“They seem to have communicated just fine without it!” I snapped, hating myself.
They’d hidden this from me! Barry had written to Stephanie, and all those calls when she’d said, “I need to talk to Mom,” they were talking about this unknown girl. This gook girl. Who my son had planned to bring home. I could just see Ronnie the Racist’s face.
They’d hidden this from me.
“Oh Mom, I’m making such a mess of this!” Steffie cried. “I didn’t really believe he’d take it like this…”
“Give him some time, darling,” said my wife. “We were caught by surprise, too.”
“You give him some time,” my daughter burst into tears. “The only grandkid he may ever have, and all he can think of is to ask, ‘Are they really married?’ and call the mother a gook and a bar girl! I haven’t got time for this! I have to pack and go to Washington to meet Nguyen, and then I have to go…”
I reached up and grasped my daughter’s wrist.
“Just where do you think you’re going?”
That little bit of a thing faced me down. “I’m joining the Red Cross relief effort.” She laughed, shakily. “I wish I’d listened to you and become a nurse after all. It’s a hell of a lot more useful than a poli-sci major for what I need to do. We’re going over there.”
“That hellhole’s already swallowed one of my kids!”
“That’s right. So I’m going over there to look for him.”
I shook my head at her. Just one small girl in the middle of a war zone. What did she think she could do?
“Daddy, you know I’ve always looked after my brother. No matter how big he got. Except with this… this mess about the war. I did what I thought was right, and see how it worked out.” She wiped at her eyes.
“Somehow, I have to make up for that. All of us do. So I’m going to look for him. And if I… when I find him… so help me, I am going to beat the crap out of him for scaring us this way!” She was sobbing noisily now, and when I held out my arms, she flung herself into them.
“Oh Daddy, I was wrong, it all went wrong and it got so fucked up!”
“Don’t use words like that,” I whispered, kissing my girl’s hair. “Not in front of your mother.”
“It’s all right,” said Margaret. “I feel the same way.”
“Unless I find him, Nguyen and the little boy are all we’ve got of Barry. And we’re all they’ve got. But all you can do is call them bad words and… and…”
I patted her back and met my wife’s eyes. She nodded, and I knew we’d be having guests in the house. No, scratch that. We’d be having new family members come to live here. And if my sister’s husband even thought of opening his big fat mouth, I’d shut it for him the way I’d wanted to for the past thirty years.
Stephanie pulled out of my arms and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. I sighed and picked my words. If I said things wrong, I was scared I’d lose her.
“We’ve been in this town for five generations,” I began slowly. “I think our family has enough of a reputation so people will welcome… what did you say her name was?”
“Nguyen,” Margaret whispered. Her eyes were very bright. “I’ll brush up on my French.” She used to teach it before we got married. “And the little boy—our grandson—is Barry, Jr. I can’t imagine how that sounds in a Vietnamese accent, can you?”
A tiny woman in those floaty things Vietnamese women wore. A little lady. My son’s wife… or widow. And one of those cute little black-eyed kids, unless he looked like Bear. Family. Just let anyone dare say anything.
“We can put them in Barry’s room,” I stammered. “I suppose.”
“Nguyen can have mine,” said Steffie. “I won’t need it. Oh, Daddy, I was wrong about so many things. But I was right about you after all.”
She kissed me, then ran upstairs, a whirlwind in a flowered nightgown. I could hear closets and drawers protesting and paper ripping.
“I wish she’d been right about all of them,” I told Margaret. She took my hand.
“I’m going with Stephanie to pick up… Nguyen,” my wife informed me.
It would get easier, I sensed, for both of us to think of her and the boy as family once we met them. My son’s wife. My son’s son. This wasn’t how I’d thought that would be.
In a few minutes, once the shock wore off, I supposed I’d get to see the pictures. I knew there had to be pictures. But you don’t live with a woman for this many years without knowing when she has more to say. And having a pretty good idea of what it is—most of the time.
This time, though, my guess was right. “Joe, I want you to come with us to Washington so we can all meet as a family. Nguyen must be terrified. She’s lost everything and, and everyone.”
Her voice trembled, but she forced it to calm. “It would mean a lot to her. Steff says the Vietnamese are Confucian. If the head of our family were there to greet her, she’d know she was welcome, she and the little one.”
A smile flickered across her face. “I wonder where we can get a crib,” she mused. “All our friends’ children are grown and haven’t started having babies yet. We’ll be the first to have a grandchild.”
I bent over and hugged her. “Did you make a third plane reservation?”
She smiled at me. “What do you think?”
“I’LL CARRY YOUR SUITCASE downstairs for you, baby,” I told my daughter.
“Oh, Dad, you know I’ll have to lug my own stuff once I go overseas…”
“As long as you’re in my house, young lady—”
“It’s on my bed.” I went into her room to get it. She’d taken a cheap plaid fabric thing, not one of the good, big Samsonite cases she’d gotten for high school graduation. Her room wasn’t just clean: it was sterile. She’d even torn down her posters and hung the crewelwork back up. I wondered what this strange new daughter-in-law of mine would make of the pretty blue and lilac room.
My foot sent something spinning and rolling. I bent to retrieve the thing, which promptly jagged my finger. One of Stephanie’s protest buttons, hurled away as if in despair, poor girl. “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” it asked.
Suppose they did? It had never happened yet.
Suppose, instead, they gave a peace? That hadn’t worked, either.
But I can always hope, can’t I?
After all, I have a grandson to look out for.
ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS
Larry Niven
Larry Niven established his credentials as a provocative writer of hard science fiction with his Nebula Award–winning novel Ringworld, about an artificial ring-shaped planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that poses unusual technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants. The novel, and its sequels Ringworld Engineers and The Ringworld Throne, are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future history of interstellar space that has accommodated a wide variety of themes including alien culture, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, teleportation, and exotic alien cultures in such novels as The World of Ptavvs and A Gift from Earth, and the short-fiction collections Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, and Tales of Known Space. Between 1988 and 1991 the series spun off a quartet of shared-world anthologies, The Man-Kzin Wars, concerned with human and extraterrestrial conflict. Niven’s collaborations extend to novel-length works of fiction and include The Mote in God’s Eye, Inferno, Oath of Fealty, and Lucifer’s Hammer, all co-authored with Jerry Pournelle, and the Dream Park series, written with Steve Barnes. Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive concepts of magic, including The Magic Goes Away and the collection Time of the Warlock. A representative sampling of his short fiction and nonfiction can be found in N-Space.