The fourth watcher

follow the spoon, and Rose realizes she might just have committed a tactical error, so she licks the spoon and hands it back, trying not to make a face at the mixture of flavors. She dips her own spoon into her scoop of coconut sherbet and holds it out. Miaow examines it as though it might contain tiny frogs, then opens her mouth. Rose feeds her, and as she tilts the spoon up, the thought breaks over her: My baby. “Miaow,” she says without thinking. “Do you know how much I love you?”

Miaow looks up at her, her mouth a perfect O. She has chocolate on her upper lip. “You. .” she says. Then she looks away, staring at the Silom sidewalk through the window. A very fat woman, weighed down further with half a dozen plastic shopping bags, hauls herself past the window, and Miaow’s eyes follow her as though someone has told her she is seeing her own future. Then, without turning back to Rose, she says, “I know.”

Having finally managed to insert the thin edge of the wedge, Rose leans down on it. “And Poke. You know that Poke loves you more than anyone in the world.”

“Love you number one,” Miaow says, still in English. “But that’s okay.”

“Look at this,” Rose says, holding up the hand with the ring on it. “This is Poke,” she says, touching the ruby. Her fingernail moves to the tiny sapphire. “This is me.” She taps the surface of the topaz. “This one, in the middle. Who do you think this is? Who do you think this is, right next to Poke?”

Miaow says, “Oh.” Her chin develops a sudden pattern of tiny dimples, but she masters it. She puts down the spoon. When she looks from the ring to Rose again, she is back in control. “Why am I yellow?”

“Tomorrow you’ll be a sapphire, same as me, because we have the same happybirthday. But you’ll still be in the middle.”

Miaow processes this for a long moment. Then she asks, “Why?”

“Because you’re the center of our lives.” Rose passes her finger along the three stones. “This is us, Miaow. Do you know how old jewels are? Jewels last forever. This is Poke’s way of saying he wants us to be together forever.”

Miaow stares at the ring. Rose sees her mouth silently form the words: One, two, three. Then Miaow says, “Okay.” She picks up the bowl, lifts it to her lips, and drains it. The moment she puts the bowl down, she says, “Can I have a cell phone?”

Ninety minutes and three cell-phone shops later, Rose has heard approximately ten thousand words from Miaow on cell phones in general, how they can play music, how great the games are, how much safer she’ll be with one, and-above all-an encyclopedic disquisition on text messages: They’re cool, they’re cheap, and all her friends send them all the time. Rose’s comment that she thought Miaow’s friends spent at least some of their time at school didn’t create a pause long enough to slip a comma into. Now, as Miaow works her thumbs on the touch pad of her new phone, so fast that Rose can’t see them move, Rose fishes through her bag and realizes she left her own phone at home. She borrows Miaow’s, after waiting until the child finishes keying in the third act of Macbeth or whatever it is, and dials Rafferty’s number. His phone, Rose learns, is not in service, which means he has turned it off. She hands the phone back to Miaow, who immediately polishes it on her T-shirt.

“I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”

“Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”

Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”

“They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”

“Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”

“Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”

Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.

“Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.

“You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”

“He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.

It is almost seven by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.

But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.

This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.

“That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That-that American-”

Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.

“It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.

And stares down into it, still as stone.

Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”

16

I Don’t Know What “Usual” Means to You

'She’s your sister,” Frank says. “Say hello, Ming Li.” From beside Frank, Ming Li says, deadpan, “Hello,

Ming Li.” She sounds as if she finds nothing out of the ordinary, as if meeting her half brother for the first time in an abandoned garage, after she’s had someone cave his head in and he’s tried to assault their father, is nothing to get ruffled about.

Rafferty is pinned to the chair again, his hands cuffed behind him. His launch toward his father had been aborted by Leung’s hand grabbing his shirt. He’d belly flopped on the cement floor, gasping for breath with the chair flat on its back behind him, as the Chinese man snapped the cuffs back on, set the chair upright, and plopped Rafferty into it as though he were no heavier than a puppy. Leung is a lot faster than Rafferty.

“I should have known,” Rafferty says. He’s so angry at himself he feels like spitting in his own lap. “She looks as much like you as it’s possible for a beautiful Asian woman to look.”

“Looks like you, too,” Frank says. “It’s the bone structure.” He is sitting in a chair about a yard away from Rafferty, his face haloed by a fringe of white hair. Ming Li stands beside him, a pale hand resting on his