The Starving Years (38 page)

The memory surfaced of a knife tapping a worn wooden board—
tick, tick, tick.
Maybe they didn’t have a lot to say to each other, but even so,
bà ngoai’s
death had left a bigger hole in Nelson’s life than he ever would have anticipated.

Tim slid a card to Bobby, who eased it into his hand. His poker face was amazing, for a twelve-year-old, but then his brow furrowed slightly. Tim broke first, cut his eyes to the fork. Bobby smirked, having faked Tim out, and discarded. Nelson wasn’t sure exactly how they’d finagled the action to allow them to play a three-person game with only two people, but however they improvised, both of them seemed to be playing by the same rules. Tim drew.

His eyes darted to Bobby’s. He grabbed for the fork.

Bobby was faster. Tim’s reach was double, but even so, Bobby snatched that fork out from under him, crowing with delight, while Tuyet told him in Vietnamese to keep the noise down—but only half-heartedly, as she stepped out of one pair of shoes and into another in an attempt to find the beaded flip-flops that were precisely right both for the occasion, and for her most recent pedicure.

The kid’s palm must be full of tine-marks by now. Nelson smiled at the back of his head.

The futon where Tuyet and Bobby slept was folded into its couch-shape, and a brown corduroy blazer with absurdly long sleeves was draped across the back. Corduroy. Maybe Tim did know how to be ironic, after all. He’d just been subtle about it.

Tuyet tucked the shoes that didn’t make the cut into a tower of plastic bins that teetered in the corner behind Tim’s redundant servers, then grabbed the blazer off the futon and held it up for Tim to slide his arms in. “Let’s go,” she snapped.

He hustled to obey. The way he towered over her had intimidated her…for maybe two seconds. Within a day of them all moving in, she’d ruled the roost.
 

Once she had Tim put together, she spit-slicked one of Bobby’s cowlicks into place, then hustled them all out the door.

The walk between the apartment and the old place should have seemed familiar. But with cranes and bulldozers and dumpsters dotting the part of Chinatown where he used to live, and especially with the temporary plywood-covered walkways meant to keep pedestrians from being brained by stray rubble while the damage was cleared and the building rebuilt, Nelson’s old street no longer felt like home.

Mott Street was closed off today, not for construction, but for the memorial service. Eighteen people had died in the explosion. Many of them had probably given Nelson the stink-eye in the hallway as he staggered home with a guy he’d picked up at a pretentiously run-down gin mill. He wouldn’t have thought he would care, but it turned out he did. Not a huge surprise. Lately, it seemed like every emotion cut more deeply than he remembered.

As they neared the turn off Canal Street, Tuyet was talking to one of her girlfriends from church on her cell, and Bobby had just belted Tim in the arm and said, “Punch bug blue.” Funny, that Tuyet and Bobby would be okay today, and Nelson would be the one in a funk. Or maybe acting like everything was same-old, same-old was just the way they were coping.

Because it couldn’t be anything other than an act. Nothing was the same.

Pedestrian traffic grew thick as they turned onto Mott, and then Nelson spotted the camera crews. Not many, compared to the mob that had accosted him outside the Manhattan Minute studios. But a few.

Javier peeled out of the crowd as they approached, tucking his press pass into his pocket. He fell into step beside Nelson and said, “You’re wearing jeans.”

“I heard they make my butt look good.”

“That’s beside the point.” Javier’s pinkie brushed the side of Nelson’s hand as they walked. “Are you avoiding Randy?”

“No.” Nelson considered the unreturned messages on his phone. Probably.

“Because he’s pestering me now. Why don’t you want the speaking engagements he’s trying to arrange?”

“There’s plenty of other food science nerds who’d be happy to explain the hydrogen-carbon chain to John Q. Public.”

“They don’t want some other scientist. They want you.”

Nelson groaned and rolled his eyes.
 

“What’s the real reason?”

Nelson considered hedging…but, hey. If Javier let Nelson see his freaky eye whenever they did the horizontal mambo, it wouldn’t kill Nelson to ’fess up. “This whole ‘honorarium’ thing makes me feel like a complete and utter tool.”

“Which is why Randy is handling it for you. These organizations have budgets set up for their speakers. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty about taking the money.”

A producer from one of the news crews spotted Nelson as he approached the checkpoint and showed his license to the cops who were trying to keep rubberneckers out and let grieving family in. The cop took an inordinate amount of time squinting at the address, until Nelson said, “They’re all with me,” and indicated Tuyet and Bao along with Tim and Javier. Including a couple of Asian faces in the group seemed to do the trick. The cop handed Nelson’s license back and waved them through, and they slipped past the barricade before the press caught up with them. Most of the time Nelson was willing to mug for the cameras—he’d distilled what he knew about the current manna situation down to a few easy-to-digest sound bites that the media never seemed to tire of him regurgitating—but not today.

Javier ushered Nelson through a gap in the crowd, then steered Tim toward it with a hand to the lower back. Once they were through the barricade, the crowd thinned. The sidewalk in front of his old building was cleaner than it had ever been before, which was surreal, but the plywood buttress keeping the damage contained was already covered with graffiti. Tuyet and Bobby veered away to talk to a family with a daughter Bobby’s age who’d lived in the apartment above them, and Nelson scoped out a place to stand where a lamp post would block him from the mechanical eyes of the cameras beyond the barricade.

“Is that Marianne?” Javier asked.

Tim craned his neck and looked over the tops of the heads of the people around him. “It is.” He waved, and looked like he was just about to call to her—but then a glance at the eighteen wreaths lined up in front of the souvenir shop made him reconsider raising his voice. He settled on getting her attention by waving more vigorously.

Once Marianne had made it through the checkpoint, she waved back—and Tim gasped.

Javier said, “What is it?”

“Did you see her…uh….” Tim blushed.

“What?” Nelson prompted.

“Back at Manhattan Minute, I’d just figured she was trying to be a distraction.”

Nelson wondered what had become of the chartreuse hat. “And?”

“It’s just that…right now, when she waved, she looked like she might actually be…” he dropped his voice and whispered, “pregnant.”

Nelson snuck a look through the crowd. That whole day was a blindingly bright serotonin blur…but remembering the spongy feel of her foot swelled up like a water balloon as he salved and wrapped the blisters, it would make a hell of a lot of sense. And then there was the frequency of her bathroom breaks. He watched her stop and give her condolences to Tuyet. Now that she wasn’t wearing a bunch of oversized, hand-me-down outfits, maybe he could indeed spot a baby bump.
 

“She is,” Javier said, in that Javier-way of his, and that was that.

“But she lives alone in that little studio by NYU,” Tim said. “What about the father?”

When Javier spoke again, there was a chill to his voice. “There is no father.”

“Oh my God.” Tim stared, anguished. He wore his heart on his sleeve, no doubt about it. Maybe while he’d been tickling Nelson’s neck every night with his long stubble (or short beard), his sensitivity had been wearing away Nelson’s hipster ennui, too. Because Marianne’s predicament plucked at Nelson’s heartstrings as poignantly as Tuyet’s had over twelve years ago.

Some kids from the church circulated through the crowd, passing out cheap fake flowers to the attendees. Nelson took the flower and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. A bit of paper, a bit of wire. Maybe the souvenir shop had been looking for somewhere to unload them.

The parents of one of the children who’d died in the fire dashed over to the wreath with the kid’s last school portrait duct-taped to the center and wired their flowers to the greenery. Right away, all the other mourners tried to get in on the act, crowding the sidewalk. Nelson watched, but he didn’t approach. There’d be time to honor Mai, once everyone else was done jockeying for position.

At a nearby podium, an older white woman in a dark suit noted the rush toward the wreaths, and shuffled index cards while she waited for a better moment to address the survivors. “Who’s that?” Tim said.

Javier, who apparently knew everything (in four different languages, even) said, “Deputy Mayor.”

Nelson wondered idly if she was a deputy, why she wasn’t wearing a big tin badge. But even he knew better than to say something so facetious just then.

“So she needs a mark,” Tim said.

Nelson suspected he wasn’t talking about the Deputy Mayor.

“Yes.” Javier knew. Of course.

“I’m giving her mine.”

Both Javier and Nelson looked up sharply. Tim crossed his arms and stared back as if he was daring them to challenge him. Javier didn’t, not out loud, but there was no mistaking his displeasure when his eyebrow drew down like that. He was just looking out for Tim—Nelson understood that—but, hey. It was Tim’s mark to do with what he pleased. Just because a decision was made impulsively didn’t necessarily make it a bad one. Nelson cuffed Tim lightly in the Punch Bug arm and said, “Awesome. You won’t regret it.”

 
“Make sure someone’s standing behind her when you tell her,” Javier said. “She’s liable to faint when she hears she’ll be carrying on the Voice of Reason line.”

Nelson looked for a sign of amusement, and maybe he saw a slight quirk at the unscarred corner of Javier’s mouth. Maybe. His deadpan delivery was twice as inscrutable as Bobby’s poker face.

The crowd around the wreaths thinned as some of the mourners let their family members escort them off to the side, to weep. Most of the immigrants in the building had seen enough tragedy in their lives that they were able to avoid big public displays of grief. But the sorrow of so many of them seemed harder to bear, as if by their proximity they were compounding the burden rather than sharing it. Especially now, with the loss so fresh.

“At least most of them still have their children,” Javier said.
 

Nelson couldn’t imagine how he’d cope if Bobby was of the unlucky kids being rehabilitated up at Bellevue. “And everyone thought they were being so backward by cooking their traditional food.”

The microphone at the podium gave a squeal of feedback as it went live, and the Deputy Mayor hooked a strand of hair out of the corner of her mouth as the wind wreaked havoc with her hairdo and made rumbling noises in the microphone. “Can everyone hear me?” she asked the crowd, all of whom looked back at her blankly. Figuring no news was good news, she squared her shoulders, glanced down at her index cards, and began. “To the loved ones of all who have been lost in the recent tragedy, I join you in remembering and honoring these fellow New Yorkers….”

A few mourners stepped back from their family member’s wreath, opening a direct line of sight between Nelson and his family’s wreath, and suddenly he felt Mai’s eyes on him as if she’d been staring him down the whole time. It was a strange photograph. She’d never liked having her picture taken, but Bobby had used Nelson’s phone to snap a surprise shot of her less than a week before she died. She stood in the cramped kitchen that was now a pile of rubble in a landfill in New Jersey, hair stuck to her forehead in damp tendrils. She was probably boiling some shrimp bodies just out of frame in a big, steaming pot. She looked surprised. Vulnerable.

And young—barely fifteen years older than Nelson. Way too young to be called
bà ngoai
…grandma.

Nelson smiled at her grimly. She would’ve hated that picture—maybe. Or maybe she would have just acted like she hated it because everyone else expected her to be the stern one, the grownup.

Tuyet and Bobby joined Nelson by the streetlight where he stood between Tim and Javier. They found a spot beside Tim, even though that meant walking around Nelson to avoid falling in beside Javier. The eye patch freaked them out…that, and the whole idea that he was involved with both Nelson and Tim. Bobby and Tuyet somehow managed to drop the subject whenever Nelson brought it up. No doubt they wanted him to settle down into something relatively “normal” with just Tim. But while they would always have a place in Nelson’s life, it was still his life to live.

The Deputy Mayor said something generic about pulling together in a time of tragedy. Nelson supposed there were only so many ways to acknowledge that losing your loved ones sucked. It occurred to him that it would be possible to create a program that would generate a condolence speech for any occasion—and that if he were able to come with the phrases, Tim could probably write an app that would recombine them.

Nah, that’d be morbid.

Nelson tuned in. Preciousness of life, cherishing our loved ones, blah-blah-blah. Seriously, it did sound like it had been generated by some kind of platitude generator. Javier nudged him with an elbow. No doubt he’d now developed multilingual telepathy and had just heard Nelson’s mind wandering. Nelson turned to reply with a look of wounded innocence, and it took him a moment to make sense of the thing in Javier’s hand being extended to him. A handkerchief. How weird, and old-fashioned, and foreign…and somehow, classy.

As Nelson took it, he realized his eyelashes felt damp. He scrubbed at them briefly and then crammed Javier’s handkerchief into the pocket of his blazer…which also belonged to Javier. He sighed.

Once his hand was free, Javier slipped his fingers into the spot his handkerchief had just occupied, and squeezed. Goosebumps raced up Nelson’s arm. On his other side, Tim, who was as sensitive as a tooth whose enamel had all been worn away, interlaced his long fingers with the fingers on Nelson’s free hand. Then he shivered, as if the goosebumps had raced through Nelson, and onto his skin.