a look at Kate, who normally viewed its food court as contraband. “You’ll each have a budget and can pick anything at its value or below. Unless it’s too heavy. Wai Po has a bad back.”
Kate strongly suspected that Linda’s energetic initiative, highly out of character, was linked to her own admittedly less than desirable domestic situation; Denny, with her blessing, had extended his contract another two months at the Palo Alto Home Suites. For the moment, the children seemed to enjoy their visits (it helped that there was an indoor pool), though Kate knew she and Denny were just kicking the harder parts—the difficult conversations and decisions—down the road. The last time she’d seen him, during a handoff, they’d been entirely civil, with Denny guiltily but excitedly declaring separated life better suited for a start-up. “Of course it’s harder when I have the kids,” he said. “I never thought two would be so difficult.” They were in an amicable enough place where Kate had genuinely been able to laugh, and she’d studied him when his back was turned. He didn’t give off the air of someone with a new girlfriend, but she found she didn’t very much care.
She told her mother the news of the separation in the very broadest of terms. Kate knew Linda had never approved of CircleShop and thus Denny; in her world, entrepreneurial activities were to be lauded only when pursued after returning home from a steady career of the sort that provided a regular paycheck and employer-matched 401(k). Conversely, however, a marriage dissolution was also a horrific event, a stigma Kate would carry for the rest of her life, torpedoing her desirability and dooming her to a late-life remarriage with some piddling state school graduate.
“But you and Dad are divorced,” Kate said. “And you always conveniently forget that Yvonne Cho’s daughter, the one you mention in almost every single one of our conversations, went to UC Irvine.”
“Your father and I are different,” Linda huffed. “And I don’t forget where anyone went to school.”
Overall Linda seemed to view Denny’s absence as something delicate, a land mine to tread carefully around while she investigated the surrounding terrain. When Kate packed her bag for Vegas, Linda took a particular interest in the proceedings. “That jacket makes you look old,” she complained, after spotting a leather blazer.
“This was extremely expensive. I bought it at Le Bon Marché in Paris. It was a zillion euros.”
“It looks like something Mary would wear. And why so many ugly shoes? You used to beg me to let you wear high heels when you were a teenager!”
Now that she was in Vegas, Kate admitted Linda had been right, at least about the jacket. It was far too warm for an outer layer—the temperatures outside were in the mid-80s, and the Labs demo space was being maintained at a balmy 79 degrees Fahrenheit, to create what Sonny insisted was the ideal environment to consume Grommix over ice. Almost everyone was adorned in corporate swag or—if an executive—regular business casual, the general rule being that the higher one’s seniority at X Corp, the lesser the requirement to advertise you actually worked there. Most mornings Kate paired the simplest logo tee she owned with black denim and stacked loafers and hid out in one of the makeshift conference rooms until it came time for press interviews. She was never allowed near any of the top-tier media, the national papers and online networks that were hoarded by the various public relations managers as tributes to their associated chieftains. Instead, she was shuttled off by one of the event coordinators—a Vietnamese woman named Trang who managed to pull twelve-hour days in a tube top—to meet with a series of increasingly obscure media outlets and YouTube reviewer channels at a breakneck pace.
On the third day—partly due to Sonny’s refusal to enter the main X Corp conference space, where Ron Fujihara was onstage giving an early demo of Slippers—a reporter from Forbes writing a cover story on X Corp was ambushed by Ken Bullis while waiting for the elevators. The reporter had been headed to the forty-eighth floor, to the suite that had been repurposed as Sonny’s office for the week, to interview him as the company’s mouthpiece on research and development; the chief brand officer had instead proceeded to divert the captured journalist to a nearby conference room, where he issued a series of quotes on innovation and ate up the remainder of the time slot. The resulting mayhem and accusations of sabotage had exhausted Kate for most of the afternoon, to the point where she now decided to ditch that evening’s team dinner. She normally never missed corporate events, considering them a form of self-flagellation for the absurdly low strike price of some of her earliest X Corp option grants. But by the end of the day, Kate felt she had earned a solo evening. The terrified communications manager who’d lost control of the reporter and subsequently been shouted at and called a dirty dog by Sonny was pacified and in his hotel room, inspecting his free new 500GB unit of the controversial X Phone; Sonny himself was a few floors higher in his suite, rehearsing lines for a video appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box the next morning.
With her evening open and a rare desire to avoid misanthropy, Kate decided to go to a bar. She had no particular preference of venue, and given her end-of-the-night feet, which were actively protesting in a pair of rarely worn heels, she opted for the first one she saw. The lounge was barely thirty feet from the elevator, a luxurious yet bland setting clearly meant as a s
topover between more profitable destinations. The stools were too tall, and she shifted her position every few minutes as she sought the right balance between her legs dangling in the air and her butt hanging off the seat. She avoided eye contact and breathed through her nervousness.
It was only after her first drink that Kate allowed herself to admit she had descended with the express purpose of seducing someone, and only after her second that she comprehended the actual difficulty of doing so. First there was the matter of effectively signaling to the number of frightened engineers strewn about that she was, in fact, open to a proposition; then there was the issue of fending off the drunk marketing managers, who were lurching in a harassing fashion from stop to stop. She felt ridiculous and old, a tableau of some wilted cougar lying in wait for some similarly beset traveler, and she had nearly given up when someone sat beside her.
“Here for work?” the man asked.
With his tawny hair and matched features he reminded her of Charles Fennelly, the Irish fling she’d enjoyed at this very conference more than a decade earlier. She looked down past his oxford shirt and dark jeans and saw he wore expensive sneakers like the sort her brother collected. That was encouraging; this guy had probably had sex before. After she’d made casual banter and verified that he was, in fact, not employed at X Corp or any of its subsidiaries, she decided to linger.
It wasn’t as if she truly wanted to sleep with someone. If she was being honest with herself, Kate hadn’t wanted to do that for quite some time, which was sad and probably some of the issue with Denny. But she wanted something, like those high school dances where you pressed your body against someone else’s for a few minutes while slow music lent a dramatic aura. If only there was something like that for adults, a brief encounter that made the heat rise to your face but didn’t involve the intimate exchange of bodily fluids. If there was, Kate didn’t know about it. So she assumed she’d have to have sex.