The Expatriates

Free The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee Page B

Book: The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee Read Free Book Online
Authors: Janice Y. K. Lee
complex without an ID check.
    She has noticed how, as she grows older, she is more and more reluctant to say anything directly, even to her husband.
    She will tell him, “I haven’t told anyone else about that,” when she means to say, “Don’t tell anyone.” When David later says he has mentioned it to a friend, she gets upset, and he will exclaim, in the simple way of men, “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to keep it private?” and she will retire, injured. He should have intimated, she thinks. Intimated, because they are supposed to be intimate. He should have known.
    So she does not say, “Please try to get the stain off the piano.” She walks into the kitchen and says, “Puri, I’m leaving now.”
    Julian is sitting there, having a snack. Usually she would be therewith him, but she forgot her lunch appointment and now cannot cancel. He is seven, wary. He comes, once a week, for his piano lesson, paid for by the Starrs, a new arrangement that has already revealed itself to be static and in need of change, but one that she has no idea how to alter. She sat with him during his lesson, as she always does, watching his slender fingers hover over the keys. He is talented. She found Julian in foster care, half Indian, half Chinese, left by his teenage mother. At the table now, he looks up and gives a shy smile, with his light brown skin and beautiful dark eyes, ringed with impossibly long lashes. How odd, she thinks, to not know whether his mother was the Chinese or the Indian half. The system must know, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to ask. But this seems a vital part of the equation. He will want to know, she thinks, and he should be able to find out. She should find out for him.
    “I have to go out for lunch, Julian. Sorry I couldn’t reschedule it. Sam will come to take you back in fifteen minutes, after he drops me off. I’ll see you next week.”
    She thinks he understands her but isn’t sure. His English is almost nonexistent, but he is agreeable. He gets in the car to come here, he plays the piano, he eats the snack they give him, and then she takes him back to the group home. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and goes home. Another odd event in his odd life.
    Sam is waiting downstairs for her in the car. She gets in, and even in the cooler air, the interior is redolent of body odors. Humors, she thinks. The humors of the body, escaping through those tiny pores, roiling around the interior of the car.
    Chinese or Filipino? everyone had asked when she said she was hiring a driver. Sam is Indian, an anomaly, but he grew up in Hong Kong, speaks fluent Cantonese, and knows every street in Hong Kong. She thought he would be happy to see Julian visit, but he is odd about it. Later she realizes that he thinks Julian is a street child, beneath him, a proper working man with a family. She realizes that everyone wants to find his own level.
    Sam starts the car, and they go to the club.
    Hilary sits, hidden behind sunglasses, waiting for her friend Olivia. Children are playing on the lawn while their mothers sip tea and gossip. A boy falls and cries. His mother goes to comfort him. She is a woman Hilary sees at the club every time she is there: a woman with three children, two girls, one boy. Today the woman is in dark jeans that show her wide hips and bottom and a white wool sweater that is stretched across her large breasts and hugs the shelf of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. The muffin top, Hilary knows it is called, the soft, doughy edge that tips over the waistband of your pants. The woman stands up and returns to her group of friends.
    Hilary views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust. How can they let themselves go like that, these women, as if it didn’t matter? Even if they did have children, surely it can’t be too much work to refrain from shoving éclairs and cream puffs down their throats for a few months? She was a heavy child, but she lost

Similar Books

Surrendered Hearts

Carrie Turansky

The Exposé 4

Roxy Sloane

Flame Thrower

Alice Wade

The Gold Falcon

Katharine Kerr

The Antidote

Oliver Burkeman