Chapter Four: Francine

ON SUNDAY, WE DRIVE UP TO LA FROM ORANGE County to my a gūng and a pòh’s house. We all act as if everything is normal—Dad with his hands perfectly placed at ten and two o’clock on the wheel, Mom listening to some staticky Cantonese radio station with her eyes closed, and me in the back seat, watching the gray landscape whiz by.

Usually, when traffic is really bad (which is often), I like to pass the time by peering into other cars. People do all kinds of things when they don’t realize anyone’s looking—argue with wild hand gestures, bite into sloppy sandwiches, dance to music I can’t hear.

But today, I don’t notice anything because I spend the whole drive thinking about Ollie.

Was I totally deluded for believing he would help me with The Plan? Has he somehow, over the years, become an actual jerk?

I lean my forehead against the window, letting the road jostle my face against the glass until it hurts. My mind drifts over everything I know about Ollie, the details I’ve kept packed away like my old stuffed animals, safe but out of sight. When I was younger, I went to his house a lot more because my cousins and I often got dragged there by our parents. I remember the kitchen most, narrow and rectangular with sunny tile countertops that in later years got replaced, like a betrayal, by two slabs of green marble. My aunts, along with Mom, would help Ollie’s mother amid the steam and smoke of wok oil, wrapping Chinese-style egg rolls with Vietnamese-style filling. The men would be in the adjoining dining room, noisy and rambunctious, speaking three different languages—Vietnamese, Cantonese, and occasionally Mandarin—and somehow, saying nothing at all.

As for me, I mostly got ignored: by Ollie, who escaped to his room before I even toed the threshold of the front door; by Ollie’s brother, Isaac, who was already in high school and interested only in video games and basketball; and by my cousins, especially Lauren, the oldest, who for some reason was not at all intrigued to learn that when she turned bright pink around Isaac, it was the veins in her face overreacting to adrenaline.

Once, when I was ten, I found the three of them—Lauren; her sister, Ava; and my other cousin Sandy—huddled together on Ollie’s front steps, where they’d gone while I’d been laying out The Game of Life. “Sure,” Lauren had said, when I’d offered to set it up. “You do that, and then we’ll come back and play.” But twenty minutes after I’d counted all the money, arranged the bills along the sides of the board, and plugged the plastic people into four car-shaped pieces, I was still sitting there on the carpet, alone.

Outside, only Ava turned around when I pushed open the screen door.

“Oh, hey, Francine,” she said, her voice slightly more high-pitched than usual. “You want to join us?”

Except there wasn’t any room left on the steps, so I hovered behind them, watching Isaac as he dribbled a basketball around another Asian kid in the driveway.

“What are you all up to?” I asked after a minute.

“Nothing,” said Lauren.

Isaac made a shot just then, which sent him jogging in a circle, arms pumped in the air, while the other kid laughed and shook his head.

I eyed Lauren, who was paying very close attention to the proceedings. At the time, she was fourteen, like Isaac, and had lined her eyelids with dark strokes, the outer edges swooped out and up. She looked pretty, but even I could see that Isaac wasn’t going to notice that while she was sitting all the way over here. Especially when he was so immersed in basketball.

“If you want to get Isaac’s attention,” I offered, “wouldn’t it be better if you asked to join the game?”

“We’re not trying to get anyone’s attention,” Lauren snapped.

This seemed false, but arguments with Lauren were consistently unpleasant when she was wrong.

“Okay, well,” I said, shrugging, “do you still want to play Life?”

“Lauren says Life is boring,” Sandy piped up.

I stood there for another minute, observing Isaac as he tried to steal the basketball from the other kid, and wondered, genu-inely, how this was any less boring.

“Maybe you should move closer to the hoop—”

“No one’s asking you, Francine,” said Lauren.

“No one ever does,” added Sandy, and the three of them exchanged a look.

Now it was the veins in my face that were reacting to adrenaline, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why.

Back inside, I sat down at the coffee table, surveying the Life board spread out before me. I decided to play the game on my own—it wasn’t like I hadn’t done that plenty of times before. As an only child, you got used to that kind of thing. It was only sad when other people saw you doing it.

“Uh, Francine?”

I looked up, my hand over the spinner. Ollie, on his way back from the kitchen, had paused reluctantly, chrysanthemum tea drink box in hand. His dog, Dexter, a great big husky mix the color of cream puff pastry, crashed to a halt against his heels.

“Are you playing Life . . . against yourself?”

I resumed my spin of the wheel, which whirled so fast the rainbow of colors blurred together. “Seems like.”

Ollie shifted from one foot to the other, glancing around the empty living room. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” I replied, pushing one of the car pieces forward seven spaces. “I’m winning.”

That made Ollie laugh—a quick, barely there exhale of surprise—but then he immediately sobered, stealing a glance out the window as if to check for any witnesses. All we saw was Isaac lunging for the basketball.

“Do you need, um . . .” Ollie was having trouble getting the question out. Already, too, he was inching away, like he hoped more than anything my answer would be no.

I decided to save him. “Sure, if Dexter wants to join, he can. I know Life can be a complicated game for a dog, though.”

We both looked down at Dexter, who wagged his tail guilelessly, glancing from me to Ollie. Then Ollie stared at the floor so long that I decided to go ahead and spin the wheel again. But instead of leaving me alone, he sat down next to Dexter.

“Okay,” said Ollie. “He’ll play.” Patting Dexter’s back, he kind of smiled at me, and that’s when I noticed his dimple for the first time.

I nearly fell over.

Everyone always says that between the two of them, Isaac is the handsomer brother. But I’ve never thought so. Ollie’s deeply hooded eyes, set off by delicate lashes, are large and serious—Mom often insists they were wasted on a boy. A Pòh’s assessment, though, is not as generous: “That one looks like he suffers,” she says. “His older brother took all the good fortune.” When I try to argue that you can’t tell that just from someone’s face, A Pòh dismisses me. “The point is, you’re always better off with an oldest son.”

But that gloomy air my a pòh found so inauspicious was exactly what I liked about Ollie back then. I was sure it meant he pondered things that other people didn’t, things that I hoped to understand. Even when he smiled, a twinge of melancholy would remain, like a bit of salt in chocolate milk—and boy, that wasn’t something you got over fast.

Now, though, I wonder, if I’d been imagining something that had never been there at all.

“We’re here, Francine,” says Mom, and I blink.

A Gūng and A Pòh live on a sloped street just north of Chinatown, off a thoroughfare lined with shuttered tire shops. Despite the constant sunshine, there’s no escaping the industrial pallor that lingers right around the corner. Their neighbors are mostly Mexican families, squeezed into beautiful old houses that have been cut up into apartments. White people have started to move back into the surrounding neighborhoods, but this one’s a holdout—for now at least.

My grandparents’ house was originally built for somebody rich, though it’s kind of hard to see that now. You can still make out little details, like the crown molding in the living room or the archway that leads into the dining room, but most of the grandeur is now buried. Literally, because A Pòh is a bit of a hoarder. The porch is dense with potted plants and piles of boxes, plus stacks upon stacks of weekly ad circulars.

“Every time we come, it gets worse,” Mom says to no one in particular, kicking aside a tray that once held Asian pears. She says it in English, in case A Pòh overhears.

Lauren, who can be wise about such things, once told us younger cousins that the hoarding is a result of a lifetime of surviving war. “Think about it,” she said. “First the Japanese came to Vietnam. Then the Americans. Imagine what that does to your psyche.”

When A Pòh opens the door, however, she seems scarred neither by war nor, for that matter, the more recent trauma of A Gūng’s diagnosis. “Hallooo!” she cries, as loud as ever. It’s how she always says hello.

“A Pòh hóu,” I reply dutifully.

“You need to eat more,” she tells me, rapping my shoulder blade with her knuckles. “What is this? You’re all bones!”

Gratuitous (and inaccurate) assessments of my weight aside, I like A Pòh. When I was a little kid, she was the only person who never got tired of talking to me. I’d ask any question—say, “Why are crows black?”—and she would always have an answer, no matter what. She liked to explain things, and I found it magical.

These days, she still enjoys talking to me, but the stories are more often things she learned from reading the Chinese newspaper—like the time some elderly woman got her purse stolen at a Monterey Park intersection. So, you know, it’s not always as nice.

Normally, A Gūng would be finishing his qigong exercises around now, standing in the center of the living room with his arms outstretched. The giant TV, a gift from Lauren and Ava’s parents and probably the most expensive thing in the house, would be tuned into one of his usual news programs (at this hour, usually a Mandarin one beamed in via satellite). The smell of Folger’s instant coffee would waft out from the kitchen, where A Pòh would be puttering around as she assembled A Gūng’s midmorning meal—a bowl of porridge, a bit of boiled choy sum, and a soft banana.

But today, everything is eerily still. For the first time, I notice the worn patch of hardwood floor where A Gūng’s feet shuffled every day. The TV, control of which has been ceded to A Pòh, is playing a black-and-white Jimmy Stewart film with the sound off. A Pòh has a gift for comprehending movies without needing to understand a word—though right now she isn’t really watching this one.

“Where’s Bā?” Mom asks. In response, A Pòh puts a finger to her lips and points toward the bedroom. Two roller suitcases sit right outside the door.

The thing about today is we’re not here just to visit A Gūng and A Pòh. We’re here to bring them to stay at our house, where it will be easier for Mom or Dad to take A Gūng to his various appointments. And although nobody says it out loud, it also means he’ll get to spend more time with us. Until, I guess, there isn’t any left.

“Lunch will be ready soon,” A Pòh says in her normal voice, and disappears into the kitchen.

Dad settles into the La-Z-Boy by the fireplace while Mom hovers in the dining room, picking through the oranges and apples heaped on the table. A Pòh is always buying fruit to make offerings to the Guanyin Buddha and our ancestors, but she never eats it fast enough afterward, so most end up going to mold.

“Mà! Why don’t you throw these away?” says Mom, chagrined.

A Pòh comes back out and picks up an orange, holding it close to her nose. She takes off her glasses to inspect it, but after only a second, shakes her head. “Aiyah, it’s not a big deal!”

Mom and I exchange a glance, and my limbs feel inexplicably heavy. Maybe it’s the worry that A Pòh wouldn’t have realized on her own that the fruit had gone bad—or worse, that she refuses to acknowledge she clearly hadn’t noticed this time.

“Fōng,” she commands now. “Go wash your hands and get ready to eat.”

My mind is still on the fruit, but I obey her and trudge toward the bathroom. I’m suddenly not sure I have the energy anymore for anything, much less The Plan. In the hallway, I pause in front of the photos on the wall. They’re ones I’ve seen before, of course, mostly color portraits of Lauren, Ava, Sandy, me, and other people in our family. A few are of A Gūng and A Pòh from when they first came to America, looking serious and already old, though maybe not so gray.

Then there’s a sepia-toned photograph that’s smaller than the rest, taken when A Gūng and A Pòh still lived in Vietnam. Squeezed within the serrated borders are much younger versions of themselves—A Gūng’s forehead broad and unlined, A Pòh’s hair still raven black—along with six girls of various ages, including a small baby who is Mom. No one is smiling, exactly, and A Pòh’s expression is particularly unreadable. A Gūng’s, though, is more open. In the slick of his pomade and the heft of his glasses, there’s a determined optimism that gives him the appearance of a Cold War intellectual. You can see he still believes, despite the poverty that’s tailed him his whole life, that all circumstances, surely, can be triumphed over.

I try to square this A Gūng with the one I’m familiar with, but it’s hard. The face that I know, clouded over with wrinkles, hardly seems like it ever had the space for such ambitious faith.

A few steps down the hall, A Gūng’s door is slightly open, so I tiptoe over and peek in. The shades are drawn, darkening the room against the sunlight that might have filtered through the window. A Gūng is facing away from me, the top of his head obscured by a flannel sleeping cap, so all I can see is an inert form lost in the covers, slumped into a curve of defeat.

I back away quietly, my chest stinging. I refuse, however, to cry. A Pòh always tells me there’s no point to crying, and I’m inclined to agree. What does have a point is taking action. I already know the one thing that will make me feel less sad is to help A Gūng feel less sad. He may have given up, but I’m not going to.

Which means I’m not giving up on Ollie yet either.

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