Page 35 of Bad Words

I threw a glance across the bar. Packed. By the time I fought my way across the crowd to privacy, the call would go to voicemail.

I hunched toward the wall beside me and picked up. “Dad?”

“Xueyan.”

Those two syllables confirmed my fears. My mother and father hardly ever used my middle name. At home I was Xiao Yan in the day-to-day, Selina with company—Xueyan only under serious duress.

I slid forward on my barstool so its edge bit into my thigh. If I got a car back to Brooklyn and it took me fifteen minutes to pack a bag, I could be at LaGuardia in an hour, although God knew if there were any flights to Minneapolis tonight. “What happened?” I said sharply.

“What happened? You tell me. Fred Richards at work said today he see you in the news.”

This took me so completely by surprise that for a moment I could only sit there, staring at the bottles of bourbon clustered upon an iron shelf. Thoughts of a rush flight to Minnesota vanished.

I straightened up on my barstool. “Wait,” I said. “This is about the feud?”

“The feud? The feud!” My father’s voice was a reedy, mournful baritone, like a bassoon turned into a sixty-eight-year-old man. “You say ‘the feud’ like we should know about this. We don’t know anything. You have a fight with this writer? You were in every newspaper for weeks? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“What do you mean, why didn’t I tell you? What was I supposed to—” I hunched over the bar, my bewilderment interrupted by a stab of frustration. “Never mind. Okay. Now you know. Do you have questions, or something? Is that why you’re calling?”

Now I heard my mother faintly in the background. “She picked up? Let me talk to her.” A moment later, she was saying, “Xueyan. What are you going to do about this? We heard about this fight from your father’s coworker! From—”

“I know. Dad already said that.”

“—so? So?”

My free hand had curled into a fist in my lap. “I’m handling it.”

“How?”

The tattooed bartender had caught my eye. He made a motion toward his ear, a kill gesture across his throat.

“I don’t have time for this,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Where are you? What’s all that noise?”

“I’m at a bar. I’m fine. I just have to go.”

My father again. “Xueyan, this is—”

“I can’t be on my phone in here. Bye.”

I ended the call and shoved my phone into my purse. My dress was sticking to the middle of my back. My face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, looked blank and hard-eyed, but I felt like something inside my torso had bruised. My heart thudded against that soft place again and again as I drained half my gimlet in two long, bitter swallows. The panel, and now this, too? With the low roar of the bar churning around me, I returned to thumbing through the books in my tote bag, needing something beautiful to catch my eye.

Chapter NineParker

“To the feud,” said Carla, clinking her martini against my second Jack Rose.

I tipped my drink back. “Glad it’s entertaining you.”

“Not as much as this is. Are you seeing her?” Carla’s eyes, clever and quick, a little mortified and a little smug, strayed to the bar.

“Still drinking alone?” I glanced back. “If it were anyone else, I’d feel bad for her.”

Emily nibbled her lower lip. “Are we sure she’s that awful? It seems like nobody’s really talked to her. Not to be a hopeless cliché, but she could just be kind of misunderstood.”

“No,” I said. “Selina Chan is understood exactly the way she wants people to understand her.”

“How do you know?” said Emily.