A quiet day, spent mostly failing to finish the Sunday crossword and joining my regular free-writing group. I wrote this:
It was the year of the dragon, which meant the restaurant was closed. There had been talk about a private party, local businessmen renting out the back rooms with their wives and children, sampling a fixed menu of platters and drinks, but in the end the cook refused — “Not for what you pay me,” he’d said as he walked out the door, taking most of the wait staff with him — and the businessmen’s families had gone somewhere else. Dao-ming had reluctantly shuttered the front doors, sent the rest of the staff home to be with their families — with pay, of course — and switched the restaurant’s phone line to voice mail.
Not that there were a lot of regular customers calling for reservations these days, or that she herself had anywhere else to be. Dao-ming stood in the door of the darkened kitchen, listening to the stillness of her father’s restaurant. The one he had opened in the year of the rat — how many years ago was that, now? Neither of them — nor her mother, nor her two brothers, all of them gone now — had ever paid much mind to astrology. “A bunch of old country crap,” her father had said; it was the kind of thing Americans liked, that customers expected to see: the red lanterns and gold Buddhas he had openly detested but still decorated the restaurant with on any occasion.
Only at the end, after he’d been diagnosed, after the cancer had spread through his liver like an oil slick across the surface of a lake, had her father found religion. Only then had he talked of omens and curses and fate, inauspucious signs he said he should have recognized, on which he should have acted. They never openly talked about the fire, about her mother, about Chang and Baoqi. He never blamed her; not once in five years had he ever blamed her. And like a good little drone, her father’s daughter, she never dared mention it herself. She kept the restaurant open, even as it continued to fail, and she buried him in the family plot where her mother and the two boys all were laid.
She was still here, still managing the books, though they saw a lot more red these days than ever before. She would have joked, had there been anyone to joke with — anyone but the staff, the cook and waiters, the hostess who most nights still worked the door — that it was red for the new year, the year of the dragon, each debit and loss secretly an omen of glad tidings. She didn’t believe it — that’s what would have made it a joke — but what else, really, could Dao-ming do?
That is all.