Wheeler had grown up knowing that his mother was damned to hell. Then again, most women were going to hell. His father made him realize that. Most women were wicked. All they wanted was sex. All they wanted was to feed that unquenchable fire between their legs. Like animals, they were, slaves to the lusts of their bodies.
Wheeler had not seen a photograph of his mother until after his father's death, and when he finally did see what she looked like, he was surprised to discover that she did not resemble the evil temptress he had imagined at all. He'd always thought she would look like a vamp, one of those pouty, slutty women who hung around outside the bars on Seventh Street, a painted lady with enormous breasts and tight dresses that outlined the curves of her slatternly body. But instead, she looked like a mousy librarian, a plain, average, slightly underweight woman of approximately middle age.
He'd burned the photograph after he'd looked at it, throwing it into the fireplace along with a rubber-banded stack of old letters he'd found in his father's dresser.
You could never tell. That was one thing his father had taught him.
You could never tell what lay beneath appearances, what hid behind people's outer masks, what they were really like inside. That was something only God could see.
But Wheeler had found out later that he could tell, that he could somehow see behind the mask and into a person's soul, that he could see through the facade to the truth beneath. It was a gift God had given him, a reward for his achievement in spreading the word of the Lord.
And now Jesus had seen fit to visit him personally. There was a new day coming.
Wheeler looked again at the church, then at Davis next to him. The restoration coordinator was one of those false Christians, all piety and obsequiousness on the outside, all bleeding heart humanist on the inside. Wheeler smiled to himself, felt warmed. The man would soon find out on which side his bread was buttered.
Davis finished making calculations in a small handheld notebook and looked up. "The earliest we can have it moved is next Friday," he said.
Wheeler nodded. "That will be fine," he said, smiling. He continued to nod. "Next Friday will be fine."
The restaurant was closed on Monday. Even workaholics like her parents needed a day of rest, a day to themselves, and since they couldn't very well take off on Saturday or Sunday the two busiest days of the weekD they closed the restaurant on Monday, taking their weekend a day late and a day short.
This was the day Sue allowed herself to sleep in.
She lay in bed now, curled on her side, staring at the bottom right corner of the framed Sargent print on the wall. John was already up, getting ready for school. She could hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Farther off, in the kitchen, she heard the rattling of pots and the rhythmic staccato sound of her mother's attempts to sing along with a commercial on the radio.
Usually, she liked to stay in bed for a while after she awoke, enjoying that peaceful transition between sleep and wakefulness, her mind thinking clearly and without distraction while her body still enjoyed the comforts of slumber. But today she felt restless, constitutionally unable to remain inert beneath the covers. She sat up and stretched.
Sue glanced around her room, at the Impressionist prints on the walls, at the carved antique dresser, at the small nightstand covered with lace. More than anything else, her room symbolized the difference between herself and the rest of her family. She had decorated the room according to her own independently acquired aesthetic standards, with ideas obtained from books, taste molded by movies. The rest of the house was filled with gaudy throw rugs and pillows, fake jade carvings and tacky Buddha figurines, the cheap bastardizations of Chinese culture sold in curio shops and originally meant for American tourists but embraced wholeheartedly by her parents.
Her room was different.
If there was anything to reincarnation, she thought, she'd been a Victorian Englishwoman in a previous life.
Getting out of bed, she walked across the room to her closet. She did not know what she was going to do today. It seemed to her that she had had something planned--at least it felt that wayMbut she could not for the life of her remember what it was.
She took her robe from its hook inside the closet door and put it on.
Her parents usually used this day to shop for supplies, to work around the house. Sue read, watched TV, or did her own shopping, although she invariably felt guilty that she was not doing something more productive. In the two years she'd been out of school, she had still not adjusted to the fact that her free time was truly free, that there was no homework hanging over her head, no assignments or projects due.
She kept wanting to work on something, and she'd considered trying to write, trying to paint, trying to do something creative, but instead she'd let herself become lazy, doing nothing with her days except hanging out.
Was this what life was like for most people? Drifting, merely existing? It all seemed so pointless and purposeless. She'd worked so hard to do well in school, to learn, to get good grades, and where had it gotten her?
In Cantonese, her mother yelled for John to come to breakfast.
Sue, too, headed down the hall toward the kitchen, bumping into her brother along the way.
"Watch it, retard," he said, bumping her with his hip in return.
"Die," she told him.
They walked into the dining room. Three bowls were already set on the table. Her mother, who had obviously assumed that Sue would sleep in today, was surprised to see her but hurriedly returned to the kitchen and brought out another bowl.
"What about Grandmother?" Sue asked in CantOnese. "Isn't she eating?"
"She is not feeling well," her mother said as she placed the bowl on the table She did not elaborate but returned immediately to the kitchen. That worried Sue. Usually, if her grandmother was ill, her mother would describe in detail the predse nature of her malady, whether it be toh se or tao tung. Her mother's silence made Sue feel uneasy, and she could not help thinking of what her grandmother had muttered last night before settling painfully into bed. Wai.
Badness.
She had not been sure at the time whether her grand mother meant sickness or evil, and she had not asked. She had not wanted to know.
But she had a suspicion that her grandmother was not referring to physical illness. For the past few days, ever since the mechanic had been found in the arroyo, her grandmother had seemed worried and preoccupied, had spent more time than usual in her room, and when she'd spoken to the family at all, her conversation had been peppered with thinly veiled hints of signs and omens. While Sue often scoffed at the super stitiousness of the old woman, she was also more than a little afraid of what her grandmother called D/ Lo Ling Gum, the sixth sense.
She had never been able to satisfactorily explain to herself how her grandmother was able to tell when it was going to rain when even the weathermen did not know, or how she could predict with amazing accuracy the deaths of relatives who lived far away. She liked even less her grandmother's references to spirits and tse mog, demons, She remained standing as John sat down. Her father was already sitting at the head of the table but he had not yet spoken, and neither she nor John dared address him. He was not a morning person, and though he always awoke early, he seldom spoke before breakfast and never before his first cup of tea. He preferred to sit in undisturbed silence and listen to the news on the radio or, on Thursday, read the newspaper.
Looking at him now, at the way he stared crossly at nothing, she wondered if he even spoke to her mother before breakfast, or if the two of them simply woke up when the alarm went off, got out of bed silently, and got dressed without speaking.
It was a depressing thought, and she pushed it out of her mind.