Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

As she comes out of the Kiddie Kare she sees me, which happens almost by accident, for she drops her keys and turns on an oblique angle, back toward me, opposite her way to Lerner’s, and finds me where I’m standing stock-still in the middle of the mall. She stares, and for a moment we are transported back in time, as if we are caught up again in the long dry stare of her youth, that severe, bloodless regard she’d offer up from across the kitchen table, or the dark water of the pool, or from the sidewalk in front of the store, where she’d lean against the parking meter and smoke her spice-scented cigarettes. But now I see that more than anything else she is simply acknowledging me, her eyes half-angry and half-sad, and I wonder if in my threadbare red cardigan and bulky corrective shoes and loose-hanging slacks I am something of a horrendous sight for her eyes.

“Don’t let him see us,” she says, slowly approaching and then passing me by. “We’ll talk at the food.”

I realize what she means and start walking past the Kiddie Kare without glancing in, though now I wish to look upon him, once again take in his shape. Instead I loop around the large planter and head back toward the food hall smelling thickly of tacos and burgers and Chinese food warming in steam trays. Sunny is sitting at one of the tables on the inner “veranda” of the court, a plastic cup of iced coffee in her hands, and when I sit down she rises and asks if I want some tea. The consideration surprises me, and as she heads to the Java Hut I think we must both be glad for the momentary reprieve.

Soon enough, though, she returns with a paper cup of steaming green tea.

As there’s silence, I say, “I was grateful for the card.”

She pauses, but it’s too late to act as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

“Sally Como told me. I bought it that day. I guess you know she works here. I wasn’t going to send it, but then one morning I put a stamp on the envelope and dropped it in the box. It was stupid to think you wouldn’t know who it was from.”

“It wasn’t stupid at all,” I tell her.

She doesn’t answer this, jiggling her iced coffee instead. “Well, now that’s done with, and you’re here. You look okay to me. But you lost some weight. I mean, over the years.”

“I feel quite fine.”

Sunny nods, not exactly smiling. “Did you really almost burn down the house?”

“Not at all,” I say, taken by her sudden feeling and interest. “There was some minor damage from the smoke. Really nothing serious. I’ve had it all fixed, and the curtains and carpet in the family room have been replaced. There’s hardly an odor anymore. If you came by and saw it you might think nothing had ever happened—”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she breaks in, sounding busy all of a sudden. She checks her watch. “I have to be at work pretty soon.”

“It is quite lively there,” I tell her. “It’s a very nice shop, you know, very efficient, very well run. It’s clear that there are good systems in place. You must have been managing the store for some time now, I suppose.”

“No, not a long time,” she answers. She seems a bit nervous, even almost shy, but acting as an adult might in an awkward situation, forward and harried. “We moved here in the spring. I was doing the same job in Long Island, at a Lerner’s in Great Neck, but it was too expensive there for us to live and when this came up nobody else seemed to want it. So here I am.”

“With your son.”

“Yes,” she answers, taking a sip through the straw.

“May I ask his name?”

“It’s Thomas.”

“What a good solid name for a boy. How old is he?”

“Almost six.”

“He looks sturdy, very strong.”

“Well, I didn’t want him to see us together,” she says firmly, unapologetic. “He doesn’t know about you. And I would like it to stay that way. I don’t want him confused.”

I have an impulse to ask about the boy’s father, if he is with them or at least somewhere around, and if it is Lincoln, in fact, but from Sunny’s tone I realize the question is one I should set aside. She’s here now with me, and willing enough. And from where I am sitting, I see how Sunny has aged as well. She’s still someone at whom you must stop what you are doing and take a moment to look, her rich color, her beautiful eyes. I was last this close to her nearly half her lifetime ago, in the bristling flush of her adolescence. But now, too, I see the first lines at the corners of her mouth, a strand (or two or three) of silvery hair, the barest perceptible sag to her cheek. If there’s anything one can say it’s that she’s a young woman of a lovely cast who has been worn down in the course of the years in the ways a woman of privilege or leisure would never have been.

“I’ll let you say hello to him, if you want,” she says now, looking squarely at me, as if I have already asked her and she’s long been considering it. “But you can’t say anything like you’re his grandfather, or related to him in any way. I don’t want you to tell him there was a connection. I’m having trouble enough with all his questions about his father and me.”

“I would be very pleased to meet him,” I say. “If he asks who I am, well, I can tell him you once worked at my store, when you were young.”

“Fine,” she answers curtly. “But I don’t want him to have expectations. Because those would be impossible. You understand me, right? I want you to understand.”

“Yes of course,” I reply, wishing certain expectations wouldn’t be so potentially hurtful or damaging, when all I might do is make myself available to him, in any possible way. “I’ll do exactly as you wish.”

She acknowledges this and we sit in silence, sipping our drinks. And it’s striking to me — almost unacceptably so — how not awful it is to have passed all these years, with a host of all manner of difficult feelings, and have between us now such mild and mature accord. As if there had once been a hint of something more than just duty and responsibility: something like love. It’s what I hadn’t allowed myself to hope for as I drove to the mall, the ambient progression of such a meeting. At the same time, however, it grieves me a little now to see how Sunny has tempered herself, or worse, been thus tempered by her life, how my standing by and letting her leave at such a young age has led her, somehow, right back to this wan town and wan mall, to sit here with this innocently crouched old man who once tried to conduct himself like her father and not despise him to his death.

But how this moment, too, surpasses me. And I say, “I’m not surprised to see how well you’re doing. For yourself and your boy, Thomas. I’ve had some worries, of course. I assumed I would find you in a good way, but like this, I must admit, as the manager of so wonderful a store with such attentive employees. And then to hold an obvious position of leadership here in the mall, which has some lack in this regard, well, it’s quite an accomplishment.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she mutters, looking over at the teens and children milling around the frozen yogurt bar, the burger and fry place. “All I’ve done is be persistent.”

“Yes, of course,” I tell her, “that’s ninety-five percent of any success. You must know the secret. Sometimes I want to go into a shop on Church Street that isn’t doing so well and tell them just to hold on. People give up so easily these days. A few bad months and it’s time to sell everything off. The economy isn’t helping matters, but it doesn’t mean certain failure. It means having to provide better service, better goods. For a long time, you know, when you were in middle school, I was almost sure the store wouldn’t make it. I had to convince Mr. Finch at the bank to give me more time. I was behind several payments, and I had to beg him.”