On that particular night, all the names that people had called him under their breath, all the looks of disapproval they’d once given him as his motherless, brown child followed him around town, clinging with one hand to the hem of his shirt, came back now to slice him across the chest like the tip of a cutlass. And he saw that he was not a foreigner at all, that this was his only home, that he had no other place to go. He may have come here as little Lin Jian from Guangzhou but he had spent more time as Johnny “Lin” Lyncook from Portland parish, sixty-odd miles from the capital city and a lifetime away from China. He could no longer be one without the other.
Had his ba been wrong to insist on being called by his Chinese surname and encourage the same for Johnny? Had he been wrong to speak to his sons in Hakka in public? Had Lin been wrong in going to the cemetery on Gah San every spring to sweep the tombs of his lost brothers and, later, his parents? Would it have changed anything?
No matter now. The blame that people were laying at Lin’s feet for the misdeeds of another man who happened to look like him was about to bring him down, not because he had anything to do with them but because of his own mistakes. Lin would not be able to recover from this fire because his own vices had already put him too far into debt.
Lin looked down at his feet. They were still stained with soot. He turned on the garden hose and ran the water between his toes. He looked up at the kitchen window, listened to Covey chatting with Pearl inside, the clack-clack of plates being washed and sorted. Just as Lin was coming to accept that what he had here was all that mattered, he saw that he was on the verge of losing it all.
Who are all these people Benny’s mother is talking about? What do they have to do with her ma? And what about the sister she mentioned? It’s still not clear to Benny what happened. And Benny isn’t even sure she wants to know. She feels panicky. She feels like everything is slipping away. She just wants her ma, the way she used to be.
Benny tells the men she has to go to the bathroom but instead, she heads farther down the hallway to the room where she grew up and digs into the contents of her wheelie bag.
There.
She unrolls an old university sweatshirt she inherited years ago from her brother and takes out a measuring cup, a cloudy-looking piece of plastic that is older than she is. It goes back to the days when Ma was a young bride, newly arrived in America. Ounces and cups on one side, milliliters on the other.
“Take this,” her mother said as Benny was packing for her move to college. She pressed the cup into Benny’s tote bag and patted the bag. “This way you’ll have a little piece of home with you, wherever you go.” After that, Benny never did pack a suitcase without slipping the old cup in among her clothes, a little reminder of all those days spent together in the kitchen with her ma.
Benny’s nose was barely level with the kitchen counter when her mother first showed her how to make a black cake. Ma reached down and pulled a huge jar out of a lower cupboard. One of her tricks was to soak the dried fruits in rum and port all year round, not just a few weeks before.
“This is island food,” Ma said. “This is your heritage.”
While the batter was in the oven, her mother hoisted Benny onto a dark green stool. She told Benny that the seat was the color of the trees that grew straight out of the water where she had grown up. Benny imagined a wide, dark sea pierced by tall trees, like the redwoods that her parents had taken her and Byron to see farther up the California coast. She imagined them standing firm like massive sentinels, as tall waves washed past their trunks.
“One day, you’ll see,” her mother told her.
Benny grew up thinking that her mother and father would take her and Byron to the island someday, but they never did. It was years before Benny realized that the towering water trees she’d imagined were actually mangroves, low, verdant clumps of life rooted in those intertidal zones where fresh water mixed with seawater, where the roots were both hardy and vulnerable, where both sea and land creatures made their homes. Where nothing was any one thing but, rather, a little bit of everything. Kind of like Benny.
Her ma had been using the same measuring cup for twenty years or so when her dad took Benny and Byron to a department store to find a replacement. They ended up choosing a bigger one made out of thick glass.
“For her black cake,” their father said, raising the cup as if in a toast.
“Oooh!” their mother said when she opened the package. She left the gleaming new cup on the kitchen counter and used it almost every day, only never for the black cake. When baking time came around, she would burrow into a bottom cupboard and fish out the old plastic thing, closing off the kitchen to everyone but Benny as she measured and mixed.