by Martha Carr
Somehow, through the power of parental guilt, I was sixteen again and explaining to him how I’d screwed up enough to bring home a B- on a science test.
My face burning, I forced my humiliation down and swallowed the acerbic retort that sprang to mind. I am not sixteen, I reminded myself. I am thirty-three years old and coming home to face the wrath of my family and, if possible, make amends. It was possible I deserved their bitterness for what I’d put them through recently, and likely I deserved more for what I’d been putting them through for years.
I could still remember my father’s elation my junior year of undergrad at USC when I’d told him I’d be going on to study law at Stanford. He’d spent years grooming me with summer internships at his firm, and was thrilled at the prospect of having someone to pass the reins to someday. My parents made sure complete strangers knew their son was top of his class in law school.
They had a clear idea of who I was and who I’d one day become. It was a rosy picture that went up in flames when the CIA recruited me halfway through my second year of law school.
I brought my seat back up and looked at my father’s face in profile. His eyes shimmered at the corners, a thin sheen of tears held in check by what I could only image was sheer force of will. His brown eyes held sorrow, fury, and a lifetime’s worth of disappointment.
“Dad,” I began, clearing my throat so I could get the words out. “I know you guys went through a lot this summer. It was never my intention for you to suffer like that, and the important thing to remember is that I was never actually a terrorist. I was working on something important and there wasn’t much I could do to keep you out of it. I would have if I could have. I’m sorry.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and sniffed a couple times. “Thanks.”
“Should I leave? You can turn around now and take me back to the airport. Tell Mom I never showed up. Would that make it easier on you?”
He pawed his eyes and wiped them on his dark blue polo shirt. “No, your mother has been cooking all day and we need your help with some things.”
“Okay.”
We drove in silence, the air heavy with the things we wanted to say to each other but couldn’t.
He merged us onto Route 24 East, which took us out of suburbia and into the scrubby foothills of the Merriewood part of northeastern Berkeley. He took Grizzly Peak Boulevard to get us home, and I let my mind wander while his car silently hugged the steep curves and took me back to my childhood.
The neighborhood looked the way all places you grew up in do: The same, and yet, somehow, intangibly different. The Woos had repainted, and the Olsons had remodeled and replaced their faded siding. I saw tricycles in the driveway of a rambler that had belonged to a surly Russian family when I’d been a child, and a new Camaro out in front of the split-level my childhood best friend had lived in.
My parents’ house at the top of the hill was modern and unassuming from the street. It was originally two properties, but they’d purchased the neighboring lot and converted the other house into an attached guest house for my grandparents. They’d recently repainted the stucco on their exterior walls white, which looked crisp beside the slightly greenish tinge of the numerous floor-to-ceiling windows.
My father parked in the driveway. He patted my back as we passed the hanging potted plants that flanked their front walkway. We both hesitated at the front door. I was gathering my courage. I had no idea what my dad was doing. We reached for the handle at the same time.
“Mom? I’m home.” I dropped my backpack onto the tiled foyer floor and took my bag from my father.
“Daniel? Is that you?” my mother asked from the direction of the kitchen.
“Yeah, Mom. I’m home.” There was something about the way my mother said my name, my actual name, that made me feel like I was telling the truth for once. I was home after a very, very long time away.
She rounded the corner wiping her hands on a white dishtowel. Her graying hair was curled into waves that hugged her head, and she was wearing a light pink pantsuit with shoulder pads that she’d had since I was a kid. She was barely five feet tall, but she entered the room like she was twice that height. “Ah, my son! It’s so good to see you.” She reached up to touch my cheek, and lightly smacked my shoulder. “Seven years? You’re my only child and you don’t visit home in seven years? What are you trying to do? Make me die of loneliness?”
“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been –”
“Yes, yes, you’ve been busy. The least you could do is give me grandchildren. I don’t suppose you have a girlfriend?”
“Not really.”
She clucked in disapproval and reached out her arms to clasp each of my biceps in her strong hands. “Now let me look at you.” When I winced, she narrowed her eyes and rolled up the sleeves of my sweater. “What is this?” She pointed to the scars that were still healing up and down my forearms. “It looks like you got attacked by a lawn mower!”
My father stepped forward and studied the injuries as I gently pried her fingers off my arm and tugged my sleeve down again. “It looks worse than it is.” I should have known better than to try to fool a pediatrician, I thought.
“Why would you choose a job that ruins your beautiful skin like that? Look at your father’s arms! No scars, no nothing.”
I wrapped her in a hug and held her close, my nose full of her perfume. “I’m happy to see you, Mom.”
She resisted the hug at first, opening her mouth to say more, but then snapped it shut and relaxed into it. My father picked up my bags and carried them up the stairs to the right of the door, leaving me and my mother in a long, silent embrace that lasted for at least a minute.
“I worry about you,” she said softly as we ended the hug.
“I know. I worry about myself sometimes, too.”
“What happened to your arms?” she asked, crossing her own.
“Accident at work. They’re healing just fine.”
Her lipsticked mouth frowned. “I know you don’t have anyone at home who can cook the right foods for you so I’ll do what I can while you’re here and make you some fish soup tonight to help lighten those scars. Stay away from soy sauce after you leave, it will only darken them. From now on? Vitamin E oil and Mederma. They’ll disappear. You’ll see.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Come on, I need help in the kitchen.”
I followed her down the hall past the bathroom and door to the garage and into the kitchen, which they’d updated since the last time I’d visited. Stainless steel appliances, marble countertop, the works. “The kitchen looks great.”
“Yes, thank you.” She ran her hands over the gold-veined marble and pointed up at the cabinet over the refrigerator. “It’s good to have my tall son home again. Reach up there for the rice cooker, will you?”
“Why would you store it all the way up here?” I asked as I pulled it down.
“That’s the big rice cooker, I only use it for family things,” she replied, grunting as she lugged a sack of jasmine rice out of the walk-in pantry.
“Are we having company tonight?”
She measured rice grains by the cupped handful, sticking her finger into the middle of the pot to gauge the proper amount of water. “Just your aunties and uncles.”
I grabbed an orange off the counter and peeled it over the sink while I tried to estimate how many people I’d have to talk to tonight. When you grow up Chinese, aunties and uncles don’t necessarily have to be related to you by blood. They can be friends of the family, and sometimes even close coworkers. Filling out my family trees in fourth grade was a challenge as I tried to figure out exactly who should be where.
She slid a green plastic cutting board and stainless steel-handled knife across the counter and gestured with her thumb to the fridge. “Vegetables are there. You still know what to do with vegetables?”
“Of course I know what to do with vegetables,” I said, bending down to scoop bags of green produce out of
the crisper drawer. “I don’t have brain damage, Mom, I just chose not to work in law.”
“I wonder about you sometimes.” She was muttering more to the dough on the counter in front of her than to me. “We raise you,” she said while she rolled it flat, “give you a good home and education, and then when you’re grown, what do you do? Move across the country and never visit. No wife, no children, and maybe sometimes you’re a fugitive.” She shook her head. “You were such a good child, Daniel. So happy. What did we do wrong?”
Her wrinkled hands made deft little movements that divided the dough into sections, scooping the filling into the centers of the sections and pinched them shut. She was making jiaozi, my favorite food. It had been years since she’d cooked for me, but she still remembered my favorite of her dumpling recipes.
I listened to her lament and felt frustration. I watched her work and felt famished. It was an odd combination of emotions.
I quartered a head of bok choy while I considered my answer. One does not reply to the wife of a lawyer flippantly, because she has far more experience winning arguments than you will ever have. “Was I a good child, though?”
“What do you mean? Of course you were.”
“What about the old Pacer?”
She paused. “What Pacer?”
“The one I stole.”
Her fingers resumed their work while her mind, I assumed, raced through the angles.
“Would a good child who was meant to grow up to be a lawyer have hotwired and destroyed a car?”
“You were a child. Everyone makes mistakes.”
I moved on to de-stringing snow peas while I put the finishing touches on my argument in my mind. “What about the Ponzi scheme?”
“Are you sure you don’t have brain damage? I don’t remember any Ponzi scheme.”
“You don’t remember the principal of my elementary school calling you in to tell you I’d bilked half my grade out of most of their lunch money?”
She pinched a dumpling closed hard enough to tear the dough. “Yes. I remember that. What was it they were investing in?”
“Pogs.” When she looked confused, I elaborated. “Fancy milk caps, they made them with all kinds of pictures and there were collectable ones and it was a whole big thing.”
She wiped her hands on a dish towel and turned to face me. “Where are you going with this?”
“What I’m saying is, I don’t think I was ever meant to work a desk job. I would never have been good at it. What would you rather have? A son who’s good at a job you never wanted for him, or a son who’s miserable in the job he was born into?”
“I don’t see what happiness has to do with career choice,” she said.
As much as I hated to acknowledge the gap between her upbringing and mine, it was inescapable. She’d been born into an upper-class Chinese family of doctors. Success was a familial legacy and obligation. When she’d immigrated to America for college, they came with her, and when she was done with medical school they’d found a suitably high-achieving bachelor for her to marry in my father, who, like her, had pursued the career his parents had selected for him before he was even walking.
I was born four years later and raised in America, a land of choice. It wasn’t difficult to see why they both struggled to understand what I’d done with my life.
“I know you don’t.” I finished prepping the piles of vegetables and dumped the dishes into the sink. “But trust me, I would’ve made a terrible lawyer. And I’d probably be in prison for something by now. Hookers, blow, gambling, street racing, tearing the tags off mattresses. I’m not a desk job person. I am, however, done with these. Do you need me to help with anything else?”
She shook her head slowly and returned to her heap of dumplings. “No. Go settle in, everyone will be here in about an hour.”
“Okay.” I pulled her close and bent down to give her a quick peck on her powdered cheek. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
I passed the framed photos from my childhood on my way up the stairs and found my father waiting for me in the guest room that used to be my room. Fantastic. Here we go with round two. I pictured Mayweather getting his face stitched up ringside and tried to channel his pugnacious tenacity.
“Did you and your mother have a good conversation?” he asked. He was reclined in a leather armchair in the far corner, one of his legs crossed over the other at the knee. “You were down there awhile.”
I pawed through my bag, which he’d placed on the bed, searching for my phone charger. “Yes. She’s making jiaozi.”
“She loves you.”
“Yes, she does.” I plugged my phone in and plopped onto the corner of the bed. “What’s up, Dad?”
He exhaled a long breath through his nose and studied me above the rims of his glasses. It was an old tactic of his, and an effective one. I learned the basics of interrogation from my father, and this was one of his best gambits. He was waiting me out; making me uncomfortable so I’d talk. What he was hoping to learn, however, I had no idea.
Seconds ticked by on the silver clock atop the bookshelf. Outside the window, sunset was slipping into the sky behind a spectacular view of Berkeley down in the valley below. I propped some pillows up against the headboard and stretched out atop the bed, folding my hands over my stomach. If I knew my father, this could be a long wait.
He surprised me by speaking moments later. “Your uncle is being blackmailed.”
“I’m sorry, what? And which uncle?”
“Johnny.”
“Ugh, that guy. How do you know he’s being blackmailed?”
“Because he told me.”
“Was he hoping you’d find some legal recourse for him?”
“No,” he said, his voice calm and gaze steady. “He told me because he was hoping I’d ask you for help.”
I laughed. “Really? What’s he hoping I can do for him?”
“He wants you to make the gang that’s leveraging him stop.”
“Sure. That’ll be no problem. Now, do I have to provide my own muscle shirt and posse or will he take care of that for me?”
He leaned forward, his hands hanging between his spread knees, his eyes on the floor. “This is not a joke, Daniel.” He looked up, and what I saw in his brown eyes was the fierce intellect and resolve that made him such a feared litigator. “Like so many things that are important to us but don’t seem to matter to you, nothing about this is funny. Do you think we’re stupid?”
I unfolded my hands from my stomach and ran them through my hair as I sat up. “No, I don’t think you’re stupid. But you have to admit, asking your son who’s just come home to visit for the first time in seven years to help his uncle fight a gang is weird, Dad. Does Mom know you’re asking me about this?”
“Who do you think thought of it?”
That took me aback for a moment. I proceeded with caution. “Why would you even think I could help with something like this?”
He checked the time on his wristwatch. “Because at the very least, you hold a black belt, and if you do what we think you do for a living, you’re more than qualified to handle this. Johnny and his family will be here in fifteen minutes. Are you going to help him?”
I walked over to the window to watch swaying eucalyptus trees while I thought. What he was asking me to do was a terrible idea, of course. Johnny should just go to the police if he needed help. Why would they ask me?
Unless he was involved in something illegal in the first place, which was why he was in a position to be leveraged at all. I needed more information.
“I’m not confirming or denying anything you’ve said or assumed about the nature of my work, but I’m always open to hearing more information about what my family has been up to since I’ve been gone.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. It was the closest he would let himself get to a smile. “Acknowledged.”
“What does Johnny do these days?”
“He runs four foot massage parlors.”
I smirked. “Cash only businesses, I assume?”
He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Yes, but it’s not what you think. From what he’s told me, they actually do just massage feet.”
“What do they have on him?”
“A dead body.”
I turned around in surprise. “How?”
“He and Rosie have a cabin up in Big Bear. They’d already agreed to let the gang launder money through the parlors in exchange for protection and a small cut. The gang –”
“Excuse me,” I said, holding up my hand. “But it sounds like they’ve gotten themselves into a stupid situation that has nothing to do with either of us. Why are you getting involved in this?”
He pushed off the chair and walked toward me until our noses were almost touching. “Because he’s your mother’s baby brother and my brother is dead. Family is everything.” He looked out the window and shrugged. “And besides, I’m not involved. I’m just passing gossip around.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Where does the dead body factor in?”
“Johnny says some gang members showed up at the cabin with a corpse a month ago and buried it somewhere on the property. One week later, police were interrogating him about the disappearance of his main competitor.”
“There a lot of competition in the foot parlor game?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know, but apparently Johnny and this man had had some heated exchanges in the past and, when he disappeared, Johnny was the obvious suspect.”
I took the seat he’d vacated and mulled it over. “So now the gang has a dead body that’s linked with Johnny stashed on Johnny’s property, who knows where, and let me guess: The gang gets to launder their money without giving Johnny a cut.”
“Yes. In fact, he says they now have to pay the gang blackmail money.”
I shook my head and got back on my feet so I could pace the length of the small room. “No, Dad. No. This is a huge mess I’m not getting even remotely involved in. Even if I can make the gang stop bothering them, it sounds like Johnny is a moron who’s just going to get them in trouble again anyway. Why would Rosie have ever agreed to being involved in something like this?”