“When?”

“Not sure yet. I’ll call you in a couple of days. Is it hot down there?”

“Ninety-five in the shade.”

“Beautiful. We’ll go sailing. I have to go, hon. Just sit tight, I promise I’ll call you. Bye.”

Aunty Mabel was bowed over her embroidery, but my uncle, now fully awake, leaned forward on the couch, rubbing his pudgy palms together. “Boyfriend, eh?”

“No. Just friend.”

“Just friend. Ni kan,” he said to my aunt, “see how she blushes.”

18

Aunty Mabel was in the kitchen, answering questions: Is she eating enough, is she sleeping, is she being a help to you. My aunt’s Shanghainese was so quick the sibilant syllables seemed to trip over each other.

I was summoned to the phone. Before she handed it to me, my aunt whispered: “Your sister’s in an accident.”

When I asked, Ma said: “No, no, nothing serious. Marty’s rental car, it went into a ditch. Insurance covers everything. She has a broken arm, that’s all.”

“Where is she?”

“Still up in Vermont now, but she’s coming back down. Her friend drives her this weekend.”

“Are you sure she’s all right?”

“Of course, of course. I think she’s getting tired of there anyway. I think it’s time for her to come home.”

While my aunt was out of the house at her library job, Uncle Richard and I played gin rummy, a penny a point. The cards were special ones, with giant print, for people with bad vision. My uncle leaned back on the sofa, his eyes sly over his half glasses. On the table in front of him was a pair of silver globes, the kind you see for sale in Chinatown in satin boxes, that he picked up and clacked together when he was thinking. It drove me crazy.

“You’re just like Captain Queeg.”

“Hah hah. Humphrey Bogart.” My uncle had four cards left. His eyes narrowed and he threw down the queen of hearts into the discard pile. I reached for it, hesitated, and then pulled my hand back. He laughed. “That’s right, Niece. You have to weigh things, think them out. You think it looks like a treasure, it might be a poison.”

“I need a cigarette.”

Without taking his eyes off his cards, Uncle Richard reached behind him into the crack between the cushion and the back of the sofa and pulled out a battered pack of Camel nonfilters. He shook them expertly so that one slid out toward me. “Be my guest.” With his slippered toe he poked under the sofa fringe and nudged out an old tuna can full of butts.

“Looks like you’ve got it all set up.”

“That’s right.” He took a gold lighter out of his shirt pocket and lit my cigarette, then his, and set the can on the coffee table.

“Doesn’t she smell it?”

“Nah. She too busy worry about other things.” He frowned down at his hand.

“Uncle Richard, what did you think of my father?”

“What’s this, you studying your roots?”

“No, I’m just curious.”

“Pau-yu was a very intelligent man. And he has charisma, like movie star. Not like your old uncle.”

“Do you think he loved my mother?”

“Why you ask all these questions, Niece? He cherish your ma-ma. She is very able woman. Your turn.”

I picked up the king of spades, one of my favorite cards, but I couldn’t use it, since all I was holding was low clubs, so I laid it down. I remembered, sinkingly, that I hadn’t seen a lot of high spades in this game. “Ah,” my uncle said. His hand hovered over the facedown pile, teasing me, then swooped down for the king I’d just discarded. “Gin. Forty-five points.” Jack, queen, king, ace. Royal flush.

“Luck,” I said.

“I tell you, Niece, that’s what it is. Luck. Everything is luck.”

“Someone else’s good luck is your bad.”

“In cards, maybe. Not in other things. You know feng shui?” He pronounced it the Cantonese way, “shwee.”

“Wind water.”

“Very good. I have friend in Queens, expert in this. He came down, look at our house, make recommendations. You gotta bad angle on your door, he says, no money can come in, you put a mirror here to fix. Energy trapped behind this window, you put something glass to catch it. Then what happened? We get a six-thousand-dollar refund from IRS. What do you think?”

“I think you had something to do with that refund.”

“See these bells and chime hanging here? That’s for chi to play. You give it toy, good luck wants to come in. Hah, I can see you don’t believe. I tell you what. We go see some real luck in action. The puppies. You ever see greyhound race?”

“Once. A documentary on TV.”

Uncle Richard laughed raucously. “Forget TV.” He counted his cards quickly, swept them together. “One hundred thirty points. You owe me seven dollars.”

“What’s the matter, Niece? This old car is too much for you? Japanese-made, very good, we got it secondhand.”

“No, no, everything’s fine.” It was a good thing my uncle was nearly blind, he wouldn’t be able to pick up details like the fact that my palms were sweating all over the steering wheel. It was the first time I’d been in the driver’s seat since I’d gotten sideswiped in Ma’s Honda. I put on my sunglasses and adjusted the rearview mirror, casual, like I did it all the time, like I was born driving.

“So what we say to your aunt?” Uncle Richard tested me.

“We saw Cousin Cousine.” Aunty Mabel had come home with one of her migraines and had gone to lie down after lunch. I’d scrawled the note we left on the kitchen table: Going tothe movies. Be back for dinner.

“Good. You tell me the story.”

I glanced behind me and in front of me and when I was surer than sure it was absolutely safe pulled out of the driveway. I was usually bad at recalling the plots of movies, but this one I remembered, because it was the one Carey and I had seen on our first date and we’d argued about it afterward. He’d thought it was immoral.

“They’re these two couples, the man in one couple is the cousin of the woman in the other couple. Anyway, the man cousin is a real jerk, always having affairs, and the wife is good, the actress’s name is Marie-Christine Something.”

“Make a left at this light. What does this Marie look like?”

“Oh, I don’t know, long blond hair, not pretty pretty but very attractive. And in the other couple, it’s the wife cousin who’s the jerk. She’s extremely beautiful, dark hair, neurotic as hell, always threatening to commit suicide. For attention. You know she’s never going to do it. You following this, Uncle Richard?”

“Ummhmm.”

“Her husband’s totally easygoing, totally sweet. A doll. So guess what happens.”

“Either the good and the good or the bad and the bad get together.”

“But the bad and the bad are related by blood.”

“When I was growing up cousin could marry cousin. You make a right at this intersection. Watch out for trucks. Right, Niece.”

“Sorry.” It seemed as if my uncle’s eyesight was improving geometrically the farther away we got from the house. We’d been following the Gulf shore a ways, and now we were heading toward downtown St. Pete. We passed a low-slung stucco hospital with a row of those tall gangly palms, the kind where the trunks were skinny at the bottom and widened toward the top. “Bends in hurricane,” Aunty Mabel had explained to me when I’d pointed this out.

“You ever miss New York?” I asked my uncle.

“Of course. Chinese food. You think you can get decent here? Seafood is okay, but has American taste.”

“How about your friends?”

“All retiring now, and they come down here, you know, or to Miami. Miami, Miami. Big deal. Sometimes your aunt and me, we think Hawaii.”

“Hawaii! That would be great.”

“Yeah. Honolulu. You come visit us there, eh?”

“Of course.”

Now we were in a particularly seedy section, auto repair shops and bars and very few people on the street. I found the automatic door lock button and pressed it. Per capita, there was much more crime here than in New York. I remembered what Lillith had told me about the town of Starke, near Gainesville. “You want to hold your breath when you pass that,” she’d warned.