I looked down at Lisa. “You going to ask me?”
“Ask you what, Grandad?”
“Ask me how come I’m asking Ev about new people moving into town.”
She grinned. “Figured I’d wait till we got back in the truck.”
“No new address cards,” Ev said when he came back. “I’ll keep an eye out for you if you want.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
In the truck, Lisa said, “Is it all right if I ask you now?”
“I’m wondering if that shot this morning didn’t coincide with somebody moving here. Somebody who came here just so they could deal with me.”
“You mean, like somebody’s after you or something like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But who’d be after you?”
“I don’t know.”
The man at the first hotel had a pot belly and merry red suspenders. “Asian, you say?”
“Right.”
“Nope. No Asians that I signed in, anyway.”
“How about at night?”
“I can check the book.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Two weeks back be all right?”
“That’d been fine.”
But two weeks back revealed no Asians. “Sorry,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his suspenders.
“How come Asians?” Lisa said after we were back in the truck.
“Just because of something that happened to me once.”
We rode in silence for a time.
“Grandad?”
“Yeah.”
“You going to tell me? About what happened to you once?”
“Not right now, hon.”
“How come?”
“Too hard for me to talk about.” And it was. Every time I thought about it for longer than a minute, I could feel my eyes tear up.
The woman at the second motel wore a black T-shirt with a yellow hawk on it. Beneath it said, “I’ll do anything for the Hawkeyes.” Anything was underlined. The Hawkeyes were the U of Iowa.
“Couple black guys, some kind of salesmen I guess, but no Asians,” she said.
“How about at night?”
She laughed. “Bob works at night. He doesn’t much like people who aren’t white. We had an Asian guy, I’d hear about it, believe me.”
The man at the third motel, a hearty man with a farmer’s tan and a cheap pair of false teeth said, “No Asian.”
“Maybe he came at night?”
“The boy, he works the night shift. Those robberies we had a few months back — that convenience store where that girl got shot? — ever since, he keeps a sharp eye out. Usually tells me all about the guests. He didn’t mention any Asian.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be happy to ask around,” he said.
“Cochran, right?”
“Henry Cochran. Right.”
“Thanks for your help, Henry.”
“You bet.”
“You going to tell me yet?” Lisa said when we were in the pickup and headed back to the farm.
“Not yet.”
“Am I bugging you, Grandad?”
I smiled at her. “Maybe a little.”
“Then I won’t ask you anymore.”
She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, after which she settled back on her side of the seat.
“You know what I forgot to do today?” she said after awhile.
“What?”
“Tell you I loved you.”
“Well, I guess you’d better hurry up and do it then.”
“I love you, Grandad.”
The funny thing was, I’d never been able to cry much till the cancer, which was a few years ago when I turned fifty-two. Not even when my two best soldier friends got killed in Nam did I cry. Not even when my wife left me did I cry. But these days all sorts of things made me cry. And not just about sad things, either. Seeing a horse run free could make me cry; and certain old songs; and my granddaughter’s face when she was telling me she loved me.
“I love you, too, Lisa,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze.
That afternoon Lisa and I spent three hours raking corn in a wagon next to the silo, stopping only when the milk truck came. As usual Ken, the driver, took a sample out of the cooling vat where the milk had been stored. He wanted to get a reading on the butterfat content of the milk. When the truck was just rolling brown dust on the distant road, Lisa and I went back to raking the corn. At five we knocked off. Lisa rode her bike down the road to the creek where she was trying to catch a milk snake for her science class this fall.
I was in scrubbing up for dinner when Emmy called me to the phone. “There’s a woman on the line for you. Dad. She’s got some kind of accent.”
“I’ll take it in the TV room,” I said.
“This is Mr. Wilson?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Wilson, my name is Nguyn Mai. I am from Vietnam here visiting.”
“I see.”
“I would like to meet you tonight. I am staying in Iowa City but I would meet you at The Fireplace restaurant. You know where is?”
“Yes, The Fireplace is downtown here.”
“Yes. Would seven o’clock be reasonable for you?”
“I have to say eight. There’s a meeting I need to go to first.”
“I would appreciate it, Mr. Wilson.”
She sounded intelligent and probably middle-aged. I got no sense of her mood.
“Eight o’clock,” I said.
After dinner, I took a shower and climbed into a newly washed pair of chinos and a white button-down shirt and a blue windbreaker.
In town, I parked in the Elks lot. Across the cinder alley was the meeting room we used for our support group.
The hour went quickly. There was a new woman there tonight, shy and fresh with fear after her recent operation for breast cancer. At one point, telling us how she was sometimes scared to sleep, she started crying. She was sitting next to me so I put my arm around her and held her till she felt all right again. That was another thing I’d never been too good at till the cancer, showing tenderness.
There were seven of us tonight. We described our respective weeks since the last meeting, exchanged a few low-fat recipes and listened to one of the men discuss some of the problems he was having with his chemotherapy treatments. We finished off with a prayer and then everybody else headed for the coffee pot and the low-fat kolaches one of the women had baked especially for this meeting.
At eight I walked through the door of The Fireplace and got my first look at Nguyn Mai. She was small and fiftyish and pretty in the way of her people. She wore an American dress, dark and simple, a white sweater draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were friendly and sad.
After I ordered my coffee, she said, “I’m sorry I must trouble you, Mr. Wilson.”
“Robert is what most people call me.”
“Robert, then.” She paused, looked down, looked up again. “My brother Ngyun Dang plans to kill you.”
I told her about the rifle shot this morning, and the envelope later.
“He was never the same,” she said, “after it happened. I am his oldest sister. There was one sister younger, Hong. This is the one who died. She was six years old. Dang, who was twelve at the time, took care of the funeral all by himself, would not even let my parents see her until after he had put her in her casket. Dang always believed in the old religious ways. He buried Hong in our backyard, according to ancient custom. The old ways teach that the head of a virgin girl is very valuable and can be used as a very powerful talisman to bring luck to the family members. Dang was certainly lucky. When he was fourteen, he left our home and went to Saigon. Within ten years, he was a millionaire. He deals in imports. He spent his fortune tracking you down. It was not easy.”
“Were you there that day?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what happened?”