“Isn’t that a no-no? Carrying other people’s luggage?” She spoke with a visible quiver of pleasure.
“Not getting on a plane.”
Gabriella was heavyset, with a beautiful, brooding face. Her mother, Chris’s aunt Laura, had allegedly seethed with resentment at Chris’s father for being the treasured baby and only son, pampered and Mohawk-ironed while Laura struggled at home with teenage motherhood. Laura had since prospered, and now had a time-share in Scotland where she spent half of each summer golfing. But her resentment had decanted into Gabriella, who turned it on Chris whenever they met.
“What are you doing at work?” she asked him when they were all seated. “Making apps?”
“Not exactly.”
“Isn’t that what all Stanford grads do? Make apps?”
“You tell me.”
“I wouldn’t know. I went to Chico State.”
“What do Chico State grads do?”
“Become prison guards. Kidding, kidding,” she genuflected, for Abuela had a zero-tolerance policy toward self-pity. And anyway, Gabriella was a successful pharmacist.
“What product is your firm creating, Christopher?” their grandmother asked, regarding him with her calm, perceptive eyes.
“I’m… not totally sure,” Chris said. He’d never been able to lie, or even fib, to his abuela. “I mean, we’re an entertainment company. But what I’m mostly doing is breaking down stories into familiar parts, and then breaking down those parts into smaller parts, which I”—he couldn’t bring himself to say “algebraize”—“sort of diagram. I think the idea is…”
What was the idea? To make art—or make a way to make art—but as far as Chris knew, no product was in sight. He’d tried asking Aaron, his boss, where their work was leading, exactly, but Aaron merely replied, with his axlike finality, “DNA.”
“How do you like this work, Christopher?” Abuela asked.
“I love it,” he said fiercely.
Gabby had recused herself from their tender exchange by going to the bathroom. Now she stopped to examine the suitcase. “What’s in here, Chris?” she called. “I smell hydrochloric acid.”
Chris rolled his eyes, but his grandmother rose quickly from her chair.
“Oooh, I’d put that out, Abuela,” Gabby said, for their grandmother had finished her tiny portion of stew and was enjoying one of the slender mentholated cigarettes she bought on a black market, now that the FDA had banned them. “We don’t want an explosion.”
Abuela went swiftly into the kitchen and doused her cigarette under the tap. “Let’s move this case outside,” she said.
“Let’s call the police,” Gabby suggested.
“No!” Chris and their grandmother said in unison. Abuela, he knew, was loath to jeopardize the anonymity she believed was protecting her treasure, and Chris had no wish to represent the suitcase’s unknown contents before the law.
“Look, I can take it back to the city,” he said with a sigh. “I can call an Uber right now.” This was pure bluff, an invitation for Abuela to insist that he stay and finish his stew. But he’d miscalculated.
“I think that would be for the best,” she said with reluctance. “We can wait for the taxi together, outside. With the suitcase.”
“I’ll just go finish my dinner,” Gabby said. “Nice to see you, Chris.” She was grinning, and why not? She’d managed to banish him from the house.
* * *
It was dark when Chris’s Uber pulled up outside SweetSpot Networks. He looked for Comstock, but there were no smokers out—in fact, he couldn’t recall ever having seen them at night. He’d fantasized during the ride about leaving the suitcase inside the Uber’s trunk, but now he shrank from this thought, as he did from taking it to his apartment in the Richmond District. Not that he’d be returning home tonight—he would need to work straight through to get his presentation done by morning. He kept a change of clothes in his cubicle for such occasions, along with Adderall.