Preface

IT'S POSSIBLE that for 34 years the thought of ending it all never enters your head and then one day the idea presents itself, like a strange new entrée on an otherwise familiar menu. You’d think there’d be foreshadowing—an early inclination toward the dark side. Not necessarily. Sometimes it gets shuffled into the mix as you sense you're about to reach the end of your rope. Letting go is another option in the sequence of ill-considered decisions that nudged you over the edge and left you twisting there.

Here's one way it can happen. By mid-November, you’ve almost gotten used to waking up cold and disoriented in the back of your 2006 Dodge Caravan in the parking lot of a third-tier grocery store. It’s a place to hide when the local shelter is full. The streetlights are dimmed by sheets of snow driven by a frigid wind that rocks the car. You’d think you’d hit bottom. You’d be wrong. 

Fearing that your ex and friends will discover your abject failure to reinvent your life, you’re desperate to avoid anyone who’s ever known you as the spouse of a successful lawyer, hosting many of Wichita’s movers and shakers. Keeping up appearances to conceal your downfall is taking a heavy toll as you spend most of your days hiding in plain sight. 

Then one day you open your PO box praying for at least one decent job offer and withdraw an envelope from your ex’s law firm. The letter inside is only three pages long, but two words fly off the first page and hook like barbs in your eyes—sole custody. 

“Annie . . . .” Charlie rapped on the door of the upstairs bathroom they were sharing full-time now the grands had the first-floor bathroom to themselves. “You know I need to get in there.” 

She knew all too well. That’s one of those things you discover only after you move in with someone--that your roommate’s morning colonic needs are non-negotiable, regardless of where you might be in your own morning routine. 

Annie grabbed the hand mirror, comb, eyeliner, mascara, blush, lip gloss, and her bra and opened the door. “Use the Febreze. I’m coming back in,” she reminded him, knowing by the time he finished with the morning paper he will have forgotten. He stood there blocking her path as he pantomimed leering at her. 

“You should know when you make that face you look like poor, demented Lenny in Of Mice and Men,” she said, pushing past him. 

“Hey, can I help it if bare breasts endow me with the hormonal flush of a teenager?”

Normally, that kind of banter would amuse Annie. Today, she wasn’t feeling it. By the time she got dressed and down to the kitchen, her grandmother was standing by the Keurig coffee maker looking perplexed. 

“Good morning,” Annie said, giving G-ma Sally a one-arm hug as she unhooked a coffee mug from under the shelf. “Sleep okay?” She noticed the dark circles under her grandmother’s eyes had grown more pronounced and she was still in her rose-colored chenille robe.

“Oh yes. After all the commotion yesterday, I think I could have slept through a tornado.”

“I hear you,” Annie said, watching as the machine hissed and gurgled to denote the end of the cycle. “I know how hard this move is for you to make, but I really believe it’s the best thing for you both.” She didn’t add, before Pops forgetfulness gets to be too much and someone gets hurt.

G-ma Sally looked at her with a wistful smile and glistening eyes. “Life moves on,” she said. “You have to go with it.” She turned back to the coffee maker, sniffled, and said, “I don’t think I’m doing this right.” She held up her coffee cup that had a layer of grounds floating on the surface. “We never make one cup at home. Four usually. This modern machine seems fairly labor intensive.” She lifted the top of the Keurig to reveal loose grounds packed into the pod holder and spilling over into the lip around it, “Now can these grounds be used again?”

“Ah,” Annie said, seeing the empty pod on the counter, its top pried open. “Well,” she took another pod from the rack and said, “see, this whole thing goes into the little hole. You don’t have to empty the grounds into it.”

Her grandmother looked from the coffee maker to Annie and back at the mess. “Oh for corn-sake! Why didn’t I see that?”

Annie opened her mouth to reply, but laughed instead. 

G-ma Sally held up a paper towel to catch the damp grounds as Annie scraped them out with a butter knife. “I keep saying Allen needs a keeper, but I’m starting to think maybe we both do.” 

“What’s funny? I heard laughing.” Annie’s grandfather was standing in the doorway wearing blue boxer shorts and a white t-shirt. 

“Allen, go put on some clothes or at least a robe.”

“Can’t find anything. Didn’t even know where I was when I woke up. Hell of a world where a man can’t get his hands on a pair of pants.”

Charlie came into the kitchen from the back stairs and grabbed the coffee mug with a red motorcycle and Born to Ride on it. “I guess this is the coffee line. Morning everyone.” 

“Charlie,” Annie said, “why aren’t you dressed? We have guests.” 

Wearing only boxer shorts, Charlie looked over at G-ma Sally and Pops and shrugged. “Just family. Anyway, Pops isn’t dressed. Neither is Sam.” He gestured to their son, who was coming up from the basement was carrying two bowls and wearing black boxer shorts covered with roadrunners and his favorite Hard Rock T-shirt, a hand-me-down from Slyde, his sister’s musician boyfriend.

“I thought I heard Aunt Kate’s car grind into the driveway,” Sam said, just before Kate called out from the living room, “Dennis Quaid is here!” mimicking her favorite gag from the Ellen Degeneres talk show. In it, Ellen sends the actor Quaid around the corner from the recording studio to a coffee shop with a hidden camera and mic and tells him nonsensical things to do and say. 

Annie opened the dishwasher and gestured for Sam to put his dishes in and called out, “What does Ellen tell Dennis Quaid to say he wants?” 

“A red Mercedes convertible and a trust fund,” Kate hollered as she worked her way back to the kitchen. “Hi, guys. Hey, Pops,” Kate said, kissing her grandfather on the cheek. “Whoa, you need to stand a little closer to the razor, young man.”

“Hell if I can find one, he said,” as he moved into the room to let her get past him. 

“Looks like the gang’s all here,” she said as she hugged G-ma Sally and looked around the kitchen. “Wait!” she said, and burst out laughing, “who ordered the Chippendales?”

Sam looked at the other two men, checked his fly, and grinned. He looped an arm over Pops’ shoulder and lifted his leg across his body singing a song from the long-running musical Chorus Line--“One . . . singular sensation . . . .”   

Charlie stepped over to Pops’ other side and joined in “. . . every little move she makes . . . ”  the three of them doing cross body kicks with Kate singing along until they couldn’t remember anymore lyrics. 

Annie and G-ma Sally shook their heads but were laughing along with Kate. 

“Good lord,” G-ma Sally said. “Don’t encourage them.”

“Whew,” Pops said, wiping his forehead with his palm. “I’m too old for show biz. Gonna retire.”

“Yes, you are, to the bedroom,” G-ma Sally told him, “to get some clothes on.” She took his arm to lead him away, but he jerked it loose and scowled at her. “I can walk by myself, woman. I’m not helpless.”

The others exchanged glances in the awkward silence as G-ma Sally followed him out of the kitchen careful to keep her coffee mug steady. Charlie quickly reached for his own cup and went back upstairs, and Sam made one for himself while grabbing a juice box for Sage Lucy-Moon and headed back down to the basement. 

Opening the fridge and taking out a nectarine, Kate asked “So, how’s it going?”

“Help yourself, why don’t you?” Annie told her as she waited for the Keurig to spew out a cup for herself.

“Dennis Quaid didn’t have breakfast.” Kate took a bite out of the fruit, then held it out and asked. “Want it back?”

Annie waved her sister off and moved the previous night’s cups and glasses from the sink to the dishwasher. “How’s it going? Well, let’s see. G-ma packed the Keurig with actual coffee grounds, Pops didn’t know where he was when he woke up, Sage woke up crying twice. I heard the basement and first-floor toilets flush at least four times during the night. And the men have all forgotten how to dress themselves. How’re things with you?”

“Whoa, looks like Pops isn’t the only one with the crankies this morning. And what’s with Sam sleeping over?”

Annie shook her head. “Cinnamon is holding a meditation retreat at his place.”  

Kate raised her eyebrows. “For how long?”

“Didn’t say. I suspect there’s more to it.”

Kate helped herself to some of Annie’s coffee, leaving the bottom half of a coral lip print on the mug. “By this time next week, the grands should be settled, and you’ll be off to the land of big water. Oh wait, I mean, deep water. Hang in there, Sis. I’m on my way to show that rehab off Troost. Dinner at TGIF’s as usual?”

“Yeah,” Annie said, “might as well. I think we’ll all be ready to get out of the house by tonight.” 

“See you there.” Kate tossed the nectarine pit into the trash can, saying, “You can catch me up on how many more times the johns have flushed. And if we can slip away from the others, I’ll catch you up on the real reason the grands can’t camp out at Mom’s place.”

“What are you talking about now?”

“Well, I wasn’t gonna say anything, yet. Okay you’ve dragged it out of me. Mom phoned last night and asked me to drop off the disclosure papers on the Strunk place--they were still in my car. Anyway, I thought I saw Mr. Kirby driving away as I turned up her street. And I also thought I could detect that pungent dry cleaning smell when I walked in.” 

“So . . . what?” Annie asked. “Maybe he was delivering the dry cleaning.”

“Delivery service? They never have before. And by the owner? It must have been a very special delivery, methinks.” 

“You’re nuts. And anyway, Mom and Dad haven’t gotten a divorce.”

“Yet.” Kate took a handful of almonds from the bowl on the breakfast bar.”

 “Seriously, Mr. Kirby from the cleaners?”

“Hey,” Kate said, “you’re the one who pointed out he always smells like a walking ad for his business.”

“Don’t be daft. You’re such a drama queen. Anyway, we’d know if she was seeing anyone special.”

“Who said special?” Kate said, heading for the front door.

Annie stood at the sink sipping what remained of her coffee. Artie Kirby’s two sons and nephew who helped him run the business were close to her age, which would put him in his sixties. Anyway, he was married, wasn’t he? She gave her head a shake. It was too ridiculous.

What they needed to be concentrating on was the grands’ transition. She thought about Pop’s terse remarks, and how G-ma Sally cringed but remained stoic as she followed him to their room. Annie didn’t blame Pops for resenting being treated as less capable than what he once was, probably still is. 

Lately, she’d been missing her own father, who was running charter fishing trips out of the Florida Keys. Living his dream. He kept asking the girls and grandkids to come visit, but so far they hadn’t managed it. The business of living kept getting in the way. 

Anyway, she thought, what will it all have mattered when she turned Pops’ age and the memories of what she’d done--or failed to do--got gnarled up in the plaque and neuro tangles she’d been reading about, trying to understand what was likely happening in Pops’ brain. Maybe hers. Probably all of theirs. She sighed and reminded herself—with any luck, only a few more days until the only running water she’d hear at night would be waves lapping against the lakeshore.

Today ghost hands still push along the shore 

my paper boat the shape of dreams 

which never went under 

in the flood that frightened me away.

 —Bienvenido N. Santos, Distances, In Time

An Nguyen runs his fingers down the plastic crucifix hanging just inside the arched doorway to the kitchen. The ladies of St. Paul's give them to refugees when they arrive in Wichita. Too restless to sleep, he lets his lips rest briefly on the savior’s ropy gold legs and crossed feet. 

It is the first kiss he's given in a long time. He tries to remember when the last one was, far back, before the two weeks in hiding as he waited for word that there would be an attempt, a fishing boat waiting to the south of Da Nang if he could get there. And the long wait in the camp in Thailand, and finally the boat trip that cost everything but his life.

After the first raid (by who?) [RB1] on their village, his lips had tasted tears and blood on his young wife's hands—one side of her face missing from the screaming metal chips that killed her and the rest of their families. A chunk of flesh had been torn from his own right arm and planted in the smoking underbrush. 

Leaning his head against the wall, he thinks back one day more, to when the air carried the rich smell of growing vegetation and smoke of wood fires as he returned from the fields. His wife’s throat and wrists had been spiced with ylang ylang on that night when he'd had no way of knowing that was the moment of his last good kiss.

There is no sound from the room where Thanh and his nephew Binh are sleeping. An opens the refrigerator and takes out a can of Coke, pausing in the box's cool vapor before he quietly closes the door. He pulls the tab and lets the stinging foam run down his throat unchecked. Then taking a book from a shelf under the phone, he spreads a thin cotton dish towel over the torn vinyl chair cushion and sits down. He turns to Chapter Four in the English for Speakers of Other Languages reader. 

His teacher doesn't know he has this book, that he sneaks it in and out of the Learning Center at the vocational school over the weekends. It's one she herself held for him once, caressing the pages with her slender, pale fingers to ease the book's newness, its resistance to lying open before him. 

In his good dreams, the ones he controls—usually just before falling off to sleep or on weekends when the others go out, leaving him alone with his music—he has pulled those white fingers to his lips, run his tongue over them lightly. At the vocational center, he can actually taste her, the flavor of her hand cream and shampoo, even when she's several feet away. This is because he has a nose like a dog, his older brother Lam used to tell him. An could smell the lingering aroma of papaya on his brother's hands hours after the older boys would have devoured their ill-gotten goods, feeling it justified to steal from the stall-keepers in Saigon who were getting rich off the American soldiers. 

To An, America smells nothing like his own country. There is so much concrete and steel spreading out across the land, and so many automobiles with their choke smoke. The first indoctrination center he went to was in an old school administration building that smelled of aged wood and waxy buildup. He had been afraid there because he’d known no English—only "Where to find?" and "Tank you."

 When they were divided into groups, he thought that meant only some of them would be allowed to stay and study, to learn the language that would unlock the secrets of survival in such a huge land. An worked hard, concentrating on the voices around him even when they sounded like no more than small hammers drumming on woods of differing hardnesses.

Eventually, whole words began to emerge, then phrases. He learned to read a little and scolded his countrymen for talking in their own language while at the school. An was one of the first of his group to be passed on to the vocational training center where he could learn the trade of a welder. It was there he began to think that he might actually find a way to rebuild his life. There was nothing of the old one to build on, everyone gone. Even his nephew, seeking vengeance, had disappeared into the thick green that later burned orange and deadly. 

His friend Thanh told An once he was lucky to have no one left behind, no one to fear for, to feel guilty about having abandoned. Thanh still has two sisters and an aunt living in the countryside, near what is left of their home. Even if he earns enough money to get them out, there is no guarantee they will survive their escape. So Thanh says An is lucky to be so completely alone. Yes, completely, An thinks. Even his own company is like being with a ghost there is so much of him missing. 

He focuses on the pages of the book, whispers the words, Meestah Gomez come home fom wok at six o'cwock. Miz. Gomez ees in da keetchen cooking wice and beans. She smies a her husban as he wooks into each pot on da stove. "Umm, smew good," he say. "It wew be weady soon," she say. An is getting to know the Gomez family pretty well, especially likes the parts where they struggle with some problem, like leaky plumbing or their son's troubles with his studies. Their normalcy seems exotic to An. 

He rests his forehead in the curve of his intertwined fingers and thinks of Miss Joy, her cool fingers and wide brown eyes, which sometimes snap with pleasure when one of her students makes or gets a joke in English. The learning center—a small upstairs room once used for storage in the middle of the print shop—is a place of hope and smiles. That is the unspoken rule of all who go there. In that room, people from different countries but similar pasts come close to touching each other in their daily struggle to speak of the simplest things.

It is just as well, An thinks, that he has not the words just yet to tell Miss Joy how he feels, how thoughts of her—of them together—fill the empty places all around him, inside him even. The words that pour from her mouth—many of them still undecipherable to him—are like a stream of hope carrying him where ever he will next find himself. 

Added to his grief for what is already gone from his life is the new fear that something bad will happen to ruin this new life he longs to embrace. There have been whispers in all the languages spoken there of the learning center being closed to them. The night principal has been heard talking with some of the instructors when they thought the Asian students would not understand. Words like too hard and no more money and not fair to white students.

When the rumor first touched An’s ears, he felt panic rise and wash through him, making his limbs weak and the lesson vocabularies hard to remember. He wanted to ask Miss Joy, wanted her to tell him they were safe. But he was afraid that speaking the word might give them life. And today, she wasn’t there. The other American woman, Barbara, led their class. A big woman with a big laugh and bright eyes that looked straight at the men and seemed to say that everything was good, everything was going to be all right. 

But to him nothing was all right, the room was lonely and miserable. Joy less. Ha. He wishes he could tell her that when she gets back. Show how the language is winding into his brain and around his tongue and allowing him to become more his true self, ironic and deep and passionate and maybe still too lost to use words just yet. Joy less. She would understand. What would her face tell him?

He sighs and looks down at the new-words list at the back of the chapter, but is too tired to concentrate. Leaning over the table, he cradles his head in his arms and drifts off to sleep as he imagines thin white fingers stroking his stubborn hair to one side, preparing his brow for a kiss.