Lonesome Lies Before Us by Don Lee

Author:Don Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Jeanette and Joe walked back to her car at the Golden Gate National Cemetery. Mike and Patsy had cut the picnic lunch relatively short. They had a long drive back to Modesto and were hoping to beat the holiday traffic.

As they were loading her trunk, Joe said to Jeanette, “You’re not going to call Yadin?”

“Why?” Her cellphone had been on mute when Yadin had left his voicemails and texts, saying he was hurrying to the cemetery. She chose not to reply. She hadn’t mentioned the messages to her father, and didn’t feel like doing so now.

Joe took off his suit jacket, and Jeanette noticed his white shirt had yellowed sweat stains in the armpits. “You should tell him we’re leaving,” he said. “He might be on his way here.”

“You said fat chance.”

“Still.”

She ignored her father. She had been worried about Yadin, worried he might be stranded somewhere on the highway, waiting for a tow, but once she knew that he was all right, she felt inexplicably angry with him, and wanted to punish him a little. She was irked that he hadn’t listened to her about the van, the noises it was making. It had been irresponsible of him. He’d let her down by not coming today, helping her deal with her aunt and uncle. Mainly, she wasn’t willing to dismiss Franklin’s suspicions so quickly anymore. Maybe Yadin was lying to her. He was hiding something, she was almost certain. A secret. She thought he should be the one to keep trying to call her, appease her, grovel, not the other way around.

She took her father back to Rosarita Bay, and from the Longfellow Elementary School parking lot, Joe hustled home in his van to watch the Giants on TV—an away game in St. Louis. Jeanette went to her bungalow to soak in a bath, change, and get the groceries from her refrigerator, and by the time she reached her father’s house, the game was in its final innings.

While Joe showered and napped, Jeanette prepared dinners for her father to microwave during the week. She always did this on Monday (every other Thursday, she cleaned the house for him). She assembled meals that her mother had made for the family: curry rice, breaded pork cutlets, thinly sliced barbecued beef, stir-fried noodles, and ginger pork. Jeanette had all of Jo’s original recipes, which her mother had typed neatly on index cards, sometimes annotating them by hand (“only 1 tsp sugar,” “touch more soy”). Jo had been a very serviceable cook, and she’d inspired Jeremy to become a chef. He made copies of the recipes, and then later enhanced them with French and Italian techniques he’d learned in culinary school.

His plan had been to open a restaurant specializing in haute stoner cuisine, with everything locally sourced, farm to table, his dishes imparting umami—a savory flavor—which was the last of the five tastes, rounding out salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. In some cultures, there was a sixth taste, piquant, and Jeremy wanted to infuse that into his menu, too, along with the option of having a fried egg on every item.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.