This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,14
of soup. A younger woman named Miss Zhou is cutting carrots with a daunting efficiency. An older woman, reed thin with heavy-lidded eyes, sits at a corner table making dumplings.
Jocelyn brightens. “Come meet my grandma.” She jogs over to the back and introduces me to the older woman. “Amah, this is Will. He’ll be working with me on all the online stuff that Priya and I were talking about.”
“But I’m happy to help out around the kitchen and up front as well,” I insert. I don’t want it to sound like I’m afraid to get my hands dirty.
Jocelyn’s grandma puts down the wooden dowel she’s using to roll the dough and wipes off her flour-covered hands briskly with a wet rag. “Very nice meeting you,” she says in gently accented English. “You work in restaurant before?”
“No,” I admit.
Her face breaks into a wide, eye-crinkling grin. “That what I think. You too skinny. Do not worry.” She pats me on the arm consolingly. “We fatten you up. You like pot sticker?”
“Sure, they’re great,” I say.
“Be careful,” Jocelyn warns. “You’ll want to marry those dumplings when you’re done.”
When I bite into the finished pot sticker, which is still piping hot, sublimely crispy on the outside and juicy and bursting with flavor on the inside, I can’t say that she’s wrong.
“Holy cow,” I say, so overcome that I talk with my mouth still full. If my mother were here she’d be scandalized by my manners. “Why are people not lining up outside your door to buy these things?”
Jocelyn thinks about it. “I dunno. Most of our orders are take-out, so maybe they’re just not as good when they’ve been sitting in a box for twenty minutes? Or…” Her eyes open in horror. “I know why. Because we don’t actually have pot stickers on the menu. Only boiled dumplings, because that’s faster and easier.”
Then she grins like a maniac. “Good thing there’s an easy fix for that.”
JOCELYN
The back entrance to the A-Plus parking lot is open except for the screen door, so I can tell my dad is in a foul mood before I even see him. “Zenmegaode, ludo dou mai?” he mutters as he unloads the boxes of produce from our van. When I look over at Will he’s got a little crease between his eyes. There’s no way he can know that my dad is complaining about our supplier’s lack of green beans, but I’m pretty sure it took him about a millisecond to peg my dad for a grouch.
The screen door screams as my dad pushes it open using his elbow, and he unloads two boxes with a groan and a “zhong si.” He’s panting with his hands on his hips, his back turned to us, when I decide to rip the Band-Aid off.
I give Will a smile that is probably more than a little apologetic. He’s going to have to meet my father eventually; might as well know what he’s getting into from the start.
“Hey, Dad. This is Will. Our new employee.”
WILL
When Jocelyn introduces me to her father, I freeze immediately, because that’s what I do when I’m introduced to new people out of the blue. Dr. Rifkin says it’s a survival tactic that allows me to observe the stranger, put on a neutral expression, and let the other person speak to me first, so as to set the ground rules of our interaction.
Mr. Wu eyes me up and down. He’s wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that’s now patchy with sweat, and I feel like a tool in my button-down.
After what seems like an eternity, he asks, without any preamble, “What your GPA?”
I blink and answer automatically, because that’s what I do with adults. “4.35.”
Mr. Wu squints at me. “How you get GPA more than 4.0?” he asks suspiciously. “What kind of school you go to?”
“I go to St. Agnes, sir. You can get above a 4.0 if you’re taking AP classes.”
Jocelyn’s dad sniffs and nods as begrudging a nod as I’ve ever seen. His eyes are a dark brown, kind of like his daughter’s, but they lack the openness that hers have. “You ever be arrested?” Mr. Wu continues in his interrogation. “Do drugs? I have friend at police station, I can check.”
The outright aggression of his question (nothing micro about that one) leaves me speechless. Thankfully, Jocelyn has my back. “Dad!” she hisses. “Of course not. I asked about that stuff on the application. He got the Citizenship Award last year for crying out loud.”