Chapter 23
MAY
THE TWENTY-FIFTH THURSDAY
The bus rocked through the park. His thumb hovered over the download confirmation and he pressed it and he should have done this on the Wi-Fi at home but he hadn’t had the forethought.
He opened up the app, spent far too long trying to log back in, and was on the verge of tears when everything came back.
There were thirty-nine whole notifications.
Lower, actually, than what he’d expected—his mom must have given up around week three.
The scroll upwards in the family group chat was stickers and articles and voice memos he was not going to play on public transit or realistically ever.
Eventually he gave up, found her individual profile, and called his mother.
Teresa picked up before the second ring. Either she was always holding her phone or she’d felt the psychic disturbance of her son reappearing on the platform.
“Huang Wuyue ah Huang Wuyue. You remembered you have a phone.”
Oh, good.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling—”
“I know, I switched phones. I couldn’t get back into WeChat because of… logging in issues.” It was basically true. “I wanted to come over for dinner. With my—” He looked out the window, focusing on a jogger in a crop top. “—boyfriend. His name is Cassiel.”
“New phone?” she said doubtfully. “Who gave you money for a new phone?”
“Nobody, it was a—”
“Wuyue, you can’t afford a new phone. You need to start being sensible about your money. Your dad and I—”
“Okay! Fine! There’s no new phone!” May snapped, then realized he was being too loud. He lowered his voice, shrinking back in his seat. “I deleted WeChat for space. Mama. Dinner. Next Thursday. My boyfriend.”
Silence. He wondered if she was going to dig in on the boyfriend part, even though they’d been over this.
“What’s his Chinese name?” she asked.
“What? He doesn’t have one. He’s Korean. Cassiel is his English name.”
“Koreans have Chinese names.”
May stared upwards. He was not annoyed. He definitely was not annoyed. “I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
“Well I can’t say Cashier.”
“Cass-ee-el.”
“Are you with him? Ask him what his Chinese name is.”
“Oh my God,” he groaned. “Mama, is Thursday okay or not?”
“Thursday is good.”
“Good! Thursday. We’ll be over at… six thirty? Seven?”
“Six,” she said, which wasn’t even one of the options. Then, still holding the phone to her face but yelling across the house: “Your son is bringing a friend for dinner next week!”
The bus was coming out of the park. Through the window, the trees thinned into road and the light changed and May lightly thudded his forehead against the glass, which was probably dirtier than it looked.
“Bye, Mama, I’m getting off the bus. See you on Thursday.”
“Okay. Send me a message with his Chinese name,” she said, and then hung up. May squeezed his eyes shut, held it for one, two, three seconds, then sighed and let it pass. His eyes were blurry when he opened them again.
May pocketed the phone, got off at Lincoln, and walked the two blocks to Irving Street, toward Sparrow. He needed to sleep for approximately five thousand hours.
* * *
May stalked his way into the café without even glancing at the window box or the specials board.
He felt like a weather event. He felt like a hurricane, girl’s name and all, if it was hurricanes they named after women.
It didn’t matter. He launched himself into the stool across from Cassiel and said, “I called my mom. And I’m going to walk into the ocean. ”
Cassiel’s mug paused mid-sip.
“I called her on the bus.” May dropped his backpack on the floor. “Dinner’s on Thursday at six, next week. —Sorry if we’re meant to be doing the pissy shit from Tuesday. I can’t.”
Cassiel blinked at him slowly, the way you were supposed to do with cats who didn’t trust you.
“No,” he said. “Unless this is for the podcast and you’re recording.”
“Oh, that’s—hilarious. Did you miss the part where I’m walking into the ocean?”
“I didn’t feel like commenting.” Cassiel took a long drink from the mug and May watched him, watched the pale sickly color of the mint latte lap over his upper lip, watched the tongue flick out quickly to remove it. He wanted to lean over and bite him. He rested his chin in his palm instead.
Cassiel caught him watching. May kept looking.
“Thursday at six is fine. I need the address.”
May told him, and watched as Cassiel produced his phone and noted it down. The only time he’d seen the man write down anything he said was never, if Oakland didn’t count, and it didn’t, because that was less about what May said and more about what Cassiel heard.
“She asked what your Chinese name is,” he added. “And I told her—”
“Lin Minshuo,” said Cassiel.
May put his face in his hands and did his best impression of a meat grinder with his mouth. He would not be reporting this back to his mother. He would, in fact, be praying that she’d forget about the whole Chinese name business by the time the dinner came around.
“How long have you had that ready to go and why. Actually, don’t tell me. I will make a scene.”
When he peered out from his fingers he saw Cassiel wielding Definitely-A-Smile #14 behind the blue mug.
Instead of punishing him as he so clearly deserved, May remembered something.
He shoved his hand into his pocket and fished out a purple-pink hair clip, setting it on the table next to the napkins.
“What’s this?”
“For your hands. It’s got a good snap to it. I figured…”
Cassiel peered at it, touched the empty space where the ring had still not rematerialized. Then he looked back at May’s face with a curious expression.
“Where did you get it?”
“It was left to me as a token of esteem by a former lover.” May leaned his elbow on the table and raised his eyebrows.
Cassiel picked it up and tested it. Snap. Slow. Click. Also slow. Snap click.
“If it eases your mind, since you’re obviously burning with jealousy… it’s mine. I used to have curtain bangs. You keep reaching for your ring and then it’s not there so you’re just doing this—” He pantomimed the twitch. “So. Click on that for a while.”
Snap click.
“Thank you,” Cassiel said, and May watched as the clip disappeared into his coat pocket.
* * *
His Thursday shift was short. Lau Kee’s kitchen was quiet on these days—as quiet as it ever got with the clanging and the yelling.
The music had gone back to Auntie’s selection, so Uncle’s campaign had failed without May’s support.
May shook his head, hummed tunelessly as he scrubbed, and thought of Betty and Mark.
Mark and Betty and a tape in Sacramento.
He’d chase it. He’d make Cassiel come—his Watson. And Lauren, if she wanted to. She had a nebulous job, something in engineering that still allowed her to seemingly wander around doing as she pleased. She wouldn’t turn down a road trip.
When had he last been on a road trip? College, definitely, had to be…
“You think water grows on trees?” came Ah-Keung’s voice. May looked up, shaken out of his daydream. Ah-Keung pointed at the problem.
“Doesn’t even make sense,” May grumbled, turning off the tap that he had just let run.
He refocused on the job, on the next five seconds and the five after that. That was one of his tricks—thirty percent success rate—for staying on task, made easier because there was something he was actively trying to not think about. The dinner. It was always some dinner.
May had to stop having dinner.
His phone said 3:58 when Auntie Tsang stuck her head into the kitchen and waved him out. May dried his hands on the apron, hung it on the hook, pushed through the strip curtain into the front of the shop as he had done hundreds of times before, and almost tripped and fell on his ass.
Cassiel was standing inside the restaurant.
Cassiel. Inside Lau Kee. On a Thursday afternoon. In Chinatown. In the same blue and white sweater from that morning, looking straight at May with his eyebrows slightly raised.
“Hello,” Cassiel said.
Auntie Tsang did not serve, usually, but Nina, the girl who had replaced May out front, had needed the day off. The shop was not full, never was during this hour. Just two old men at the table by the window, both eating noodles, and a woman waiting for a takeout order.
“You can sit,” Auntie told Cassiel.
“He will sit!” May said, a fraction too loudly, scurrying to his boyfriend’s side and touching his arm. “I’ve, I’ve got it, Auntie.”
The woman retreated to behind the register, her arms folded, eyes hidden beneath the lid of the Eagles cap.
“It’s four o’clock,” Cassiel said as May led them to the only table in the restaurant that was far enough from both the noise of the TV and the kitchen. There was also no view of the bathroom from here, and fake bamboo provided some cover from prying eyes.
“Yeah, I know that. Did you know you’re in Chinatown?” May pointed at the seat he’d selected for Cassiel. It had a direct line of sight to the front door.
Cassiel raised his eyebrows, which is something he did when he was about to be a smartass. He stood there in front of the table, not sitting like he’d been told, so May stood too, and they just stared at each other. At least two pairs of eyes were watching them.
“Do you not want me here?”
“No, I—I just didn’t know you were taking the… Chinatown Guy thing seriously,” May sighed. He pulled his chair out and sat down, relieved when Cassiel followed his cue.
“The siu yuk rice is supposed to be very good,” Cassiel said.
The cover story from forever ago. They had made up an entire fake relationship that involved Cassiel coming into Lau Kee on his break and ordering siu yuk rice, and they had never, in their real relationship, executed any part of it because Cassiel did not come to Chinatown.
“Isn’t it…” May gestured around, sighed. The lighting, the noise, the smell, the noise. “This sucks for you.”
“Yes.”