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He wanted Vivian to understand. This wasn’t just about why his job was important, but also about who he was.
“Did you know that the inspector general for the state of Illinois at the time, a man named Dan Bauer, removed a briefcase full of cash and campaign fundraising receipts during a raid of a driver’s license agency? He eventually pled guilty to obstruction of justice, but the raid happened almost a full year before the Willis children were killed. It was too late to save my family, but someone might have noticed in time to save the Willis children.” Bauer had had a responsibility to those children—and everyone who drove on Illinois highways—and he’d failed on the job. His failures had cost lives.
Karl didn’t notice Vivian had stood up until she returned with his coffee cup, full and steaming. “Thank you,” he said.
They sat in silence for a while, the clock flashing on the coffeemaker in the kitchen, marking the time they were in each other’s company. His anger cooled. Enjoying her company was too active a phrase for how he felt right now.
Content. He was content to have her in his apartment, even though they were in the living room and not in his bed. Content to feel her presence across the coffee table and know she would still smell faintly of jasmine if he sat next to her and gathered her into his arms.
If he was actively anything, he was being actively foolish for feeling this way while still not knowing her secrets.
She owed him an answer—a real one—to at least one of his questions. Karl picked something easy. “So, if—what was the phrase you used?—‘the last name and most of the blood’s Chinese,’ how did you end up in some town in the middle-of-nowhere Nevada for high school?”
The moment she smiled at him, he knew it was a stupid question. Blame it on the decaf, the late hours, or the woman. He was smart enough to know immigrants lived everywhere in the United States, not just in big cities and ethnic communities like Chinatowns—or Archer Heights, where he had grown up, for that matter.
“You’re making the same mistake most people make, assuming that someone with Chinese heritage has parents who came in the 1970s and studied engineering. The first Yaps came to the United States in 1852, to mine for gold.”
Ah, his question had been even dumber than he’d realized.
“When the Yap men had enough money, they brought over women from China to be their wives. In times of poor fortune, or during the times immigration from China was banned, they married within the United States, if they could find a Chinese wife. In 1910, a Yap ended up in Idaho to fight the great wildfire and found love, but not with a Chinese woman. Because she was white, and intermarriages were illegal, I don’t think he married the Sicilian woman he took to Nevada with him. But my dad remembers his grandmother’s strange Sicilian-Chinese stir-fry. I have a Mexican grandmother, too, also on my dad’s side. They were able to marry because my grandfather argued Mexican wasn’t Caucasian.”
She smiled at him as if he was a child being taught a lesson, and he deserved it. He’d learned in history classes about the Chinese workers on the railroads and the Chinese Exclusion Act; he’d just never come face-to-face with the actual history of it.
“The Yaps may have been in the United States longer than the Mileks,” she said.
He chuckled. “The Mileks, yes, but please try not to compare notes with my mother, lest you get the great history of the Poles in the United States from her. It’s much like the lecture you just gave me, only hers starts with Casimir Pulaski and the Revolutionary War. She conveniently forgets that Casimir Pulaski had no children and the only evidence of relation is a coincidence of dates, locations and last names.”
“They say men marry women like their mothers.”
This time his laugh was full and hearty, all residual anger gone in the enjoyment of being teased by a beautiful woman. “Next time my mother asks why I married you, I’ll be sure to tell her that you remind me of her.”
“Just what every mother and daughter-in-law wants to hear.”
He lifted his hands in mock innocence. “Don’t blame me. You said it first.”
Vivian’s mouth opened to respond, but whatever she was going to say ended in a great yawn, which she tried to cover with her hands.
