‘Then you did the right thing.’
‘Whether it was or not, I did it, and it’s done.’
‘The distance between you and them is a gap not a gulf. You can bridge it.’
‘Never quite,’ he disagreed.
‘In fact, it’s no distance at all compared to the light-years we’ve all come from the Big Bang, all the billions of miles we’ve crossed since we were just primal matter.’
‘Don’t go strange on me again, Del.’
‘What strange?’
‘I’m the Asian here. If anyone’s supposed to be inscrutable, it’s me.’
‘Sometimes,’ Deliverance Payne said, ‘you listen but you just don’t hear.’
‘That’s what keeps me sane.’
‘That’s what gets you in trouble.’
‘Come on, let’s go see my brother.’
As they hurried through the rain, between two rows of delivery trucks, Del said, ‘How do you expect Gi to be able to help you?’
‘He’s had to deal with the gangs, so he knows about them.’
‘Gangs?’
‘Cheap Boys. Pomona Boys. Their kind.’
The New World Saigon Bakery operated in three eight-hour shifts. From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, Tommy’s father served as the shift manager while also conducting corporate business from his front office. From four o’clock until midnight, the oldest of the Phan brothers, Ton That, was the chief baker and the shift manager, and from midnight until eight in the morning, Gi Minh filled those same positions.
Organized gangs, intent on extortion, were active around the clock. But when they used sabotage to get their way, they preferred the cover of deep darkness, which meant that Gi, by virtue of running the graveyard shift, had been on duty during some of the nastier confrontations.
For years, all three men had worked seven days a week, a full fifty-six hours each, because most of the bakery’s customers needed fresh merchandise on a daily basis. When one of them needed to have a weekend off, the other two split his time between them and worked sixty-four-hour weeks without complaint. Vietnamese-Americans with an entrepreneurial bent were among the most industrious people in the country and could never be faulted for failing to carry their own weight. Sometimes, however, Tommy wondered how many of Ton’s and Gi’s generation – former refugees, boat children highly motivated to succeed by early memories of poverty and terror in Southeast Asia – would live long enough to retire and enjoy the peace that they had struggled so hard to earn.
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.