There Will Never Be Another You by Carolyn See

Author:Carolyn See
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345502391
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

DANNY and ANDREA

“You know, once when I was down in Chinatown? The real one, not the tourist one? A couple of Caucasian ladies came into this restaurant, a real Chinese one, and she ordered off the Chinese menu. The waiter said, ‘Something’s in there you not gonna like.’ Right about that time they unloaded a carton of live eels from a truck outside and the carton broke, or fell, whatever. Jeez, you should have seen the guys trying to pick them up. It was hot that day—”

“Was there?” Andrea asked.

“Was there what?”

“Something in the soup?”

“I don’t know. You sure you want to do this?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Things are different now, I guess. More cosmopolitan. I mean, the Empress Pavilion. Bankers from Hong Kong. But not with us. Don’t expect much.”

“Much what?” They were stuck in traffic, eastbound, just out of downtown, coming up on Cal State LA and the County Hospital, gridlocked on the way to Monterey Park.

“Decoration.”

“Danny?”

He raised his shoulders, kept his hands on the wheel. “I’m just saying. Don’t expect much.”

She didn’t say anything.

“There’ll only be about half of them there. There’s always somebody back with Uncle Lao.”

“Danny, I must have seen them all a dozen times. Twenty times, even. Won’t they know who I am?”

He shrugged. He wasn’t going to say that because she was Caucasian they wouldn’t have noticed her, and because she was a woman they really wouldn’t have seen her.

“I didn’t tell them about you yet.

“Because,” he continued into her silence, “for one thing, it’s none of their business. But you ought to know them. You know what I mean.”

She drew in a breath.

“I mean, you showed me to your mom. Right away. Tough Chinatown boy.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know what I can give you,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re with me, even for a week.”

“Fishing for compliments?” She put her hand on his thigh.

“Man, I don’t know. You’re driving me nuts.” Couldn’t he maybe just say that he didn’t have the language for this, that his chest felt like jelly with her around, that he felt admiration for her innocence and jealousy of her goodness, that she was like honey to him but that he didn’t know how to act, didn’t have the beginning of a clue? That he really was like all those things people talked about, a turtle without a shell, a soldier without a shield; that he was defenseless around her, he, a guy whose defenses had been perfect, more than perfect, for so long?

“It’s just me, you know,” she said. She looked at him with so much affection that he thought his head might explode.

“We don’t do that in our culture.”

“What?”

“What you do.”

“What’s that? What do you mean?”

What was he going to say? That no one had ever looked at him with love? That the most he had gotten from anybody so far in his life was respect at the best and fear at the worst?

“Are you for real?” Tough-talking. Again.

“I don’t know.”

They glided down the off-ramp. The signs out here, most of them, were in Chinese by now.

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