Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [63]
The boy waiting at his side tugged at his trouser leg and began to cry too. He patted his head soothingly, still watching the girl.
“I would rather be your friend,” she sighed.
He considered the matter carefully, aware that her eyes never left his face. “It will be very difficult,” he said finally.
“Nothing can be more difficult than what I have already suffered.”
Her voice rang with bitterness and Lai Tsin nodded. “Then let us go,” he said, shouldering his straw pannier and taking the boy by the hand.
She scrambled to her feet and fell in step beside him, and somehow he knew that if he had said “We shall walk to the ends of the earth together,” she would have gone with him. It was their fate.
After a mile or so he stopped to buy food at a makeshift roadside stall, taking money from the secret pocket under his smock to pay for it. He handed over fifteen cents, carefully replacing the few notes left and then he carried the hot soup and slabs of buttered bread to where she was sitting on a clump of fallen stones. The boy was on her lap and he had his arms around her neck. The gods had performed a miracle. She was smiling.
“Eat,” Lai Tsin said, pressing the tin mug into her hand. “You must get strong.”
He watched as she sipped the soup, closing her eyes and savoring it, thinking worriedly of the five dollars left in his pocket. It was all he had in the world. His precious book from the Chinese credit showed one hundred and three dollars and twenty cents in his name, but the money must surely have burned with the rest of San Francisco. He sighed. He had won that money gambling at mah-jongg; it was all he had from his past and it was to have been his stake in the future. It was very bad joss, but still, he was alive and unharmed.
There was a new pink glow to her cheeks as they walked on, her step was firmer and she took the child’s hand, smiling down at him as he trotted to keep up. People turned to stare angrily after them and Lai Tsin knew they did not approve of the Western woman with the Chinese man. He realized they would not accept them together at the refugee camps in the park and he kept his eyes open for a shelter. They passed another stall by the road selling small canvas tents. “How much?” he asked. The man looked at him consideringly. “Ten bucks to Celestials,” he said contemptuously, “and cheap at that price.”
Lai Tsin turned away, aware of the man’s angry speculative eyes following them as they walked down the road. It was getting dark and he knew he must find shelter soon. His eyes darted this way and that as they marched on. The boy grew tired and he picked him up. Just as darkness fell he saw the place. It was all that was left of a row of artisans’ cottages and it had been sliced down the middle as cleanly as if by a knife. The walls of the upper rooms had fallen in but downstairs looked intact. The door was gone and he walked in and looked around. Checkered gingham curtains flapped at the glassless window and a wooden table with bulbous legs lay half-buried beneath a layer of grit. There was a black horsehair sofa in front of the fire grate and a heavy oak dresser stood upright with a row of dusty plates that had somehow survived unbroken. He inspected the ceiling carefully; there were a few big cracks but it seemed safe enough. It would do for the night.
He righted the sofa and brushed it off and said, “Please to sit down, lady.”
Francie sank down thankfully and he lay the tired little boy beside her. He looked at her and said nervously, “Lady, I am Chinese. I enter America with no papers. I make a small living by gambling. I have no past, lady, and no future. Only today. It is the way I have always been forced to live, and my family before me. I can offer you nothing.”
Francie thought carefully about what he had said and realized they were alike. She nodded. “Then we are lucky, you and I. The earthquake has buried my past and taken my future. I, too, have only