Page 63 of Lone Wolf

Melinda wore bright coral Puma sneakers, and yoga pants with see-through fine mesh stripes on the sides that ran all the way up her hips, disappearing beneath an oversize man’s sweater. Her waist-length jet-black hair had been taken up in a long straight ponytail bound at intervals down its length that flicked behind her as she moved. Her face was perfectly symmetrical, her features distinct in the warm glow of the kitchen light.

An altar had been set up in a corner of the kitchen, a diminutive wooden table gnarled with knots and rough with uneven planks, its edges polished by a thousand touches. A white and blue floral ceramic bowl held offerings —apples, oranges, and some vibrant red fruit with bristly, hairlike hides. Incense burned before photos of antecedents in somber poses. Mother-of-pearl tableaus showed mountainscapes, water buffalo in rice fields, a boy playing a flute. In a small blue vase tilted a miniature South Vietnamese flag, canary yellow with three horizontal red stripes.

Evan breathed the spices and flavors and watched Melinda work.

After a time she brought plates and bowls over to the table, and they served themselves and ate silently. The taste was pyrotechnic, the smell pungent, intense. Caramelized pork belly with mắm tôm—a fermented shrimp paste strong enough to disperse a small crowd. It blasted open Evan’s taste buds. He sensed garlic and sugar, Thai chili pepper and minced shallots. The dish was as balanced and authentic as Melinda’s forgeries. Chinese broccoli on the side, a scoop of rice.

“It’s very good,” Evan said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “As my mợ would say, ‘not too salty.’ You have to get it just right.”

“Mợ?”

“‘Auntie.’ She’s the one who raised me here in Westminster.” Melinda gestured at the altar. Among the stoic black-and-whites there were some grainy Kodachrome photos, including one of a vibrant young woman in an A-line dress. “The mother-of-pearl? That was all hers.”

From the past tense Evan understood that the auntie was gone. He and Melinda had never discussed anything personal. He wasn’t good at this part, but he sensed that she might not be either, and that put him a bit more at ease.

She took a gulp from her glass of water and looked at him. Direct eye contact but not aggressive. Studying him and allowing him to study her. For a time they just looked at each other.

He took another bite. “Was she your real auntie or ‘auntie’ in the affectionate sense?”

Melinda smiled. “Asian auntie,” she said. “No blood relation. Close friend of my mother’s.”

Evan started to ask the next question but stopped. Any further headway into her biography was too intimate for him to take point on.

The Fifth Commandment again: If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

“Who raised you?” she asked.

Evan said, “Wolves.”

She nodded, respecting the boundary.

They ate for a time in silence, and he wasn’t sure if she’d decided to move on from this part of the conversation. Then she set down her chopsticks and straightened them so they were perfectly parallel. “After my father was killed in the war, my mother ran the black market in forged papers. She was a matriarch in every sense of the word. It’s all I know, all I trust. My sisters and I watched at her elbow, cleaned the equipment, ran drop-offs. There were four of us and I was the youngest, so I learned fast. I was doing finish work on documents by the age of five.”

That put Melinda in her mid-fifties now, and yet she looked younger by at least a decade and a half. Something in the heft of her age and the grace with which she carried her experience quickened his attraction to her.

This woman had supplied him with more identities than he could recount, had used her life’s skill to wrap him in her protection on mission after mission, to keep him safe when he forged onto unsafe ground. Her work was in her blood. It was her birthright, her inheritance, her identity. The forged documents she made for Evan were more than just jobs; they were gifts of creation and rebirth.

“My mẹ—my mom—she worked as a cleaning lady on a U.S. Air Force base. Tan Son Nhut.”

“I know that base.”

“Everyone knows the day Saigon fell, but the day before was the get-out day.”

“April 29, 1975.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Thirty-six hours to evacuate half a country. My mom planned to get us out through the embassy. But it was chaos. You’ve seen the footage. People throwing babies over the fence. Paperwork, it was everything. But my mom knew even the best papers couldn’t get us through that mob. So we stayed at the base, hoping that those nice people she worked for all those years would help. Not that the chances were much better there. The base, runways, and planes had been bombed but there were two cargo helicopters left—tandem-rotor Chinooks. People were screaming and scrambling. We got separated. A soldier carried me. I was seven. He put me on the wrong copter. The second one. The rest of my family was on the first. My mother’s friend happened to be on the second one, too.”

“Your mợ.”

“Yes. I watched my family in the other helicopter through the open doors as we took off. My mother was reaching for me and her mouth was open in a wail I couldn’t hear over the rotors. I’d never seen her cry. Their helicopter went one way, ours another. We landed at Côn S ơn Island off the southern coast. It housed a Vietnamese prison and the prisoners were still there. It was terrifying. The U.S. Navy got us in the morning. On to Guam. From there Camp Pendleton”—a southward tilt of her head—“in San Diego. Then Westminster.”

“And your family?”

“Years later I found out that their plane went through the Philippines. The records are scarce from there. By the time I was skilled enough to track anything down, I found a death record for my mother. Sepsis. It took years more to get info on my sisters.”

“And?”