Fewer chilies. More than the first time, less than this time. That was doable, wasn’t it? A happy balance somewhere between meh and murder.
The third batch tasted great, but—
“It doesn’t taste right,” she said out loud.
Frustration and disappointment made her throat squeeze tight. She’d been at it for hours and had had no luck. She had been so excited, and now even this felt out of her reach.
“What are you doing?”
She glanced back at her father, who stood in the doorway with a puzzled expression on his face.
Anna’s shoulders hunched. “It doesn’t matter.”
He looked into the dish on the stove, and his eyes widened. “You’re trying to make your mum’s Coorg pandhi curry.”
He pronounced the words perfectly, a sharp departure from his very white, very British accent, but he’d had years to get it right.
His brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” Anna said, “what would have been the point? You do your thing; I do mine. We don’t talk unless we have to. That’s how it works now.”
“Anna, that’s not how I meant to—”
“I know, Dad. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t either.” She looked away, at a shiny spot of grease on the counter. “It doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t taste like Mum’s. I can’t get it right.”
There was a silence. Then his voice, firmer this time. “Anna, look at me.”
She did. His eyes were sadder than they once were, but brighter than they had been the day before.
They crinkled as he smiled. “We’ll get it right.”
We.
Slowly, tentatively, the corners of Anna’s mouth tugged upward. “Okay,” she said, and handed him the spoon.
* * *
“The flavor just isn’t right.”
“Do we need more pepper? More honey?”
Dad shook his head, tapping his fingers on the counter strewn with chopped onions. “It’s too sweet with the extra honey.”
They tried again. “Oooh, that works a little better,” Anna said, “I think that batch had extra lime.”
“But it’s still not right.”
“Lime, though, that seems to be the key. Maybe we need even more of it?”
“Maybe it’s time to google. . . .”
“No. We need to make Mum’s version of this, not whatever we find on Google!”
“You’re as stubborn as she was.”
And still it didn’t work. The kitchen was a disaster, the pot on the stove gave off a smell that was closer to death than to deliciousness, and Anna had burned her thumb at least three times.
“Why is this so impossible?” she demanded. “Didn’t we watch her make this a million times?”
“I guess we didn’t pay attention.”
“I never thought I needed to. I thought she’d be around forever.”
Dad’s jaw tightened. “So did I.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s okay if you’re crying. You don’t have to hide it.”
“You’re crying too.”
“This hug is awkward.”
“It didn’t used to be. When did we stop hugging?”
“Probably around the time we stopped talking.”
“Sorry.”
“Me too.”
“Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re crying into the stew.”
“And it still doesn’t taste right!”
* * *
Eventually, they took a break. They went out to eat something that wasn’t pork and ended up at Lila’s bakery. She wasn’t there, but Anna left a note.
Thanks for everything. I was going to bring you some homemade pork curry, but it’s not right yet. Maybe next time.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” Dad said. They walked back toward the apartment, his mouth full of a cookie from Lila’s bakery.
“It’s great. And Mynah’s a saint for putting up with our grumpy faces all this time. Maybe we should take her out to eat somewhere nice before we leave?”
“Good idea.”
Anna looked down the street at the park, the town houses, the river. It was beautiful here. But it wasn’t home.
“Do you think it’ll be okay?” she blurted out. “When we go back home?”
“In what way?”
She rushed on before she lost her nerve. “The house felt cold and empty and horrible without her, and I’m afraid it’ll feel like that again when we go back.”
“Anna, why didn’t you tell me you felt that way?”
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t. It felt like every time I opened my mouth to speak, the words dried up, and I just wanted to go away again. Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? I know you must have been miserable too.”
He gave her a small, rueful smile. “I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to admit she was gone.”
“It wasn’t exactly easy to pretend she was still there, Dad.”
“I don’t know, Anna. I don’t know why I didn’t talk to you about it. I can only guess. I think I really did want to pretend nothing had changed. Which doesn’t make sense, but grief doesn’t make sense. Death doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s the worst,” Anna said, which made her father snort a laugh.
“I’m sorry. I should have done better.”
“Me too,” she said softly.
Something wet fell on the tip of Anna’s nose, then on her forehead. It had started to rain.
When they got back to the apartment, Mynah was home from work. She stood in the kitchen, comically out of place in her crisp skirt, blouse, heels, and suit jacket, and stared at the ingredients strewn around her.
She swiveled slowly to face them, incredulous. “What in actual hell have you two been up to?”
“We’ve been trying to recreate Mum’s Coorg pandhi curry.”
“Is that so?” said Mynah. “How was that supposed to work without the kachampuli?”
“The what?”
“Kachampuli,” she repeated.
“What is kachampuli supposed to be?” Dad asked, sounding out the syllables carefully.
Mynah let out a shriek of laughter. “Are you telling me you’ve been trying to make Coorg pandhi curry all this time, and neither of you knows about kachampuli? Which is only the most essential ingredient?”
“But surely the pandhi is the most essential ingredient,” Anna protested, gesturing in the direction of the pork rind sitting on the counter. “Otherwise it would be called kachampuli curry.”
Mynah ignored that and wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. “Kachampuli, my sweet ignorant ones, is what gives the pandhi curry its distinct flavor. It’s a little like vinegar, and it’s made from a limey sort of fruit they grow in Coorg.” She marched to one of the cupboards, rooted around in the back, and retrieved a dusty bottle with a sealed cap. Inside gleamed a thick, dark liquid. “Behold,” she said dramatically, “kachampuli.”
Anna was amazed. “So if we use this, the stew will taste like Mum’s did?”
“I don’t see why not.” Mynah put the bottle down with a triumphant thunk, and turned on her heel. “I’ll leave you to it while I shower.” They could hear her laughing all the way into the bathroom. “Pandhi curry without kachampuli,” she gurgled, “the very idea . . .”
The mysterious kachampuli wasn’t a magic elixir. There were still a few hiccups—a dash too much salt here, an overcooked and chewy chunk of pork there—and it took a few more attempts and a few more days to make it perfect.
It rained the day they got it right. Anna could hear the thrum of it against the glass of the window as she speared a piece of meat on a fork and promptly burst into tears because it tasted just like every time her mother had made it. It tasted like rain on the air and frogs hopping across the grass and coffee beans in a jar and the green, green leaves of the forest rustling in the
night and the sound of her mother humming a song. It tasted like a future in which the rain and the coffee beans and her mother weren’t out of reach after all.
“You did it,” said Dad.
“We did it,” Anna replied, and grinned.
“One could argue that I did it,” Mynah called from the other room, “but sure, you two take all the credit.”
* * *
It rained the day Anna and her father left Hungry Heart Row, but the sun was out by the time they got home.
Kings and Queens
BY ELSIE CHAPMAN
As I always find her after school, my mother is seated at the small table in the restaurant kitchen, prepping vegetables. Broccoli is piled high in a wide silver bowl, and sliced onion turns the air prickly.
“I hate school,” I declare in Chinese. My mother’s English holds a fraction of the wealth she finds in her native tongue—I never forget which language is really hers.
“Ming, hush, there are customers.”
Barely, though—it’s between lunch and dinner, so only two tables out in the dining room are occupied. And the waiter is one of my many cousins, the kitchen staff my father and two uncles—all are used to my complaining.
My mother breaks apart heads of garlic. “Do you have a test?”
“No, just general hate.” I drop my backpack to the floor and sit down across from her. “And an essay, but it’s not due until Monday.”
“Start it now.” She crushes cloves with a blade, strips off their skin. “Don’t leave it until Sunday. You’re going to be busy starting tonight, helping us get all the food ready for tomorrow.”
She’s talking about Saturday’s engagement dinner. The one the restaurant’s agreed to host and cater.
Because I’m both sickened and furious whenever I think about it, I take out homework so I don’t, scribbling thoughtless answers I’ll only have to fix later.
My mother gets up and takes a bowl from a shelf. She ladles something into it from a pot on the stove and sets the bowl down in front of me. “Eat it while you work.”
It’s macaroni soup. Curls of pasta swim in steaming, fragrant broth, and pieces of boiled chicken are all tangled up with them, the meat nearly fallen off the bones. It’s comfort food, the kind my parents brought over the ocean with them twenty-five years ago, and the kind that doesn’t fit westernized Chinese restaurant menus. My mother used to make it for us for breakfast, before we got older and told her we had no time to eat in the morning if we wanted to make the school bus. For years now it’s been only the occasional snack, a rare treat.
But I still like it best made with sugar, and so does my brother Lei. Only our older sister Yun asks for it this way, savory and salty.
She’s upstairs right now, silent and unmoving in her new life. The doctors have made it clear what’s no longer possible because of the bullet that smashed into her brain to leave her changed forever. Still, the sight of the noodles makes me ask my mother the pointless question anyway: “Did she like it?”
For a second my mother’s expression is pained before going carefully blank. It’s hard to look at, and I wish I’d opened my mouth only to eat.
She sits back down, picks up her knife again, and nods. “Her face said so.”
Another impossible.
I take a bite. The meat is as creamy as the noodles, soft on my tongue. It is the taste of my mother’s desperation, gone dull and dogged; it is the taste of a time that is no longer retrievable.
“It’s good,” I tell her.
She smashes apart more garlic. “I’ll make it with sugar next time. For you and Lei.”
* * *
The restaurant phone on the front counter rings, and I get up to answer it. Lei and I take turns covering, and today is Friday, which means my brother has robotics club. He won’t be home until dinner.
“Emperor’s Way Chinese Restaurant,” I say into the phone as I grab an order pad. It’s half past four—time for dinner orders to start coming in.
“Special combo from the special menu.” The voice is flat, mechanical. I don’t know who it is because I’m not meant to, the voice distorted by a phone app anyone can buy. “You understand, yeah?”
I barely keep from rolling my eyes at the question. I’ve known about “specials” all my life, considering everyone in my entire family are members of the Kings and Queens.
My mother and father had joined as teens, back when they still lived in Hong Kong. Our leader is Wen, and it’d been his ancestors who’d founded the secret society more than a hundred years ago. Wen himself had personally plucked my parents from poverty and given them security of a sort, asking only their unwavering loyalty in return. Then his family had sent Wen and my parents, along with a dozen or so other members (some of them my aunts and uncles), halfway across the world to lay down roots for a new division.
The Kings and Queens still control the streets in Hong Kong. And because Wen’s father is still the leader over there, it makes Wen the leader over here.
Membership passes down through generations on this side of the ocean too.
This is how Lei and Yun and I have come to inherit more than blood from our parents.
Until Yun’s accident, I never hated being a member of a secret society. It used to mean safety, the comfort of a large extended family. But now that safety’s a trap. And not all family means well.
“Special combo, you got it,” I say into the phone. “Which one?”
“The winter melon soup.”
Winter melon is symbolic of a wife—a special order of the soup means someone’s is about to be abducted. A special order of egg fried rice? Someone’s kid. Fried pot stickers? A husband. Shanghai chow mein with chopped-up noodles? Someone’s doomed to have their life cut short, the promise of longevity broken.
I scribble down the order. Which rival gang messed up with Wen this time to require that a message be sent? And who of the Kings and Queens, on our leader’s behalf, is going to make them pay? “The address for delivery?”
“Fifty-five sixty-six Lionsbridge, apartment seventeen. Leave it at the entrance. Got it?”
Annoyed at being questioned again, I hang up before he can say anything else. Sure, a member can be close enough to Wen to know about the secret menu and to be trusted to order from it, but it doesn’t have to mean they still aren’t half-stupid.
I’m tempted to bail on the delivery—my cousins Kris and Lulu are about to come on shift as waitresses, and I bet I can convince one of them to go for me. But my mother would expect me to do it, and my father’s already coming over to see what dish to make in the name of a gang whose say over us goes back decades.
“Someone’s husband has messed up.” I show him the order slip.
He calls it out to my uncles—“The winter melon soup, special order!”—and then frowns at me. He is not my mother—annoyance tempers his worry instead of the other way around, my glibness is trouble instead of tolerable, and he’s accepted that Yun is beyond recovery—but for his weary eyes. “It’ll be ready in ten minutes, Ming.”
I grab my wallet from inside my backpack. My mother’s slicing up shiitake mushrooms, their toughness having soaked all day in order to be cut.
“Do you know who?” I ask her quietly. The Red Den? The Sun Gods? The Black Seas?
These are the names of our rivals, the other secret societies that exist in Rowbury. Like us, their members run cover places all over the city too, from delis to banks to florists, so that honest money crosses dirty hands, and it gets hard to say one’s not the other. All of us fight over turf, over shares of a business, over how much someone’s supposed to fear and respect us.
My mother doesn’t look up from her slicing. “Not the Black Seas,” she murmurs.
I leave through the kitchen, both disappointed and relieved. The Black Seas is one of the reasons why I miss my sister so badly, but I want to be the one who makes them bleed.
Even if I have no clue yet how I’m going to do it.
I pla
ce the take-out container of soup into the delivery box of the restaurant scooter and zoom down the street.
* * *
It happened nearly a year ago, at the end of last summer. The shoot-out that day had been between a bunch of Kings and Queens and some of the Black Seas. Yun wouldn’t have even been there, except that her crush had been, a guy who’s a King.
Cross fire. A bullet. The sister I knew . . . gone.
Brain dead, the doctors said. We’re sorry, but there’s nothing to be done.
I shouldn’t hate the Black Seas any more for it just because they happened to be the gang who’d been there that day. It could have been any of the others, just as easily.
But it hadn’t been.
And so it’d been Black Sea bullets we’d had to answer with our own.
And how it happened that it’d been a bullet from one of our guns that took Yun away.
Wen himself had met my stunned parents at the hospital that night, insisting on paying all the medical bills.
Such an honor, our leader coming to see us, my mother had whispered to Lei and me after returning home, a sign of true respect for his members. But her smile had been a stranger’s, just as Yun had become a stranger to me. And there was a kind of flat, cold fire in her eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen her be anything less than adoring of Wen, the man at the wheel of the world that had ground Yun into someone else.
It was months before anything my mother cooked for us tasted right—her congee was thin, her steamed pork cake dry, her red-bean soup never sweet enough no matter how much sugar she poured in. Now I taste hints of her caring in her food again, her mother’s love a force. As though she’s imagining Yun there beside her, saying what she always said when one of us was upset, my sister who’d been fascinated with the night sky: Let’s go outside and look for stars. We can imagine other places in the world coming close to smelling and tasting and feeling as good as Hungry Heart Row, but know it’s not possible. And then we can laugh at how lucky we are.
Still.
Each bite continues to leave behind an edge of bitterness, the sourness of stubborn denial. Sometimes the tears my mother cries into her pot come while she’s cursing beneath her breath; sometimes when I eat, it’s an image of our leader that flashes through my mind.
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