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She raises a dubious eyebrow.
“Not technically,” I amend. “I just asked him to behave.”
“And?”
I wave my hand. “Some bullshit about my being naïve and not everyone liking him. I’m not naïve, am I?”
Tina meets my eyes. Very slowly, she nods. “You’re a little naïve.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. I know not everyone likes my dad. I have the Internet; I could hardly miss it. He’s abrasive and difficult, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
He is also everything I have. These days, he’s my entire family.
“I want you to like my dad,” I say. “I need you to like my dad. What can I do?”
She exhales and comes to my side. “I do like your dad.” She’s looking down now. “But he’s a blowtorch, always hot, and…” She swallows.
“And what?”
“And my parents are like a gallon of gas. Blake, they’re not going to get along. We’re going to have to choose. Every holiday we have while we’re together, we’re going to have to decide whether we spend it apart from each other, or spend it with just one of them. If we try and shove them in the same place, everything’s going up in flames.”
I stare at her. I’m so used to my dad being the problem that I didn’t think about her parents. Shit. My dad was right.
She shakes her head. “But that’s a problem for another weekend. We’re here now. We’ll have fun. Right?”
“Right,” I say weakly.
Right. Except…
I think about what my dad said. He said he was going to fix this shit. I think about all the ways I have seen him “fix” shit throughout my entire life.
And I finally, finally understand why Tina is biting her lip and looking away. A gallon of gas and a blowtorch. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything. Every fucking thing.
“Great,” I say slowly. “Let’s have fun while we still can.”
2
ADAM
The next morning
My plane landed forty minutes ago. A car was waiting for me at the curb; George, my assistant, had directions to the place I needed to visit programmed into my phone, down to a turn-by-turn description of the store’s interior.
This is the first time I’ve been in a Wal-Mart in my fucking life.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not some misguided anti-corporatist bullshit on my part. That would be a heaping pile of hypocritical shit coming from me, pro-corporate leader extraordinaire.
The reason is actually really fucking simple: I never went shopping with my mom when I lived at home because yadda yadda something gender roles. By the time I moved Cyclone out of my parents’ garage, I was already a multimillionaire, and someone else was doing my shopping.
I’ve never needed to go to Wal-Mart. This is my virgin trip.
Ha. Virginity. Like the ancient fucking Roman empire, all roads bend my thoughts in the direction of…no, not Rome. The analogy breaks down there. Never Rome. It’s more like Carthage. Which must be destroyed.
Shit.
I pause a moment in front of a display of Star Wars footed pajamas to digest that wave of bitter nostalgia. You get used to bitterness. It’s a fucking acquired taste, and after a few years, it’s so familiar that it’s almost welcome.
I concentrate on my surroundings. I’m stuck in the here and now, no matter what I fucking want, so…
This is the here. This is the now. Southern California. The place of my birth, to be fucking technical, although a Wal-Mart in Alhambra is basically the opposite side of the solar system from the wealthy half of Orange County where I was born.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. If I believed the internet, Wal-Mart would be a haven of guns and beer and rednecks.
In reality, I’m basically the only white guy I see. Also in reality, fuck the fucking internet. The internet coughs up hairballs on a regular basis. The shit it’s said about me, for instance. Besides, I know the stats our retail chief feeds me. Cyclone products aren’t cheap, and we do a reasonable business with Wal-Mart.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a regular fucking store. Blue jeans. Giant cardboard tubs of virulently orange goldfish. Cans of pasta sauce. And there’s Star Wars shit everywhere.
Speaking of my selfish pro-corporate agenda, I spare a moment of disappointment that Star Wars didn’t sell merchandising rights to Disney two decades earlier. This shit fucking rocks. Blake would have been really cute back when he was two in those Wookie pajamas. Now? He’s outgrown them by about four feet.
But that’s the great circle of merchandising life in a fucking nutshell. The shit you can’t get for your kid, you buy in bulk for your grandkids.
Big metal shelves and signs advertise every day low prices. I am trying to make logical sense of this. How can they be low if they’re every day? Doesn’t that make them regular? If I’d been the one hearing this pitch, I’d have interrupted and asked, and the ad guy would have ground his teeth, and everyone would have told me to shut up because it was a perfectly fine slogan, good even, listen to the campaign results before judging, Adam…
Imagining being a pain in the ass to imaginary people is a great fucking mental distraction from bitterness. I make my way to the bakery in back.
This encounter is going to be interesting.
I love Blake. He’s usually a smart kid. But…yeah, if he thinks that I’m the only potential problem in meeting Tina’s parents, he hasn’t thought his shit through.
The bakery counter is bustling when I arrive. A blond woman is in front, arranging cupcakes behind a plastic shield. The woman I’m looking for—I recognize her from photos Tina has shown me on her phone—is off to the side, behind a barrier. Her head is bent, her dark hair gathered in a messy bun and contained in a hair net. She’s looking down, concentrating on a cake. She’s shorter than Tina, but even the act of squeezing frosting out of a tube-thingy has her jaw set in resolute conviction.
There’s a plastic wall between us, but I tower head and shoulders above it. I am close enough that I could reach out and tap her on the shoulder.
I don’t. “Hey.” I pitch my voice to reach her ears alone. “Hong Mei.”
Mrs. Hong Mei Chen looks up. Her eyes meet mine and her gaze narrows.
Yep. She sure as fuck recognizes me.
“You.” That word is imbued with a thousand suspicions. “What do you want?”
“A couple minutes,” I say. “I—”
She jerks her head toward the front of the bakery. “You forgot your custom cake order form.” She says those last four words so swiftly that they run together, like she’s so used to saying them that they’ve blurred into one word, no pauses. “I need a custom cake order form before I can talk to you.”
I blink at her. “Are you fucking serious? You know who I am.”
She rolls her eyes, then drops her voice in imitation of me. “‘You know who I am.’ Yes, I know who you are. Doesn’t matter. Corporate policy is that we need a written custom cake order form first, then you can give specific direction. You of all people should understand corporate policy.”
I exhale. “Look. Hong Mei. This isn’t how I wanted us to meet, either. But I wanted to talk about Blake and Tina—”
“Some of us still have to work. We can’t drop everything just because a big, important man wants to have a conversation in the middle of our jobs. You want to talk to me? I didn’t realize buying a cake was such a problem.”
“Come the fuck on.”
She tilts her head toward the order forms, and…
And fuck it, why the fuck do I care if I have to buy a fucking cake? If Tina’s mother wants the damned form, she can have the damned form. I retreat to the front, fetch an over-xeroxed sheet, and chase a worn pencil nub out of the plastic tray that holds the papers.
There are too many choices. What the fuck is the difference between a sheet cake and a round cake? Isn’t a cupcake cake a contradiction in terms? What in all the levels of hell i
s But-R-Créme, and whose bright idea was it to make “butter cream” sound more disgusting than it already does? I check boxes at random. In the space for “additional instructions,” I write, “We should probably have an actual conversation about our fucking kids.” As an afterthought—I can be polite on rare occasion—I add, “please.”
I hand this over to her. She frowns at it, then leaves, returning with a square cake frosted in white. “Is this one acceptable to you? I know you’re very, very important, so I want to make sure.”
“It’s fine.” I do my best to ignore her pointed jabs. “So. Blake and Tina are down for the lunar New Year.”
She looks over her tools and selects one without so much as a glance at me. “I know this already, because they are staying in my home.”
I don’t grimace. “Blake told me he wanted us to meet. Tina has been…less excited about the prospect.”
“How could that be?” Hong Mei shrugs. “I tell her I would love to talk to you all the time. I have so many questions.”
She loads a cartridge into the back of the silver whats-its-fuck thing she is holding and begins to airbrush parallel lines in peach onto the cake.
So many questions? Yeah. I’m fucked.
“For instance,” she says. “Blake said you were in Hangzhou last week.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. When I said I was a giant blindspot for Blake, I wasn’t kidding. This bright-eyed bushy-tailed love shit on his part is officially a goddamned liability. Blake literally can’t figure out that people might not like me. He definitely can’t realize that they might have legitimate fucking reasons. While that’s a really fucking flattering way for my kid to think about me, it’s also extremely inconvenient. He has no idea what he has been doing.
“Great,” I say. “Are we talking about that?”
