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Oh, shit. They’re double teaming him now.
Adam sets down his soju. His eyes narrow. “I’m not a fucking prude.”
“Yes, you are!” Blake calls from across the room. “Don’t believe him!”
“No, I’m not. Just because I believe in personal privacy and—”
“Personal privacy?” My mom shakes her head. “You believe in personal privacy? Forgive me if I am misremembering events. You announced to the entire world that you were a two-bit crack whore, and—”
Adam is staring at her in disbelief. This whole thing is going wrong. Terribly wrong. Exactly as I knew it would.
My mom snaps her fingers. “Ah. I’m so sorry. English is not my first language. Sometimes I make mistakes. Did I say two-bit crack whore? I meant recovering crack whore.” She leans over and pats his hand. “I know the difference must be very important to you, even if nobody else will see it.”
I’m not even sure what to say. How to make this better.
Adam Reynolds practically explodes in laughter, shaking his head. “You’re not bad,” he says, “for a commie cult member.”
He may be laughing, but I have gone to DEFCON 5. My parents practice Falun Gong, which is illegal in China. It’s the reason they were granted asylum in the United States when we moved here years ago.
China’s official stance is that Falun Gong is an extremely complicated cult. His statement is the offhand equivalent of tossing a grenade.
But my mother simply shakes her head. “You’re just saying that because you can’t do it.”
“What can’t I do?”
“Falun Gong,” my father puts in. “A simple series of exercises. Requires a clear mind and flexible thinking. You can’t do it.”
Adam Reynolds sets down his soju. “The fuck I can’t.”
“Also, you will get yourself banned from China,” my father says.
“I’d like to fucking see them try.”
And that is how our parents first meet. Adam Reynolds takes off his shoes in my parents’ living room and ends up practicing “Buddha Stretching a Thousand Arms” while my mother watches, eating cake and offering pointers like, “If you do everything this fast, no wonder you don’t want to have an orgy on film. It would be embarrassing for you.”
Adam Reynolds looks over at her. “Shut the fuck up and admit you like my cake.”
She frowns at it. “Edible, I suppose.”
My father shakes his head. “Never get involved in a land war with Hong Mei,” he says, “when cake is on the line.”
Adam gives him a flat stare. “So it comes to this. I will eat the piece in front of me. You will eat the piece in front of you.”
Funny. I knew when they met there would be a nuclear explosion. I just didn’t realize that they would end up laughing and mangling Princess Bride after the radiation had dissipated.
By the end of the night, my dad is doing shots with Adam Reynolds. Adam is deemed not quite sober enough to drive, and when he talks about getting a car, my mother makes shocked noises.
“A total waste of money,” she says in disbelief. “We have a perfectly good couch. Stay here.”
No fucking way will he accept, I’m thinking.
He accepts.
Adam Reynolds. Multibillionaire. Sleeping on my parents’ couch. My mom gets him blankets; my dad finds him an extra toothbrush and a pair of sweats that will undoubtedly be too loose at the waist and too short in the leg.
We are all about to head off to bed.
“Hey,” Adam says. “Tina. Blake. Mabel.”
Blake and I stop, hand in hand.
Adam is still in jeans and a T-Shirt. He gives me a goofy smile. I would never have guessed that Adam Reynolds would be silly when he’s drunk.
But he stands up and rummages in the computer bag that he brought with him. “I have these.”
He pulls out a handful of red envelopes.
My breath sucks in. One of the things about being young and Chinese—particularly if, like me, you grew up with very little money—is that you learn to be mercenary at the lunar new year. It’s traditional for adults to give red envelopes to children. The theory is that what they give away will come back to them over the course of the year.
Everyone we know is like us: varying degrees of struggling. That means that the red envelopes I once collected usually had a dollar in them, maybe ten if it was a close family friend.
But Adam Reynolds? I have no idea what Adam Reynolds will give. Blake explained to me once that anything under a hundred grand didn’t even seem like real money to him.
Mabel approaches first.
“Gong xi fa cai,” Adam says in semi-passable Chinese, handing her an envelope. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he had been practicing the phrase.
“Gong xi fa cai,” she replies.
Blake is next. “Gong xi fa cai, asshole,” Adam says to his son. He passes over the envelope with one hand, as is traditional, and Blake takes it. The fistbump that follows is not traditional.
Then it’s my turn. “Gong xi fa cai,” he says to me.
I almost say it back. They’re just words, ones I say without thinking about their meaning. Happy New Year, essentially. Except that’s not what these particular words actually mean.
Wishing Adam wealth and prosperity for the new year is like wishing a shark more ocean. He can’t swim through the tiniest fraction of what he already has.
I’m supposed to do something risky this month. I’m not sure if there’s anything riskier than asking Adam Reynolds a personal question.
“What would you want?” I ask him. “If I could wish any one thing for you, would you really pick wealth and prosperity? Or would you ask for something else?”
He looks at me. His pupils are dilated. I can smell soju on his breath. For a second, he looks old—older than his fifty years, older even than he looked sitting in the hospital after his heart attack.
He rubs one hand through his graying hair, sending it up into little spikes. Then he looks away.
“One more email,” he says. “I want one more email.”
I don’t know what he means. I tilt my head toward Blake, a questioning look in my eyes. Blake shakes his head in confusion.
“Then I hope you get a hundred emails,” I tell him.
He smiles. There’s no mirth in the expression. Instead, there’s something almost haunting about his face.
“Nah,” he says. “I’m not drunk enough to hope for that.”
3
ADAM
The apartment is dark. The couch is surprisingly comfortable. It’s the fucking alcohol that won’t let me sleep. That, and Tina’s question.
What do I want?
A million things I’m never going to have. But this one? The one I asked for?
That, I can imagine. I can make a case for one more email. I can imagine that one exists, stuck in the Cyclone mail servers. Maybe he left one last message hedged by a delivery date. Maybe it’s still coming.
I want to believe it could exist.
I want to think that it’s not completely, utterly, finally over.
It’s over. It’s so fucking over that I watched it turn to fucking ash.
My stupid wish is just the alcohol fucking with my mind. Maybe. Maybe there’s more.
I pull my phone off the floor where it’s charging and open my mail.
I’m trying not to imagine the way he would have laughed at me throughout the evening. He’d have handled this entire situation with nuance and grace. My dispute resolution tactic has always been to barge in, guns blazing, f-bombs away. I wish he were here, but I’m not him. I can’t ever be him.
I miss his fucking nuance.
I don’t look for a response to my last message. I’m fucked enough to send messages to his abandoned email box. I’m not so fucked that I believe he’ll actually respond.
Once, I told someone that the five stages of grief were inefficient—that anyone with a fucking clue could navigate the waters of bullshit with just two. Turns out denial is not as unfamiliar to me as I had claimed.
My typical denial usually runs to extraneous bullshit posturing, but I’m drunk and stripped of my defenses. Tonight, I can’t manage the crap.
I stare at the empty message field for a minute before typing.
Hey, gorgeous.
I’m finally beginning to understand what you told me. I thought that without you to soften me up, I’d eventually ossify and break into fucking pieces. Turns out I’m not that fucked. As much as it pains me to admit it, you were fucking right about one thing. I’m going to be okay.
Don’t fucking think it changes anything else. You were still wrong. I love you. I will always love you.
BLAKE
“I think,” Tina whispers to me, “this is what getting along looks like. For our parents, at least.”
We are lying in her bed after midnight, listening to the sounds of her household winding down. Her sister has been banished to the TV room, giving us a small semblance of privacy. It’s a twin bed, which means the only way to sleep is tangled up in each other. Her head rests against my shoulder; her hands are against my chest.
