Clean Breaks

by Ruby Lang

  “Maybe while I’m in town,” his father continued after a silence, “it’s a good idea to go out to dinner with her. I haven’t seen her in a long time. Maybe something like this.” He gestured around the food trucks. “Does she like artisan hot dogs?”

  “I’m not sure how any of this would go over.”

  “I remember her when she was a little girl,” his father said absently. “Your mother loved her. So cute and lively. But what a handful when she grew up.”

  Jake felt his mouth tighten. “Actually, Dad, she was a pretty normal teen girl.”

  Ignoring him, his father continued, “Listen, I will keep an open mind. I need to learn to do that.”

  But his dad’s open mind wasn’t what Jake was worried about. Jake wanted to see Sarah again. But he wanted to do it on his terms—without the shadow of his father. But when was that ever going to happen?

  Hell, he wasn’t even sure that she would agree to see him for all that she was now answering his texts. Could he blame her? Years later, the reverend was still holding that one small event over her.

  And still, Jake knew. He knew he was going to ask Sarah to join them, because he wanted to see her. It was an excuse—and maybe because he knew plotting and planning wasn’t going to cut it with her. It was time for him to just want and need and to tell her.

  He had to see her.

  Chapter Nine

  Sarah probably would not have caved to Jake if she hadn’t been talking to her mom just minutes before he showed up at her door.

  But her mom did not telephone often. For years, she did not speak to her daughter. Sarah and her dad chatted sometimes, but he didn’t reach out unless Sarah left a message. Then eventually, Fai Soon started calling again. And maybe that was worse than the silence. Those strained talks had a terrible softening effect on Sarah: sometimes it was like being soaked in a warm soothing bath, and sometimes it was like having a meat mallet taken to her insides. Usually it was both in one conversation. Either way, her mom’s careful voice over the receiver inquiring how she was and awkwardly delivering news about extended family always led to a final blow: asking how she was doing, as if she expected Sarah to have screwed up. Again.

  “You brother said we should check on you,” her mother said. “He said you might not have been letting on you were sicker than you said you were.”

  Sarah felt that weight of accusation again. She had been taking care of her health, before and after the surgery.

  “I’m fine,” Sarah said more firmly than she felt.

  The only way to deal with her family was to sound like she knew what she was doing—to sound like she didn’t need them or, more important, want to need them. Because while they had once given love, they also doled out hurt. If she were trapped in a cave with water coming higher and higher, she would adopt exactly the same tone with her mother that she was taking now, even as she panicked.

  “I’m fully recovered. I have gone in for all my follow-ups, and as long as I continue to be vigilant, I don’t anticipate any problems.”

  Speaking in English and using her doctor voice tended to both comfort and stymie her mother.

  “You didn’t tell us it was cancer.”

  “No, I didn’t. How did you find out?”

  “Jake’s dad told us.”

  There was a long silence—which was typical of most of their relationship for the last fifteen or so years.

  Her mother finally said, “The reverend says he’s in town for a conference. If you see him, take him out to dinner.”

  She hung up.

  It was no coincidence that her mother was checking up on her, then. A double whammy of Winston and the reverend. And now Jake was standing at her door, in jeans and a t-shirt that molded tautly to his lean body when the wind kicked up.

  It was completely unfair.

  They might have stood for a minute, looking at each other. But Mulder, not believing an invitation was needed, bounded inside, and Jake . . . well, Jake simply let go of her leash. His eyes crinkled.

  So. Completely. Unfair.

  Sarah turned and stalked to the kitchen, aware that he had closed the door gently and was following her. She started chopping some greens into teeny-tiny pieces.

  “You have good knife skills,” he said, folding his long limbs under the counter.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she assessed the sleek muscles of his shoulders—a little loose around the middle where his golden skin would be making small hard ridges, a topographic delight that had been traveled by her eager fingers. Involuntarily, her hands tightened.

  She put her eyes back on the cutting board.

  “Thanks for letting me in,” Jake said, after a pause.

  “What’s going on?”

  He took a deep breath. “My dad’s in town. He wants to have dinner with you. And I want to see you again—although not under these circumstances. But I’ll take what I can get.”

  “Not that I’m trying to help your cause, but having your dad in the room is not likely to make me think more kindly of you.”

  “We’d be a study in contrasts.”

  “You told him about the cancer.”

  “Was it a secret?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  She turned to get some eggs from the fridge. When she turned back, he was still watching her from under the dark flop of hair—intensely and seriously and carefully. The way he’d always watched her, she had to confess to herself. When she was younger, she’d told herself it was because he was waiting for her to say something outrageous or make a mistake. But that wasn’t it. That had never been it. After all, she’d watched him back, in her own way. And maybe she was the one hoping he’d screw up.

  “I also told him we had been seeing each other,” he said.

  She cracked an egg into a bowl. “Had been is the operative phrase here.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  “Did you say we were present tense seeing each other?”

  “No, I didn’t. But it’s not because I don’t think of you all the time. Or want you all the time.”

  His voice had suddenly dipped low—as low as the hot spot between her thighs—and an abrupt scrape of the stool brought him nearer.

  She jumped a little and dropped an egg on the countertop. As she watched, the egg meandered toward him, uncracked. He picked it up with one hand, and with the other, he pulled her wrist to him and tucked the egg into her palm, closing her fingers around it.

  They stood there for a moment, her hand in both of his, gingerly holding the egg.

  She pulled herself out of his grasp.

  “I like you, Jake. I always have, in a way. And I enjoyed the sex, a lot.” She held up her hands as he moved toward her again, his face intent. “Okay, down boy. If you get any closer, you’re going to end up in the omelet.”

  He stopped, because he always did listen to her.

  She sobered. “But it is not my job to make you a better person. I do not owe you, and I don’t have time. And I am most definitely not going to be your fake girlfriend like we’re in some kind of zany plot to fool your father that you’re doing just fine and get him off your back.”

  “You are most definitely not the person I’d choose as my fake girlfriend, Sarah.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s a compliment. You’re real, and you aren’t intimidated by the reverend. You won’t take his bullshit, and you call me on mine. But I’m asking you to go because I want you with me. I’m tired of not seeing you, and I’m at the point where I frankly don’t care what the conditions are. I don’t even care that I’m pressuring you. Come with me as a friend. Come with me because you have things to tell the reverend about the person you’ve become. Come with me to tell him off. Come for whatever reason. But sit with me. Talk to me. Be with me. You’ll see it won’t be the worst thing you’ve ever had to do—far from it.”

  “This is unusually self-interested of you.”

  “You sound like you like that.”

&nb
sp; “To a point. I’m really not likely to jump you if you start quoting Ayn Rand.”

  “When are you most likely to jump me, then?”

  She huffed out a laugh, but her body had flushed all over. “I have a knife,” she said.

  “Hippocratic oath.”

  “Why does everyone invoke that like a talisman against me?”

  “Because it is. You’re a small, powerful, creature with a blade, and people need to be careful around you.”

  “Be careful around me or be careful of me?”

  “Maybe a little of both.”

  She put the knife down. She sat down. “I don’t want to go,” she said in a small voice.

  This time he did pull her to him, and he felt so warm and comforting that she didn’t stop herself from burying her face in his chest.

  He sighed. “I shouldn’t ask you, then. I also thought this might be a step to change things for you. You’d see that people are different now. Or that they can’t hurt you anymore.”

  She breathed in the laundry soap smell of his shirt and squeezed her eyes shut. “That is such bullshit, Jake.” Then she added very quietly, “I’ll go.” She stepped away from him. “Besides, my mom just asked me to.”

  Jake watched her. He was pleased and maybe surprised. “I’m surprised that you’d do this for her.”

  “Yes, well, it’s complicated. But she’ll owe me.”

  They were both still for a couple of beats, listening to the dog’s tail make a thwump against the floor.

  “I still don’t know if I forgive you,” Sarah added.

  Jake kissed her forehead, so light. It only made her want more.

  “I don’t know if you should yet.”

  He snapped for a suddenly obedient Mulder, and they let themselves out of her house.

  • • •

  “So, uh, who picked this place?” Sarah asked a few hours later, watching their server depart.

  That server, Elspeth, who was decidedly white, was wearing a mandarin-collared jacket. She also had decorative chopsticks—one with little fan pendants and one with the double happiness symbol—stuck in her hair. Maybe it was the restaurant’s version of flare. Maybe Elspeth would keep collecting chopsticks until her bun was bristling with so much heavy metal that it could be used as a mace.

  “I chose it,” the reverend answered cheerfully. “I looked it up on one of those websites. They’re known for their nouveau riche and stinky tofu. I haven’t had stinky tofu since my last trip to Taiwan seven years ago.”

  “Nouveau riche and stinky tofu?” she mouthed at Jake.

  “It’s made of fermented scrapings from gold ingots maybe?” he whispered, leaning close to her ear.

  The reverend’s eyes flashed from behind the menu, taking in the sight of Sarah and his son lip to ear. Sarah felt herself blush. What the fuck was that about? But instead of jerking away as she once may have done, she felt herself lean in and murmur back, “It’s made of the crackling skin of desperate old misers.”

  “I think I read that book. Is it by Amy Tan?”

  Sarah shivered as his voice skittered low across her skin.

  “Children,” the reverend interrupted, putting down the menu, “what do you think we should get?”

  Elspeth returned. “So, let me tell you a little bit about what we have today. Everything is family style, and if you order the tasting menu, we prefer that everyone at the table do the same. Today, our chef Neville Dobley-Howe is offering a selection of buns three ways: pork belly with cherry reduction, a lotus seed puree, and our house special crystal wheatgrass and water spinach.”

  “I think we’ll probably need a minute—or like, maybe another century of post-colonialism,” Sarah muttered.

  “Of course, take your time,” Elspeth sang. “May I take your drink orders?”

  “Should I have a Taiwanese Mai Tai or a Ginseng Sling?” the reverend asked.

  Sarah stifled a little groan.

  “We also have a selection of microbrews from Taipei,” Elspeth said, turning the reverend’s menu over in his hands.

  “Oh, thank you. Let’s try this,” he said, pointing and squinting.

  Elspeth looked around at Jake and Sarah, who shook their heads at alcohol. The kids were not here to play, it seemed.

  There was a small silence. Sarah said, “Have you noticed that we’re the only Asian people here?”

  “It’s a white people restaurant,” the reverend agreed easily. “That’s why they can charge higher prices.”

  He scratched the inlaid table with his fingernail. “All this decoration is maybe a bit much, though.”

  “It’s verging on racist.”

  The reverend laughed. “I’m not offended by it. I’m old enough and have lived here long enough that any remotely positive attention to our culture is flattering—and a relief.”

  “Even if it’s caricature? And there aren’t any actual Chinese people involved in the making of the whole restaurant? And what is a Mai Tai doing on the menu of a Chinese—faux Chinese—restaurant?”

  “The restaurant is supposed to be mostly Taiwanese,” the reverend said—maybe a little condescendingly.

  It was galling, but she blushed anyway. She knew the difference between the two—God knows it had been pointed out frequently in her childhood. Even though Jake’s dad and her parents could stumble along in Mandarin together, that didn’t mean that they didn’t snipe about the others’ ways.

  The reverend added, “I heard Taiwanese is becoming fashionable, what with Fresh off the Boat and Jeremy Lin and all. Are there a lot of Taiwanese people in Portland?”

  Sarah stayed silent—she didn’t know for sure.

  Jake shook his head. “Mostly Cantonese.”

  After a short silence, Sarah said, “Well, as for Taiwanese being fashionable, that’s weird for—I don’t even know how to describe it—for someone’s country of origin to be fashionable. I’m not going to argue with you about whether we’re all God’s precious babies after all. But it’s weird.”

  “Maybe we should just have a drink here and leave,” Jake suggested.

  But the reverend reached over and stayed him—almost touched him. Jake seemed to flinch away.

  “I want to see what the hot places in Portland are”—a definite wince from Jake—“and I want my stinky tofu. After all that, you may lecture us, Sarah.”

  “I don’t want to sit here smiling so that white people can look over at us and decide that this place must be good because there are real Asian people eating here,” Sarah grumbled.

  But she was fighting a losing battle against her hollow stomach and, well, guilt. Despite her differences with the reverend, he looked older and tired, and she’d been trained to be forgiving—and he was a minister and her parents’ friend. He had experienced more blatant terrible things when he’d first come to America. He was wrong, but was she going to push it right now?

  She was already planning her nasty Yelp review for later, though.

  “We could hire ourselves out as those Asian people who legitimize a place if our lucrative careers don’t work out,” Jake said.

  She snorted. “I might have to take you up on that.”

  “Me, too,” said the reverend, a little too seriously.

  Jake smirked. She raised her brows at Jake, and he gave his head a slight shake.

  Something was definitely wrong between the two of them. Now that she’d relaxed into her indignation, she noticed the currents between father and son. In fact, Jake seemed to be avoiding his father a lot.

  Elspeth came back, and the reverend decided to go for the eight-course tasting menu. Sarah thought about protesting, but she decided she was tired. Might as well see what Neville Doogie-Howser can do. Soon, a sour plum powder and watermelon amuse-bouche appeared at the table. The reverend closed his eyes and folded his hands, saying a small prayer at the table. Jake did not join in, she noticed. He waited with her, not looking at her, and when his father finished, he took a sip of his water.

/>   By the time the bussers had laid down three bowls of what appeared to be jellyfish salad, the reverend was red-faced and a little garrulous. “Did my son tell you that I’m thinking about getting married? Judy’s thirty-nine.”

  Jake’s potential new stepmother was just five years older than them.

  “Tell us about her,” Sarah said, genuinely curious.

  Jake, on the other hand, may have turned a little green. But she was still annoyed with him for bringing her to this dinner, and she was going to needle him for just a little longer.

  “She wants a family. She’s a pediatrician. You would have a lot in common. Or maybe not. I guess you deal with the stuff at the beginning, and she deals with the end result. I think I would like more children. But I’m old. I was hoping for grandchildren actually.”

  Nothing subtle there. No wonder Jake was unhappy. He was probably wishing he’d ordered a drink by now.

  “You wish he were still married to Ilse?”

  “Yes. You know I do. This breaks my heart.”

  “Dad. Ilse’s getting married in a month.”

  Sarah did not like this at all. “What about Jake? What about how he feels? How did their marriage turn into something that is all about you?”

  “Everything we do affects the entire community, Sarah.”

  “There you go again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you take these things that happen to Jake, or me, or any one of your flock, and you tell them they can’t do them because they have to be a good example. This isn’t about God or community. This is about how people perceive you, your feelings, and how you think your life should be ordered.”

  “Jake needs to set an example. He is my son.”

  “Jake has spent his entire life trying to be a good person, and not just in the coaching Little League and organizing food drives way. Remember how he’d hand deliver groceries to Ms. Johns after his shift at the store?”

  Jake said softly, “But I didn’t defend you when you needed a friend, Sarah.”

  “You can’t help everyone, Jake.”

  She turned to the reverend. “Anyway, you probably never noticed them, because Jake just does this without making a big deal out of it. But you take his divorce—which isn’t even a reflection on him, isn’t even bad so much as it is sad and painful for him—and you give him a hard time and hint at how he ought to still be married to Ilse. He has been a good example for his entire life. Why instead of a paragon and representative of the community can’t you just let him be a person?”