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“Well, he did before! He started this!” I knew I sounded like a sullen child even as the words tumbled out.
“Perhaps. But ever since then, you have controlled the board. You say the ball is in his court. Maybe. But you decided the terms under which things ended before. You decided the terms under which to reappear. It might be his ball, maybe they’re even his rules, but it seems that much of the court has been under your control.”
“You even decided to send him cookies!” Stacy added, before I could respond to the charges she had laid at my feet.
Guilty, guilty, guilty. Silently, I pled the fifth. It was no wonder he’d said I made him nervous. “I just never know what to expect with you,” he had finally elaborated after the fourth or fifth time I’d asked. “I never had any idea what you would do or say next. I still don’t.”
I wondered again if the cookies had made it, if he had shaken his head in disbelief to think what a nut I must be, shipping two dozen cookies halfway around the world. I also wondered whether he ate them, or shared them, or dumped them in the bin. I owed him a sheaf of documents around his birthday, and with what it would cost the college to overnight those – because overnight service was the only guarantee that the papers would not go missing between Ann Arbor and Vientiane – we had decided to toss in a bit of swag for his students, notebooks and pens, and another shirt for him. The cookies were my personal touch. I make a mean cookie. If the man didn’t devour them, he’s a fool.
Real American cookies are a treasured delicacy the world over, and Nao Kao was no exception, at least the Nao Kao of twenty years ago. Once I made cookies for him at the little apartment on Madison, me as the chef, him taking notes, a real-life cooking show. You have to cream the butter and the sugars thoroughly, I had explained, to make the mixture completely smooth before you add the eggs and the vanilla. Cracking eggs was not my forte, and I had spent the next five minutes extracting tiny pieces of shell from the bowl with the tines of a fork, causing him to order a commercial break, during which he mimed ads for appliances and kitchen gadgets until I was ready to sift the flour into the bowl.
“You’re not supposed to eat raw cookie dough,” he told me, as I forked at least two cookies’ worth into my mouth.
“How do you know that? You’ve never even made cookies before!” I was talking around the dough, my hand in front of my mouth, causing him to waggle his eyebrows at the many bad habits I was simultaneously demonstrating.
“I researched.”
“Researched making cookies? Why?”
“In case I needed to know.”
I laughed, spitting little pieces of half-masticated dough onto my palm. Nao Kao looked away, bemused or disgusted, or probably both.
“I’m telling you, no manna from heaven ever tasted better. Try it.”
“It’s the salmonella, you know, from the eggs. Also, it’s possible the flour could have e. coli.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I know. But I’m telling you, death by cookie dough would not be a bad way to go. Now try some.”
Every bit of skepticism vanished the moment the spoon crossed his lips. Nao Kao’s eyes widened, and he reached for more even as the first taste was still in his mouth. Victory. Sweet, sweet victory.
When the cookies came out of the oven, he almost literally ate his words. He was so thin then I am not sure where they went, but he must have eaten a dozen cookies while they were still hot, the chocolate melting over his fingers as he plucked them from the cooling racks, and I sent most of the rest home with him on the bus, where he gobbled half of them before he arrived at North Campus. He messaged me in the morning that he had taken a page from my book and polished off what was left for breakfast.
In the years since, I have shipped cookies all over the world on birthdays, Christmases, and Chinese New Years too numerous to count. Never, though, had I shipped them anywhere that the ambient temperature hovered near one hundred degrees. I could envision the great, gooey mess that would be my cookies upon their arrival in Laos. Nao Kao would have to settle for peanut butter. Whether they arrived, I never knew. Maybe the postman got them, maybe he took them to class, maybe, maybe, maybe.
Oh, but this man was maddening!
“Did you ever think about how hard this might be for him?”
“Hmmmm?” I had been lost in my fit of pique about the cookies and was only half-listening to Stacy.
“Earth to Liss, come in, Liss. I said: have you ever considered that this might be hard for him? Or at least not easy?”
“Um, no?”
Stacy sighed.
“Liss, look. From the beginning, nothing you have told me about this situation, nothing at all, is common.”
Her favorite word. Therapists are not allowed to tell you that you or your problems are not “normal.” I had learned over the years, though, that things that were not “common” were most definitelyabnormal.
“I have told you before, I don’t know this man from Adam and I have never even met anyone from Laos. I’m not sure, honestly, if I’d even heard of Laos before you told me about this guy. But I know people. I get people. And when I think back to all the things you’ve shared with me, to the details he has shared with you – what I know, Liss, is that people do not retain this level of recall unless they care uncommonly. I don’t know what Facebook’s algorithms have to say about friends who have exchanged, what – six hundred pictures in fifteen months? Seven hundred?”
“More like nine hundred probably,” I corrected her, “but who’s counting?”
“Probably Facebook. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s some kind of record. But the point is not the number. My point is that this is not common. I can’t tell you what itis, but I can tell you what it isnot. And what it is not is common. What it isnotis the behavior I would expect from college friends who check back in after a couple of decades to catch up on life. Those people? They send an email or two and then they content themselves with holiday cards!”
“But I don’t get it,” I said. “Do you know that in all this time, I don’t think he’s told me his girls’ names at all? If he said them ever, it was once. The same thing for his wife. Why be so secretive? Why be so weird?”
