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Vivian wondered if Karl would manage to be so patient with a four-year-old who had made a drum set out of pots and pans.
All told, Karl was probably only home for forty-five minutes between the gym and work. But it was forty-five minutes during which Vivian wasn’t reliant on a bird for conversation—a bird who’d learned to speak from a gambler. And it was forty-five minutes when Vivian wasn’t facing the mess of her life alone. They had also arranged what time he would be home, even if he had to bring work home with him.
When the door shut behind him, Vivian didn’t get out her shoes for another contemplative walk around Chicago. She decided that those walks had stopped being introspective and had become brooding. Instead, she got out the laptop, but not for another round of résumé edits and job applications. Vivian opened up her email and faced the messages from her friends. She’d let them sit unread for too long.
They all knew why she’d been fired, but none of them knew the real reason she’d fled Las Vegas so quickly. She’d let her fear and her humiliation over the situation she’d found herself in stop her from letting them know she was okay.
Maybe Karl was the only support she had in Chicago, but he wasn’t the only person she knew. Her friends could be supportive from Las Vegas, if she let them.
She didn’t tell them all the details of her past couple weeks, but gave them a brief outline of where she was staying and that she was looking for work. She told her two closest friends about the pregnancy and trusted them to share the news—or not—with the others.
That hurdle jumped, Vivian opened another browser window and began the process of looking for her aunt. It felt wrong to hope Aunt Kitty had never married, so Vivian just hoped her aunt hadn’t changed her name. The public librarian who answered Vivian’s first call of the day suggested a few databases that might help her track down her aunt, including finding out if she might have gotten married.
Providence was on her side. The first database Vivian tried came up with one Katherine Chin in Reno. The clock showed it was noon there, which meant she couldn’t use the time as an excuse not to call. She took a deep breath and dialed.
“Hello.” The voice that answered rang some distant memory in Vivian’s mind.
“Is Kitty Chin available?” Maybe this wasn’t the right Katherine.
“Yes?”
Xìnyùn whistled, but Vivian didn’t believe in luck. “Did you have a sister named Tina, who married a Victor Yap?”
“Who is this?” The woman’s voice wasn’t suspicious, more just full of wonder.
“Aunt Kitty, this is Vivian.”
Silence reverberated through the line. Vivian’s heart bounced up in her throat. Finally her aunt said, “My sister’s Vivian?”
Vivian swallowed, but her heart still didn’t leave her throat. She scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her palm. “Yes.”
“My darling child.”
“I’m—” Vivian’s voice stopped and she had to suck her breath in to say the rest of her sentence. “I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier.” Because she was. For all those years when her address had changed with regular irregularity, staying in contact with her aunt had been beyond her young knowledge. But when she was an adult in Las Vegas with the same apartment for years—Vivian really had no excuse for not tracking down her aunt over the past sixteen years.
“Where…where are you?” The amazement in her aunt’s voice slowed her speech down such that Vivian heard the cadence of her childhood in each syllable.
“I’m in Chicago. I’m married. I’m going to have a baby in seven months.” How do you sum up the past thirty years in one phone conversation? “I want my baby to know my family.” She wanted to know her family. She and her father had been a unit until Vivian had left home. Now she only saw her father when he needed money. Jelly Bean would grow up knowing generations of Mileks and eating pierogies, but the child should know her mother had family, too.
“And your father?”
“He’s…” Vivian didn’t know what to say. “He’s fine.”
