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He’d oversold the concept a little, jumping a couple of steps. I didn’t know how he came upon that factoid. “Jobs are like . . . ugh. That’s thinking too far ahead right now.”
“You don’t need to worry about what happens after school,” Mom said over her shoulder. “If you can’t find a job, Quentin will take care of you.”
Quentin’s eyes went wide, like a boxing referee who noticed both fighters were suddenly holding knives. He waved his hands at me behind my mother’s back to show he didn’t share her opinion on the matter.
I took a breath through my nostrils so deep I could have made a wish on a birthday cake. By the time I counted to three and exhaled, the dangerous moment had passed. It was okay. Another one of my mother’s stupid, old-fashioned statements. Not worth picking a whole fight from scratch about.
I felt proud of myself. I was the embodiment of serenity and forgiveness.
“No one has considered whether or not I have time to be captain,” I said. “You know. Given my other extracurriculars?” I made a hint-hint face at Quentin.
“If it’s valuable, then make the time,” Mom said. A mouthwatering bloom of garlic and ginger filled the air as she added the aromatics to the pan. The smell would last in our cramped, unventilated kitchen until tomorrow. “You always have more time than you think, lying around in little bits. Back when your father and I were opening the furniture store, we were so busy that we used to make schedules of what we were doing in fifteen-minute . . .”
She paused. I looked away. I’d seen this before; the sentence wasn’t going to be finished.
The experience of those days, of the unmitigated disaster that was my father, and really my mother, too, going into business for themselves, had surfaced in the disguise of a wistful memory. The clash of feelings caused my mother to short-circuit.
I might have had an American set of values to help relieve the pressure caused by the tragedy. Stuff happens. People change. TV’s too good right now to care.
But to her, what had happened to our family was a fermenting cauldron of bitterness that would only grow thicker and fouler over time. It would be there forever. Asian parents did not have the widest psychological toolset.
Quentin tried to break the silence. “You know, you could make things easier for yourself by delegating. Create an assistant captain position.”
Yeah right. He’d seen how well that worked with Guanyin. Trying to command someone who’d been passed over for your job was only a good idea on paper. The other seniors who’d been playing the sport way longer than me would looove taking my orders. And forget the young’uns. This incoming crop of sophomores and freshmen barely knew which side of the net was theirs.
And secondly, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Mom’s mood had infected me, ruining my short-lived moment of tranquility, and the two of us had regressed into the emotional state we’d spent most of the last five years in. Mother and daughter were both sullen cocoons now. Who knew when we’d emerge. It certainly wouldn’t be this evening.
Quentin made a little inward sigh when he saw my face and moved on to safe questions he already knew the answer to. “Can I help with anything?” he called out to Mom.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. She tipped the beans onto a plate and set them down in front of us, the steam wafting in front of Quentin’s face like a veil. Then she paused in front of the rice cooker.
“Forgot something?” I said.
“No, I . . .” She shook her head. I could hear her jab the paddle roughly against the insides of the chamber as she filled a large bowl.
Ugh. Now we were in angry chore mode. The sound of dishes being passive-aggressively put away, the roar of an unnecessary vacuuming, was pretty much the soundtrack of my childhood. Mom turned around and, sure enough, her face was slightly red. She stopped again halfway to the table.
But then her hands trembled. I’d never seen that before. Something was very wrong.
“I’m fine,” she said in response to a question no one had asked out loud. She tried to put the food on the nearest flat surface. The bowl tipped off the edge of the counter and crashed to the floor.
“Mom!” I knocked over my chair in my attempt to reach her before she collapsed.
“I’m fine,” she declared, this time in a loud, strong voice. But she thumped hard down on the floor, like a child refusing to walk anymore. She took the landing so hard on her wrist that I was certain she’d broken it.
Quentin was gone. I knew without needing to look that he’d vaulted over the table to get help.
I wouldn’t have seen him go anyway. My vision had tunneled. My whole world had shrunk down to the size of my mother in my arms, and it was fragile and small and shaking, and I was going to sit here and cradle it in my arms and pray to every god in existence that it would be okay.
7
“Genie, I’m fine,” mom said.
She would have looked pretty stupid saying that, had we been inside a hospital room, with her lying on an incline bed, an IV stuck in her pale, thin arm. But we weren’t. Instead, the two of us were sitting on dull tartan chairs in front of a pile of Runner’s World magazines in the lobby. We hadn’t even made it into the ER proper.
The scattered handful of other people in the waiting area held ice packs to their faces or cradled swollen ankles. Their presence made me indignant. Get up on out of here with your superficial injuries distracting the staff from my mother. You assholes aren’t related to me.
“You are not fine,” I said. “You had a hypertensive episode.”
