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"Sure, I can do it," the writer told him. He washed his hands and face, and put on a clean apron. When he went into the dining room, the businessmen types seemed surprised that he wasn't Asian--or especially angry-looking.
"What's going on in the kitchen?" one of the men asked him tentatively; he definitely didn't want Xiao Dee to overhear him.
"It's the end of the war, on the television," Danny told them.
"The pasta is terrific, in spite of everything," another of the businessmen types said to Danny. "Compliments to the chef."
"I'll tell him," Danny said.
Some faculty types showed up later, and a few proud parents taking their beloved university students out to dinner, but if you weren't back in the kitchen at Mao's with the angry Asians, you might not have known that the war was over, or how it ended. (They didn't show that television footage everywhere, or for very long--not in most of America, anyway.)
Ah Gou would get to keep his fingertip. Kaori or Sao took young Joe home and put him to bed that night, and Danny drove home with Yi-Yiing. The cook would drive himself home, after Mao's had closed.
There was an awkward moment--after the Japanese babysitter had gone, and before the cook came home--when Joe was asleep upstairs, and Danny was alone in the third Court Street kitchen with the nurse from Hong Kong. Like Danny and his dad, Yi-Yiing didn't drink. She was making tea for herself--something allegedly good for her cold.
"So, here we are, alone at last," Yi-Yiing said to him. "I guess we're almost alone, anyway," she added. "It's just you and me and my damn cold."
The kettle had not yet come to boil, and Yi-Yiing folded her arms on her breasts and stared at him.
"What?" Danny asked her.
"You know what," she said to him. He was the first to lower his eyes.
"How's it going with that tricky business of moving your daughter and your parents here?" he asked her. Finally, she turned a
way.
"I'm very slowly changing my mind about that," Yi-Yiing told him.
Much later, the cook would hear that she'd gone back to Hong Kong; she was working as a nurse there. (None of them ever heard what happened to the Yokohamas, Kaori and Sao.)
That night the war ended, Yi-Yiing took her tea upstairs with her, leaving Danny alone in the kitchen. The temptation to turn on the TV was great, but Danny wandered outside to the Court Street sidewalk instead. It wasn't very late--not nearly midnight--but most of the houses on the street were dark, or the only lights that were on were in the upstairs of the houses. People reading in bed, or watching television, Danny imagined. From several of the nearby houses, Danny could recognize that sickly light from a TV set--an unnatural blue-green, blue-gray shimmer. There was something wrong with that color.
It was warm enough in Iowa at the end of April for some windows to be open, and while he couldn't make out the exact language on the television, Danny recognized the drone as the disembodied voice of the news--or so the writer imagined. (If someone had been watching a love story or another kind of movie, how would Danny have known?)
If the stars were out, Danny couldn't see them. He'd lived on Court Street for three years; there'd been nothing ominous about living there, except for the driverless blue Mustang, and now the writer and his family were about to go back to Vermont. "This asshole country--" Ketchum had started to say; he'd been too angry or too drunk, or both, to even finish his thought. Wasn't it too harsh an assessment, anyway? Danny hoped so.
"Please look after my dad and my little boy," the writer said aloud, but to what was he speaking--or to whom? The starless night above Iowa City? The one alert and restless soul on Court Street who might have heard him? (Yi-Yiing--if she was still awake--maybe.)
Danny stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty street, as if daring the blue Mustang to take notice of him. "Please don't hurt my father or my son," Danny said. "Hurt me, if you have to hurt someone," he said.
But who was out there, under the unseen heavens, to either look after them or hurt them? "Lady Sky?" the writer asked out loud, but Amy had never said she was a full-time angel, and he'd not seen her for eight years. There was no answer.
CHAPTER 11
HONEY
WHERE HAS MY MEMORY GONE? THE COOK WAS THINKING; he was almost sixty, his limp more pronounced. Tony Angel was trying to remember those markets Little Brother had taken him to in Chinatown. Kam Kuo was on Mott Street, Kam Man on the Bowery--or was it the other way around? It didn't matter, the cook concluded; he could still recall the more important things.
How Xiao Dee had hugged him when they'd said good-bye--how Ah Gou had twisted the reattached tip of his left index finger, to make himself cry. "She bu de!" Xiao Dee had shouted. (The Cheng brothers pronounced this SEH BOO DEH.)
"She bu de!" Ah Gou cried, bending that scarred and slightly crooked first digit.
Chinese immigrants said she bu de to one another, Xiao Dee had explained to the cook during one of their sixteen-hour marathons to or from Chinatown, somewhere out on I-80. You said she bu de when you were leaving your Chinese homeland, for New York or San Francisco--or for anywhere far away, where you might not see your childhood friends or members of your own family ever again. (Xiao Dee had told Tony Angel that she bu de meant something like "I can't bear to let go." You say it when you don't want to give up something you have.)
"She bu de," the cook whispered to himself in his cherished kitchen at Avellino.
"What's that, boss?" Greg, the sous chef, asked him.
