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* * *
Eden won’t stop laughing.
“What?” I demand.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “It’s just… This feels so ridiculous. Your fancy car in a McDonald’s drive thru. I could have made a call and had your table atEl Blancoreserved.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a good ol’ fashion burger and fries every now and then.”
“I won’t argue with you there. What I thought was funny was how you could barely reach up to pay the guy at the window because your car’s so low.” She holds her stomach as she laughs, all wheezy with tears in her eyes. “Big man in a small car. Hilarious.”
I laugh with her. “Shut up.”
Eden takes a deep breath, trying to calm down. She pats the bag she has sitting on her lap. “I hope Mei-Lee likes chicken nuggets.”
“Whodoesn’tlike chicken nuggets.”
“Very true.” After a moment, she asks, “How long have you known sign language? I don’t remember you knowing any when I was little.”
“I learned.”
She rolls her eyes. We’re a couple more streets away until we’re back at my place.
“Obviously,” she says. “I want to knowwhy.”
“Mei-Lee wasn’t always deaf,” I explain as I drive. “She started losing her hearing about six years ago. She’d been working for me for about a year at that point. She got sick, wound up with an ear infection. We got it treated, but her hearing started deteriorating rapidly.”
Eden frowns. “That’s terrible.”
“She was very worried about what it might mean for her employment. ‘How can I follow instructions if I can’t hear?’ she asked me.”
I shake my head. “I could tell how much she was panicking. She doesn’t talk about them much, but I know she has a family back home in China that she sends most of her paycheck to. Without work, how else was she going to take care of them?”
“You clearly kept her on,” Eden says thoughtfully.
“I felt bad. She’s a good worker. Tough as nails. I knew she’d have a hard time being hired anywhere else now that her hearing was going, so I came up with a plan.
“I had that summer off. No films waiting for approval in the pipeline, no movies waiting to be shot. I decided now was as good a time as any to take Mei-Lee to the local community college where we could learn American Sign Language together. Guess who was at the top of the class?”
“You?”
I shake my head and chuckle. “No. Mei-Lee. She was very eager to learn.”
“And how’dyouscore?”
“Dead last. I passed, but barely.”
She breaks out into a fit of giggles, the sound so light and sweet that I can’t help but laugh along with her. “You’re lying,” she declares.
“I’m afraid not. I’m a long-time sufferer of testing anxiety. I got the basics, okay? And I’ve had six years of practice, so I’m much more fluent than I was.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her smiling at me. There’s a look of adoration on her face.
“Will you teach me a few signs? I want to be able to tell Mei-Lee we got her chicken nuggets.”
I chuckle. “Sure.”
* * *
