Paul pulled out his wallet. “Hit me with the full charge, Mr. Chey.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dad said. “Just by making sure these guys are never killing each other, you are doing me a favor.” He patted my head with a paternal amusement, a joking condescension, the grease from broken cars getting into my hair.
“That’s not the reason he likes you,” I said to Paul. “He still talks about your ability to eat durian.”
“Christ,” Brian said, pushing off the counter to pace around the room while stretching his arms, as if limbering himself up to jump on new opportunities. “Can we not talk about durian right now? You’re making me nauseous.”
“You guys are so not Cambodian,” Dad said as he waved his hand. “You are not even Cambodian American! Durian is real, true Khmer food.”
“Hey,” I said, “I like durian. I don’t even think it smells bad. It just reminds me of gasoline, which, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve spent half my life marinating in the smell of . . .”
“Which one’s durian?” Paul asked.
Brian stopped stretching, grabbed Paul’s shoulders, and playfully shook him. He yelled: “It’s just the only food that Andrew Zimmern has refused to eat on Bizarre Foods! Think about that for a second! The badass dude eats fried grasshoppers and even he thinks durian is gross. You know the fruit is protected by a giant spiky shell, right? They’re so crazy and lethal they fall from trees and strike elephants on the head and, like, kill ’em! How is that not a sign we shouldn’t mess with that shit?”
“Oh yeah,” Paul said, squinting. “I think I do like durian.”
Dad threw a pen at Brian and snorted. “My kids are spoiled!” he said. “Anything you can eat, you should be eating. You think every meal we had during Khmer Rouge was smelling right?”
I laughed, enjoying this banter, the kind I’d missed every day of college. “Ba, you gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments,” I said, but before he could reply, or even chuckle, Doctor Heng’s wife was bursting into the waiting room.
“Bong, I checked with the monks!” she said, after she had nearly crashed into Paul. “I know what you need to do!”
Dad raised his eyebrows and sighed. Skeptical defeat was his go-to response for just about anything this familiar woman happened to be saying. Oblivious to his expression, Doctor Heng’s wife dug into her Louis Vuitton purse—which appeared bigger than ever that day—and pulled out a golden statue of Buddha, slamming its base on the counter with a loud thud. “We need to boost your karma,” she continued, and rotated the Buddha so that his cocky smirk was facing me and Dad. “This is the key to your success.” Then she slipped into a breakneck Khmer that made me dizzy to try to understand, though I gathered she was explaining the details of some grandiose agenda. Dad only nodded in silence. After a while of this, Brian signaled for me to meet him outside. I attached an empty invoice to a clipboard, handed it to Paul, along with a pen, and left to join my brother on the sidewalk.
Brian was peering into the waiting room. “How’s Ba today?” he asked, his eyes serious and arms crossed.
“I don’t know,” I answered while also looking through the glass door. Doctor Heng’s wife was placing the Buddha around the room, testing different locations, I assumed, for the best usage of its spiritual effect. “He seems fine to me.”
“Are you not paying attention at all?” Brian now asked. “His business is failing, and everyone knows.”
“It’s a slump,” I shrugged. “The Shop got, like, one bad Yelp review ’cause of the stolen car. We’ve been through worse.”
“Dumbfuck,” Brian said, shaking his head. “Just look at the guy!”
So I did, but he seemed totally normal—tired but amused. “Guess I should check in with him,” I said, wondering if I’d gotten used to seeing Dad as defeated, if I could no longer tell the difference.
Brian’s face settled into a slight irritation. “Yeah, do that,” he said. “Stop being a dumbfuck.”
I motioned to confirm that I would, indeed, stop being a dumbfuck, and then found myself staring at Paul, who glanced up from the clipboard and locked eyes with me. He smiled and risked a wink. It was corny, so damn corny, and again I felt like a kid gushing over his older crush, but this time I felt exposed, with Brian, Dad, and Doctor Heng’s wife, of all people, standing that close.
The next couple of weeks, Cambos rolled in and out of the Shop. Some brought their cars for actual repairs, but everyone brought statues of Buddha, of all sizes and colors, to decorate the waiting room, even one that was painted an alarming hot pink. Doctor Heng’s wife orchestrated the whole affair, having informed the community of the Shop’s urgent need for better karma. Mas and Gongs, Mings and Pous—all the older Cambos I’d ever met in my life—tried helping Dad the best they knew how. We put Buddhas anywhere it made sense: a crowd of medium Buddhas on top of the mini fridge, an army of tiny Buddhas lining the edge of the desk, a giant Buddha hanging out with the bamboo plant in the corner, with a few Buddhas stuffed between the desk and the wall, just to ensure we had our bases covered.
When people ran out of actual Buddhas, they started coming with insignias scribbled onto scraps of paper. We taped dozens of them over the walls, alongside the smog-check certificates and the framed photo of my youth baseball team, which the Shop had sponsored. I stopped a half-blind Gong from taping an insignia in the center of the computer screen; we settled on the lower-right corner.
Every time a Cambo waltzed into the waiting room with another Buddhist emblem, Dad looked more disgruntled, more disappointed to hear the door swing open, the sound of a potential new customer, only to realize it was just another guy who’d picked rice with him, for twelve hours a day, in the concentration camps. Each point of good karma the Shop accrued seemed pilfered straight from his soul. All the same, Dad always entertained these Cambos. They had only good intentions, and Dad asked them about their kids, their siblings, their relatives back in Cambodia. Witnessing the Shop bloat with spiritualism, you had to appreciate the middling optimism keeping our community afloat, those teachings all but promising that our lives, and our reincarnated lives thereafter, would remain, at best, tolerable.
I stopped scrolling through job postings, as I spent most of the day trying to cheer Dad up. Even non-Cambodian customers, I told him, might find these superstitions amusing. As they waited for their cars to be fixed, they could play visual counting games, like the kind found in magazines for toddlers. “How many ink blotches and fat Buddhas can you spot here at March Lane Brake and Tune?” I asked, and Dad laughed until he didn’t.
For lunches, Dad started packing recycled containers from Baskin-Robbins with leftover plain rice. He clutched invoices so close to his face I sometimes thought he might suffocate. I couldn’t remember if Dad had always been this stressed, if he had always held invoices that way. When I was a kid, he would avoid doctors, never wanting to spring for the copays, let alone an optometrist for something as basic as his ability to see. Yet even that hardly explained his behavior.
During the Shop’s karmic makeover, Paul and I hooked up almost every night. Our sex became rougher, quicker, as if we had recently met off Grindr. I forgot lube a couple of times, and Paul never carried any around—because what if Meryl found it?—so we just used spit. The pain and the chafing and the hemorrhoids weren’t great, but my need for relief only grew as the days marched into winter, as I got more and more worried about the Shop.
“Way to make a guy feel special,” Paul joked one night, after I came only five minutes into our hookup, and pushed him out of my sore asshole.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Yeah, uhm, lemme give you a hand.”
A few moments later, I was putting on my clothes, my head and arm stuck in my T-shirt, when Paul said, “Wait a minute, Meryl’s doing church shit, so I’m free all night. Also I have something to tell you.” He helped me escape my shirt and pulled me down. I collapsed into his embrace, landing on his torso so hard it hurt, or maybe my hemorrhoids h
ad made me sensitive all over. “I think I’m finally ready to come out,” he said, and then, unsure of how to respond, I shuffled my body to look at his face. His expression was genuine, calm, wearing a gentle smirk like the Buddhas protecting the Shop. “I think it’s unfair to Meryl,” he added, “if I don’t, you know, come out.”
“No shit,” I blurted, but he remained unfazed, and kept grinning. “What prompted this?”
“I guess I finally worked up the courage,” he said. “You were my motivation, to be honest. You’re so comfortable and chill, even here, in front of your dad and everything.”
He squeezed my chest, and I asked myself, Does he expect me to be his new Meryl? Then I thought, Maybe that would be nice. I imagined our lives together, our buying a house close to my parents, shopping at a Cambo grocery store every week. We would be an openly gay couple in the community, a radical symbol of love for the youth, for anyone who ever thought they had to quit their home, their family, their lives, just to be themselves.
“Why did you never move away?” I asked. “Like, seriously, I’m not special. I just had the opportunity to leave.”
He made a face, as though this were the hardest question he’d received in years. “It never made much sense,” he said. “What would I even do?”
“You know AT&T stores are everywhere?” I joked.
“I’m being serious, you dick,” he said, then ruffled my hair while tickling my side.
“Okay, okay,” I laughed, elbowing him to stop. “So when’s the official confession?”
“We’ll see,” he answered, and I didn’t know how much I factored into his we, whether I wanted to be a part of it or not.
The following week Dad seemed on the verge of snapping. He yelled at me for using blue paper towels to clean the windows, and not old newspapers. He even threatened to send his guys home, indefinitely and without pay, after Ohm Young had teased that he wasn’t being a good boss by ordering everyone lunch.
“You are lucky I am standing to see your face!” Dad yelled at Ohm Young, who laughed in response until he realized Dad wasn’t joking.
In the afternoon, a new customer finally appeared, the first one we had since the beginning of the week. She was elderly and white, dressed in a white grandma cardigan. Dad was so excited that he opened a new box of pens so she could write her contact information on the invoice with ease. He promised that the owner and the main smog technician would be handling her repairs, trying his best to speak with zero trace of his slight accent. I thought the customer was about to die, right there in the waiting room, she spoke that languidly, and this, combined with Dad’s straining to avoid stressing the last syllable of his words—like the older Cambos usually do—lent the entire interaction a slow motion quality.
Apparently, I realized, Dad could no longer trust his guys to do even the simplest of tasks. He did the customer’s preliminary diagnostic himself, which wasn’t actually necessary, as all the car needed was an oil change. In the waiting room, the customer asked if the supermarket across the street was open, and I told her, “Yes, Ma’am,” even though I’d never called anyone that in my life. As she left to go shopping, I considered whether I should say that the supermarket carried mostly expired canned foods, but I didn’t want to disrupt the shaky equilibrium of her patronage.
Ohm Young came into the waiting room shortly after the customer left. He was holding a small stack of papers. “You know how to read songs still?” he asked.
“Let me see,” I said, remembering how as a teenager I’d labeled all the notes of Ohm Young’s sheet music, even going so far as to writing down which finger should play what key on the piano. He would hover over my shoulder as I transcribed rock classics from the eighties, from when everyone first immigrated. The sheet music he handed me now was for the song “Every Breath You Take.”
“It’s good you are here for your dad,” he said, rubbing the top of my head. “Because you can do this for me!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “What’s this for anyway?”
“When the monks come, I will ask them if my band can play at Cambodian New Year. The monks love Sting.”
“Wait, the monks are coming?”
“You do not know? They come tomorrow.”
“That’s bad, right?” I said, and glanced to my left, through the open door to the garage. Just then, Dad was ducking his head under the hood of the customer’s car. I could only catch his butt sticking up in the air.
“Monks coming—that happens when you fail.” Ohm Young sighed. “They come when you first open business, to bless everything, but after that, they are not supposed to come. No, we are not supposed to need them . . . Hey! Please keep on doing the music, okay? My band is my plan B. I cannot be the assistant manager my whole life. It is too stressful.”
“Oh. Right,” I said, staring at the endless bars of melody. “That makes sense.”
Dad had finished working on the customer’s car by the time she returned with a plastic bag full of canned garbanzo beans. He completed her invoice with a painstaking attention to detail, marking down the $29.99 charge and taking careful notes of all the labor he had done. Then, as the customer paid and took back her keys, as satisfied with our services as one could be, really, I suddenly heard the voice Doctor Heng’s wife in my head. It was that lecture she delivered in my Honda, the one of about marrying a Cambodian girl who wanted a green card. How many oil changes, I found myself wondering, would add up to fifty thousand dollars? And just how long would it take to get there?
At home that night, Mom was prepping egg rolls in the kitchen while Dad napped on the couch, the TV blaring out a football game. I asked Mom if I could help, and she responded, “So today you have time for me?” She scooped minced meat out of a bowl and onto a wrapper. “How lucky of me! My own son will not abandon me like he does every other night.”
“This for the monks tomorrow?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes.
“If anyone ever listened to me, we wouldn’t need this. You think I have time to cook a hundred naem chien on a workday?”
“What can I do? Want me to help wrap?”
“No, you’re too clumsy.” She shook her head. “Go mix the fish sauce for dipping.”
“How do I do that?” I asked. “I . . . forgot.”
Mom threw her hands, both covered in raw meat, over her head, pretended to mess up her hair out of frustration. She wanted me to know how dumb I was, for my failure to remember her recipes, and honestly I agreed with her. Then she walked over to the cabinets and pulled out an empty plastic cylinder, one of those cheap containers that restaurants provide for leftovers. Along the side, she had stuck three pieces of blue painter’s tape, all spaced out unevenly. She pointed at each, saying, “Warm water to here, fish sauce to here, vinegar to here. Sugar and roasted peanuts to taste.”
“What happens when we lose this container?” I joked, taking it from her hands. “How will we make dipping sauce without you?”
“You better not lose my stuff when I die,” she replied, and scooped more meat. “So when are we meeting him?”
“Meeting who?” I answered.
“The boy you’re seeing,” she said.
“Where did you hear that from?” I asked as I heated the water.
“Don’t tell me you go out every night and aren’t with a boy. Don’t lie to me. I’m your mother.” She raised the new egg roll to our eye level. “Here, you see?” she said. “This is perfect.” And it was.
Avoiding her question about Paul, I finished mixing the ingredients, and then held the takeout container now filled with clear bronze liquid. I felt its weight shift from my left hand to my right. Of course, based off Mom’s method, it was easy to record the exact ratios that her dipping sauce required. Yet at that moment, for whatever reason, the future appeared so precarious, the way a tradition like this could depend on a flimsy plastic.
“I’m not seeing anyone, really, I’m not,” I finally told Mom, still thinking about our culture, how Cambos like
us retained our Camboness mostly through our food. Egg rolls stirring up portals back to the homeland, but just in your mouth, until they disintegrated into saliva and vanished down your throat. Mom looked at me, skeptically, and rolled another egg roll.
After Mom and I had cleaned the kitchen, I sat on my bed and texted Paul that I didn’t feel well, but that we’d definitely hook up the next day. I put my phone away and fell asleep. The following morning, I could smell Mom deep-frying egg rolls in the backyard, before heading off to work. I read the texts Paul had sent the previous night. Awwww, ain’t a thing but some blue balls. Then, I think tonight’s the night it happens. Gonna tell Meryl. Then, nothing.
I thought of responding, How’d it go, feeling more excited than I cared to admit, if also unsettled, as though a simple text might cement something into our relationship I wasn’t ready for yet. I ended up sending nothing.
Later that morning at the Shop, hours before the divine assault was scheduled, Dad and I mopped up the residual grease from the garage floor, shined the Buddhas in the waiting room to have a pristine glimmering, and took down the many posters of naked Thai women. We set up a folded table, placed a clean sheet over it, and arranged Mom’s egg rolls next to the other dishes all prepared by the wives of Dad’s guys—lemongrass beef sticks, glass noodles stir-fried with bean curd and ground pork, red-hot papaya salad drenched in fish sauce, and also, of course, the requisite and huge pot of steaming white rice. The entire time Dad had looked especially grave, as if the Communists were pulling off another coup d’état. I wanted to cheer him up, to assert that no one thought any less of him, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Around noon, five monks came marching behind Doctor Heng’s wife, all of them sporting the same burnt orange robes and sandy beige Crocs, armed with packets and packets of incense. Dad and I bowed to each monk in a row, our hands clasped together. Then the monks walked around the Shop, examining the corners and crevices, sprinkling blessed water over the grease stained walls. When they finished the inspection, the monks lit their incense in every room, even the storage room, with those cases of flammable Mobil 5W-30 oil. The aroma of burning flowers, I guessed, was supposed to create a force field that would thwart evil spirits while attracting customers.
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