Chapter Thirty-Eight
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
One aspect of her death Joan did not consider was her funeral. After all, she would already be dead. She had an estate plan, though she could not recall the precise directives, and feared that asking Nelson would alert him to her greater intentions. Also, she just didn’t care about funerals.
If Joan had cared, she might have asked that the service not be held at a church.
These instructions had been copied over from Bill’s, who had not been a churchgoer either, but the Lauders believed that, like the royal family, they should conduct their important ceremonies at church.
And certainly Joan would not have requested to hold the reception at Lotus Garden.
Not due to any embarrassment over her prior history but because Sam Wu had retired and sold the business, and thus the restaurant she had known was no more.
The cook was new, and the menu touted cocktails with names like “Sunset Dreams” and “The Pink Bubbly”; everyone knew that when a Chinese restaurant tried to pivot to serving Caucasians on first dates, the results were usually dire.
But Joan had never told her family this (if she were alive, she might have argued that by not visiting, she’d already delivered her verdict), and so after the service, they all traveled to the restaurant where Joan had worked as a hostess decades earlier, as a young woman new to California.
Misty showed up at Lotus Garden. She sat right outside the entrance on the low concrete ledge, which was where Lee encountered her.
“I couldn’t go into that church,” Misty said. “I spent the whole time sitting outside staring at traffic. Funny thing is, I did the same for most of your father’s.”
“Oh?” Lee didn’t remember much of Bill’s funeral; it was a blur in her memory, though she could still recall the heat of the fire that night.
They walked inside. Misty looked strong; her hair was short and dyed red. She went first to Bridget and Henry, the three siblings forming a little knot, and then halfway through dinner returned to speak with Lee.
“She wanted to give you something,” Lee recalled.
She ran and retrieved the box from her car.
Lee had found about a dozen such boxes, wrapped and clearly labeled with the recipients’ names, on Joan’s dining room table.
She had resisted the temptation to open them, though Lee had a pretty good idea what was in Misty’s.
Misty seemed to know too; she shook the box and didn’t open it. “Your mother always had the greatest jewelry.”
“Yeah.” Lee glanced at the ring on her right hand. “I’m aware.”
“She had taste . Like sometimes I thought Joan dressed too much like an old lady—I’d make fun: was she trying for the world’s biggest collection of cardigans? But then she’d surprise me with something. A sexy dress. A bright color.”
“Why couldn’t you come into the church?”
“I didn’t want to break down and cry everywhere. I mean, I just know your mother would have hated it.”
“She wouldn’t have hated it,” Lee said, knowing Joan would have.
“You know what’s funny.” Misty was clutching the box, slightly crushing its sides in her grip. “From the first moment I met her, I knew she was a decent person. A good person. I used to tell her: Joan, if anyone deserves to live forever, it’s you.”
“What did she say to that?” Lee asked, curious.
“That she didn’t want to,” Misty replied. She wept.
Ellison drove Jamie to Lotus Garden. Ellison was dressed in a charcoal suit made of very fine wool; he seemed extremely pleased to be wearing it, perhaps to the edge of inappropriate, given that it was a funeral.
He said he had been waiting for the perfect occasion for the suit, which he’d had made in Hong Kong by a tailor who worked out of the Peninsula.
“I didn’t think your mom was a churchgoer,” he said.
“She had her own spirituality,” Jamie said wryly. To his knowledge, Joan had never expressed an interest in religion, except to once comment that it was admirable churches distributed food to those in need. “That is, if they don’t ask for anything in return ,” she’d added.
“Do you need a ride to the café?” Ellison asked. The employees would have their own event later that night, a tribute to Joan. Jamie had paid for the food and drink and given them the following week off, saying Joan would have wanted it.
“I can’t go. I’ve got to stay here.”
“What for?”
“Some paperwork.” Jamie poured himself tea. “Family affairs,” he said.
“What?” Jamie added a moment later. Ellison looked angry, and Jamie thought perhaps he was upset that Jamie hadn’t poured him tea, as this was something hosts were instructed to do at the café, to be polite.
“Why do you look like that?” Jamie filled Ellison’s cup; he was hasty, and some of the liquid slopped over the edge, which Jamie tried to blot with a napkin.
Ellison snatched away the cup. “The way you say it,” he exploded. “ Family affairs . As if I didn’t consider her family. We had a relationship that was entirely separate from you!”
Jamie stared at Ellison. He felt exhausted, as he often did when someone was mad at him. He was confused that anyone was allowed to be angry with him at his mother’s funeral. But it was true that Jamie had not considered Ellison would be in mourning too.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie murmured. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“Maybe I’m being too sensitive.” Ellison sniffed.
“Well—” Jamie started.
“But we did have a connection. Joan told me I didn’t have to speak to my parents if I didn’t want. Whenever I felt guilty, I’d ask her again, and she’d tell me all over. I took her to Costco just a week ago. On the drive, she spoke about you and the navy. Honestly, I think she was a little proud.”
“Well,” Jamie said again. He was surprised to feel the lifting of some weight: that Joan’s approval, even after she was gone, could settle over him like one of her perfect, cool blankets.
“You know,” Ellison said, “when I was younger, I was a very jealous person. The thing I was most jealous of was beauty. Sometimes even now I’ll watch Lee twist her hair around itself and stick in some old pen to hold it together and feel like I could die of envy.
I’m almost never jealous of men, but I was when I started at the café and heard Joan talk about you.
Neither of us did what our parents wanted us to. But how come your mom still loved you?”
“She wasn’t exactly approving, ” Jamie said. “And I’m pretty sure she loved you too.”
“You’re my best friend. Don’t say anything back, I know I’m only your very good friend. But that’s because you’re incapable of having real friends.”
“I do want to have friends. It’s just.”
“I know, I know. You’re working on it.” Ellison retrieved from his pocket a silk square and gave it to Jamie, as if he expected him to cry.
I should cry, Jamie thought. I should fucking sob. Because Lee was in shock, Jamie seemed to be the only one so far who’d realized they no longer had a mother or father. He would work in the café, every day, and never see Joan again.
Jamie tried to cry, but nothing came out.
He stuck the square from Ellison into his pocket and went to greet Juliet and Theo, who were seated with Bridget.
His limp had returned, and he could feel the table make a show of not watching him as he walked.
Only Theo looked at him straight on. “I always wondered how you’d turn out,” he said, thumping Jamie on the back.
For a moment Theo looked so much like Bill that Jamie returned to an old fantasy, that the last decades had been a dream. And it could all start over.
In the late evening, when it was just him and Lee and Nelson left at the restaurant, and Nelson’s hand shook as he drank his water, Jamie saw that Nelson was getting older.
And Jamie knew that one day Nelson would die, and Lee would die, and he himself would go.
He stuck his hand in his pocket, where his fingers grazed the stitched edges of Ellison’s handkerchief, and it felt so familiar, as if it were something he knew from before, a soft item placed in his fingers when he was born.
When Jamie was nine and Lee seven, Bill planned a trip to Las Vegas.
The trip would be only Bill and the kids, as Bill had gotten it into his head that a dad’s bonding weekend was a rite of passage.
Though in truth, Lee and Jamie preferred to travel with both parents—Joan, after all, was the one who packed their underwear and made sure they had snacks.
As a result, Jamie and Lee were somewhat agitated, although they were sensitive enough not to hint such to Bill.
Lee especially couldn’t shake the thought that something terrible would happen to them while away, that due to Joan’s absence, a tragedy would strike.
The night before they were to leave, Lee sat on her bed and watched Joan pack her duffel for her. “What will you do if something happens to me while I’m gone?” Lee asked.
“I’ll cry.” Joan dropped Lee’s toothbrush and a travel-size toothpaste into a toiletries pouch. “But nothing will happen to you.”
“What if Dad takes us to space and I get stuck on Mars?”
“I’ll come get you.”
“What if Jamie gets stuck there?”
“I’ll go get him. What, you think I’m going to fetch one kid and not the other?”
“What if the three of us crash in the plane?”
Joan stopped packing. This, of course, had been Lee’s aim to begin with.
Joan set the sweater she’d been folding on the bed.
“Don’t say that. You have to knock on wood.
” Joan was not superstitious but had adopted a few American customs. She waited until Lee actually knocked three times on the headboard. Joan then knocked.
“But what would you do ?” Lee pressed. “If all of us were dead?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You have to tell me. I asked you.” This was a house rule: when the children asked a real question, the adults had to give a real answer.
“I would want the plane to just disappear. I wouldn’t want it to be found. That way, I could imagine you were existing out there, that you had gone through a wormhole.”
“What’s a wormhole?”
“I don’t know. An alternate life,” Joan breathed.