The family was finally training a cousin—the American-born son of Tommy’s mother’s younger sister—to serve as a shift manager on a rotating basis that would allow everyone at the management level to work approximately forty-hour weeks and, at last, have normal lives. They had resisted bringing in the cousin, because for too long they had stubbornly waited for Tommy to return to the fold and take that job himself.
Tommy suspected that his parents had believed he’d eventually be overwhelmed with guilt as he watched his father and his brothers working themselves half to death to keep all the principal management positions in the immediate family. Indeed, he had lived with such guilt that he’d had dreams in which he’d been behind the wheel of a car with his father and brothers as passengers, and he’d recklessly driven it off a high cliff, killing them all, while he miraculously survived. Dreams in which he had been flying a plane filled with his family, crashed, and walked away as the sole survivor, his clothes red with their blood. Dreams in which a whirlpool sucked down their small boat at night on the South China Sea, drowning everyone but the youngest and most thoughtless of all the Phans, he himself, the son who was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. He had learned to live with the guilt, however, and to resist the urge to give up his dream of being a writer.
Now, as he and Del stepped through the back door of the New World Saigon Bakery, Tommy was conflicted. Simultaneously he felt at home yet on dangerous ground.
The air was redolent of baking bread, brown sugar, cinnamon, baker’s cheese, bitter chocolate, and other tantalizing aromas less easily identifiable in the fragrant melange. This was the smell of his childhood, and it plunged him into a sensory river of wonderful memories, torrents of images from the past. This was also the smell of the future that he had firmly rejected, however, and underneath the mouth-watering savour, Tommy detected a cloying sweetness that, by virtue of its very intensity, would in time sour the appetite, nauseate, and leave the tongue capable of detecting only bitterness in any flavour.
Approximately forty employees in white uniforms and white caps were hard at work in the large main room—pastry chefs, bread bakers, assistant bakers, clean-up boys—amidst the assembly tables, dough-mixing machines, cook tops, and ovens. The whir of mixer blades, the clink-clank of spoons and metal spatulas, the scrape-rattle of pans and cookie sheets being slid across baking racks, the muffled roar of gas flames in the hollow steel shells of the minimally insulated commercial ovens: this noise was music to Tommy, although like everything else about the place, it had two conflicting qualities—a cheerful and engaging melody, but an ominous underlying rhythm.
The hot air immediately chased away the chill of the night and the rain. But almost at once, Tommy felt that the air was too hot to breathe comfortably.
“Which one’s your brother?” Del asked.
“He’s probably in the shift manager’s office.” Tommy realized that Del had removed the Santa hat. “Thanks for not wearing the stupid hat.”
She withdrew it from a pocket in her leather jacket. “I only took it off so the rain wouldn’t ruin it.”
“Please don’t wear it, don’t embarrass me,” he said.
“You have no sense of style.”
“Please. I want my brother to take me seriously.”
“Doesn’t your brother believe in Santa?”
“Please. My family are very serious people.”
“Please, please,” she mocked him, but teasingly and without malice. “Maybe they should have become morticians instead of bakers.”
Tommy expected her to don the frivolous red-flannel chapeaux with characteristic defiance, but she crammed it back into her jacket pocket.
“Thank you,” he said gratefully.
“Take me to the sombre and humourless Gi Minh Phan, infamous anti-Santa activist.”
Tommy led her along one side of the main room, between the equipment-packed baking floor and the stainless-steel doors to a series of coolers and storerooms. The place was brightly lighted with banks of suspended fluorescent fixtures, and everything was nearly as well scrubbed as a hospital surgery.
He had not visited the bakery in at least four years, during which time its business had grown, so he didn’t recognize many of the employees on the graveyard shift. They all appeared to be Vietnamese, and the great majority were men. Most of them were concentrating so intensely on their work that they didn’t notice they had visitors.