The Misfortune Cookie

least used to be able to find my way around.”

We rounded another corner—and were surprised to bump into Lily Yee. Per her daughter’s comment, she appeared to be taking inventory. Dressed in dark slacks and a pretty red blouse, with her black hair in a heavy bun at her nape again, she was carrying a clipboard and wearing a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose.

“John!” she said in surprise. “Ted didn’t mention you were coming.” Then she recognized his companions. “Hello, again! Max, how nice to see you.”

“Hello, Lily.” Max executed a gentlemanly little bow and beamed at her. “I’m pleased to see you looking so well.”

“Oh, nonsense,” she said with a smile. “I look a mess!”

It would take at least thirty minutes of makeup and hairstyling for me to look that much a “mess,” so I said nothing.

“Are you looking for Ted, er . . .” She said to me, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“This is Esther Diamond,” said John. “She’s taken over the role of Alicia in Ted’s film.”

“What? Oh.” Her face fell. “Oh. I thought . . .” She sighed. “Well, never mind.”

I recalled that, at Benny’s wake, she had seemed to assume that Ted planned to meet me for a date, not an audition. Wishful thinking, but I could understand it. What hardworking widow with an unemployable grown son wouldn’t hope to palm him off on another woman?

“You must be the actress who Ted said would be here tonight to try on some dresses,” she said to me.

“Yes, but we’re having trouble finding him.”

“This place can be a bit of a maze,” she said with a smile. “Come with me.”

“Oh, good,” I said to John. “We have an intrepid guide to take us upriver.”

As I expected—since it was her place, after all—she led us unerringly to Ted, who was in a section of the store devoted to cheongsams, kimonos, and other clothing.

Ted, who was talking on his cell, waved to us and started wrapping up his call. “Well, I’m glad you won’t need a second surgery on the leg. And I’ll be in touch about a date to film in the apartment.”

After he got off the phone, he greeted us all.

Then his mother asked him, “Did you finish unpacking those statues from the new shipment?”

“Huh? Oh, I forgot.”

Lily’s face went very still. A lesser woman, I sensed, would have scowled at him. Speaking evenly, she said, “Ted, I really want those on the floor tomorrow. With the New Year just over a week away—”

“Sure, I’ll get to it, Mom.”

“When?”

“Um . . .”

“And I still need you to clean out that back room, too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And don’t forget to take out the garbage tonight.”

“Okay, Mom, don’t worry.”

“You keep saying that, Ted, but then you don’t—” She looked at the rest of us and evidently decided not to criticize her son here and now. Instead, she said to him, “Please just make sure the things we’ve discussed get done by tomorrow.”

“Right, Mom.” He paused. “Um . . . what were those things again?”

With that look of resigned disappointment which I had seen before on Lily Yee’s face when speaking to her son, she said, “I will write you a list.”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. Ted was feckless, but good-natured.

“Now I shall leave you with your friends and return to working on the inventory.”

“May I assist you?” Max offered.

“Oh, thank you, Max.” She gave him a warm smile. “That is very thoughtful. And I would enjoy your company.”

But although he seemed pleased by her response and he smiled back, I thought his expression seemed a little melancholy. Almost regretful. I wondered if he was thinking of another woman who had lived in another era, someone who had inhabited a world that must have been very different from this one. And I had a feeling he was recognizing in his heart, that organ which is such a slow learner, that despite the resemblance which drew him to her, Lily Yee was not Li Xiuying—whoever she had been.

I said to him, “I guess I’ll send a search party after you when I’m ready to leave.”

Max responded with a distracted nod, still gazing after Lily Yee with that melancholy expression as she turned to lead the way back to another section of her labyrinthine store.

14 Loyalty

After Max and Lily parted company with us, John asked Ted, “Was that Mary on the phone? How is she?”

“They don’t think they’ll have to operate again,” said Ted. “But she’s looking at a long recuperation.”

“Just how bad was the injury?” I asked.

“Bad,” said John. “She slipped going down the stairs of her apartment building. Broke the leg in two places.”

I winced. “What rotten luck.”

“You said it.” Ted nodded. “You never met anyone with worse luck than Mary.”

“It was one thing after another,” said John—which I remembered someone saying at lunch today, too. “First, she got mowed down by a runaway food cart on Broadway.”

“What?” I blurted.

“Such a weird freak accident. Nothing broken, just superficial injuries,” Ted said to me. “But she was so bruised and banged up, I postponed the start of the film for a week. She couldn’t work on-camera in that condition.”

“Then a few days after we started shooting,” said John, “she got this virulent chronic rash. Very uncomfortable. I was afraid the makeup had caused it, even though the rest of the cast was fine.”

“I still don’t see how it could be the makeup, John. The only place you were using it was on her face, which was just about the only place Mary didn’t have that rash.”

“After that, she went into anaphylactic shock one day.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “That could have killed her.”

John asked Ted, “Did they ever figure out what caused it?”

“I don’t know,” said Ted. “I don’t think I’ve asked about it since she broke her leg.”

“Man, it really was one thing after another, wasn’t it?” I said in amazement. “That poor woman.”

“It was like she was cursed,” Ted said.

“Cursed?” I repeated with sudden dread.

“But the surgery on her leg went well and it sounds like she’ll be all right,” he added. “Well, as long as nothing else happens to her for a while.”

I took a breath to steady myself. When Ted said curse, he was just using a figure of speech—a very apt one, given Mary’s run of bad luck. Max had said the death curse would work quickly and couldn’t be mitigated; and, obviously, Mary wasn’t dead. She also didn’t have anything to do with Joe Ning. Or with Benny Yee, apart from being in his nephew’s film.

“Are you all right?” John asked me. “You look a little . . . I don’t know.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I assured him. “Mary’s story is just really upsetting, you know?”