Afterparties Read online

  Dedication

  For everyone who underestimated me, including myself.

  Oh, and Alex, my love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts

  Superking Son Scores Again

  Maly, Maly, Maly

  The Shop

  The Monks

  We Would’ve Been Princes!

  Human Development

  Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly

  Generational Differences

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts

  The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the streetlamp is broken, and California Delta mist obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow. “Isn’t it a bit early for an apple fritter?” the owner’s twelve-year-old daughter, Kayley, deadpans from behind the counter, and Tevy, four years older, rolls her eyes and says to her sister, “You watch too much TV.”

  The man ignores them both, sits down at a booth, and proceeds to stare out the window, at the busted potential of this small city’s downtown. Kayley studies the man’s reflection in the window. He’s older but not old, younger than her parents, and his wiry mustache seems misplaced, from a different decade. His face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions that only adults must feel, like plaintive, say, or wretched. His light-gray suit is disheveled, his tie undone.

  An hour passes. Kayley whispers to Tevy, “It looks like he’s just staring at his own face,” to which Tevy says, “I’m trying to study.”

  The man finally leaves. His apple fritter remains untouched on the table.

  “What a trip,” Kayley says. “Wonder if he’s Cambodian.”

  “Not every Asian person in this city is Cambodian,” Tevy says.

  Approaching the empty booth, Kayley examines the apple fritter more closely. “Why would you come in here, sit for an hour, and not eat?”

  Tevy stays focused on the open book resting on the laminate countertop.

  Their mom walks in from the kitchen, holding a tray of glazed donuts. She is the owner, though she isn’t named Chuck—her name is Sothy—and she’s never met a Chuck in her life; she simply thought the name was American enough to draw customers. She slides the tray into a cooling rack, then scans the room to make sure her daughters have not let another homeless man inside.

  “How can the streetlamp be out?” Sothy exclaims. “Again!” She approaches the windows and tries to look outside but sees mostly her own reflection—stubby limbs sprouting from a grease-stained apron, a plump face topped by a cheap hairnet. This is a needlessly harsh view of herself, but Sothy’s perception of the world becomes distorted when she stays in the kitchen too long, kneading dough until time itself seems measured in the number of donuts produced. “We will lose customers if this keeps happening.”

  “It’s fine,” Tevy says, not looking up from her book. “A customer just came in.”

  “Yeah, this weird man sat here for, like, an hour,” Kayley says.

  “How many donuts did he buy?” Sothy asks.

  “Just that,” Kayley says, pointing at the apple fritter still sitting on the table.

  Sothy sighs. “Tevy, call PG&E.”

  Tevy looks up from her book. “They aren’t gonna answer.”

  “Leave a message,” Sothy says, glaring at her older daughter.

  “I bet we can resell this apple fritter,” Kayley says. “I swear, he didn’t touch it. I watched him the whole time.”

  “Kayley, don’t stare at customers,” Sothy says, before returning to the kitchen, where she starts prepping more dough, wondering yet again how practical it is to drag her daughters here every night. Maybe Chuck’s Donuts should be open during normal times only, not for twenty-four hours each day, and maybe her daughters should go live with their father, at least some of the time, even if he can hardly be trusted after what he pulled.

  She contemplates her hands, the skin discolored and rough, at once wrinkled and sinewy. They are the hands of her mother, who fried homemade cha quai in the markets of Battambang until she grew old and tired and the markets disappeared and her hands went from twisting dough to picking rice in order to serve the Communist ideals of a genocidal regime. How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.

  WEEKS AGO, Sothy’s only nighttime employee quit. Tired, he said, of her limited kitchen, of his warped sleeping schedule, of how his dreams had slipped into a deranged place. And so a deal was struck for the summer: Sothy would refrain from hiring a new employee until September, and Tevy and Kayley would work alongside their mother, with the money saved going directly into their college funds. Inverting their lives, Tevy and Kayley would sleep during the hot, oppressive days, manning the cash register at night.

  Despite some initial indignation, Tevy and Kayley of course agreed. The first two years after it opened—when Kayley was eight, Tevy not yet stricken by teenage resentment, and Sothy still married—Chuck’s Donuts seemed blessed with good business. Imagine the downtown streets before the housing crisis, before the city declared bankruptcy and became the foreclosure capital of America. Imagine Chuck’s Donuts surrounded by bustling bars and restaurants and a new IMAX movie theater, all filled with people still in denial about their impossible mortgages. Consider Tevy and Kayley at Chuck’s Donuts after school each day—how they developed inside jokes with their mother, how they sold donuts so fast they felt like athletes, and how they looked out the store windows and saw a whirl of energy circling them.

  Now consider how, in the wake of learning about their father’s second family, in the next town over, Tevy and Kayley cling to their memories of Chuck’s Donuts. Even with the recession wiping out almost every downtown business, and driving away their nighttime customers, save for the odd worn-out worker from the nearby hospital, consider these summer nights, endless under the fluorescent lights, the family’s last pillars of support. Imagine Chuck’s Donuts a mausoleum to their glorious past.

  THE SECOND NIGHT THE MAN orders an apple fritter, he sits in the same booth. It is one in the morning, though the streetlamp still emits a dark nothing. He stares out the window all the same, and once more leaves his apple fritter untouched. Three days have passed since his first visit. Kayley crouches down, hiding behind the counter, as she watches the man through the donut display case. He wears a medium-gray suit, she notes, instead of the light-gray one, and his hair seems greasier.

  “Isn’t it weird that his hair is greasier than last time even though it’s earlier in the night?” she asks Tevy, to which Tevy, deep in her book, answers, “That’s a false causality, to assume that his hair grease is a direct result of time passing.”

  And Kayley responds, “Well, doesn’t your hair get greasier throughout the day?”

  And Tevy says, “You can’t assume that all hair gets greasy. Like, we know your hair gets gross in the summer.”

  And Sothy, walking in, says, “Her hair wouldn’t be greasy if she washed it.” She wraps her arm around Kayley, pulls her close, and sniffs her head. “You smell bad, oun. How did I raise such a dirty daughter?” she says loudly.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Tevy says, and Sothy whacks her head.

  “Isn’t that a false causality?” Kayley asks. “Assuming I’m like Mom just because I’m her daughter.” She points at her sister’s book. “Whoever
wrote that would be ashamed of you.”

  Tevy closes her book and slams it into Kayley’s side, whereupon Kayley digs her ragged nails into Tevy’s arm, all of which prompts Sothy to grab them both by their wrists as she dresses them down in Khmer. As her mother’s grip tightens around her wrist, Kayley sees, from the corner of her eye, that the man has turned away from the window and is looking directly at them, all three of them “acting like hotheads,” as her father used to say. The man’s face seems flush with disapproval, and, in this moment, she wishes she were invisible.

  Still gripping her daughters’ wrists, Sothy starts pulling them toward the kitchen’s swinging doors. “Help me glaze the donuts!” she commands. “I’m tired of doing everything!”

  “We can’t just leave this man in the seating area,” Kayley protests, through clenched teeth.

  Sothy glances at the man. “He’s fine,” she says. “He’s Khmer.”

  “You don’t need to drag me,” Tevy says, breaking free from her mother’s grip, but it’s too late, and they are in the kitchen, overdosing on the smell of yeast and burning air from the ovens.

  Sothy, Tevy, and Kayley gather around the kitchen island. Trays of freshly fried dough, golden and bare, sit next to a bath of glaze. Sothy picks up a naked donut and dips it into the glaze. When she lifts the donut back into the air, trails of white goo trickle off it.

  Kayley looks at the kitchen doors. “What if this entire time that man hasn’t been staring out the window?” she asks Tevy. “What if he’s been watching us in the reflection?”

  “It’s kind of impossible not to do both at the same time,” Tevy answers, and she dunks two donuts into the glaze, one in each hand.

  “That’s just so creepy,” Kayley says, an exhilaration blooming within her.

  “Get to work,” Sothy snaps.

  Kayley sighs and picks up a donut.

  ANNOYED AS SHE IS by Kayley’s whims, Tevy cannot deny being intrigued by the man as well. Who is he, anyway? Is he so rich he can buy apple fritters only to let them sit uneaten? By his fifth visit, his fifth untouched apple fritter, his fifth decision to sit in the same booth, Tevy finds the man worthy of observation, inquiry, and analysis—a subject she might even write about for her philosophy paper.

  The summer class she’s taking, at the community college next to the abandoned mall, is called “Knowing.” Surely writing about this man, and the questions that arise when confronting him as a philosophical subject, could earn Tevy an A in her class, which would impress college admissions committees next year. Maybe it would even win her a fancy scholarship, allow her to escape this depressed city.

  “Knowing” initially caught Tevy’s eye because it didn’t require any prior math classes; the coursework involved only reading, writing a fifteen-page paper, and attending morning lectures, which she could do before going home to sleep in the afternoon. Tevy doesn’t understand most of the texts, but then neither does the professor, she speculates, who looks like a homeless man the community college found on the street. Still, reading Wittgenstein is a compelling enough way to pass the dead hours of the night.

  Tevy’s philosophical interest in the man was sparked when her mother revealed that she knew, from only a glance, that he was Khmer.

  “Like, how can you be sure?” Kayley whispered on the man’s third visit, wrinkling her nose in doubt.

  Sothy finished arranging the donuts in the display case, then glanced at the man and said, “Of course he is Khmer.” And that of course compelled Tevy to raise her head from her book. Of course, her mother’s condescending voice echoed, the words ping-ponging through Tevy’s head, as she stared at the man. Of course, of course.

  Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” Then he’d lament, “How did my kids become so not Khmer?” before bursting into rueful laughter. Other times, she’d eat a piece of dried fish or scratch her scalp or walk with a certain gait, and her father would smile and say, “Now I know you are Khmer.”

  What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway? How does one know what is and is not Khmer? Have most Khmer people always known, deep down, that they’re Khmer? Are there feelings Khmer people experience that others don’t?

  Variations of these questions used to flash through Tevy’s mind whenever her father visited them at Chuck’s Donuts, back before the divorce. Carrying a container of papaya salad, he’d step into the middle of the room, and, ignoring any customers, he’d sniff his papaya salad and shout, “Nothing makes me feel more Khmer than the smell of fish sauce and fried dough!”

  Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can’t be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister. Khmer-ness can manifest as anything, from the color of your cuticles to the particular way your butt goes numb when you sit in a chair too long, and even so, Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer. And now that she’s old enough to disavow her lying cheater of a father, Tevy feels completely detached from what she was apparently born as. Unable to imagine what her father felt as he stood in Chuck’s Donuts sniffing fish sauce, she can only laugh. Even now, when she can no longer stomach seeing him, she laughs when she thinks about her father.

  Tevy carries little guilt about her detachment from her culture. At times, though, she feels overwhelmed, as if her thoughts are coiling through her brain, as if her head will explode. This is what drives her to join Kayley in the pursuit of discovering all there is to know about the man.

  ONE NIGHT, Kayley decides that the man is the spitting image of her father. It’s unreal, she argues. “Just look at him,” she mutters, changing the coffee filters in the industrial brewers. “They have the same chin. Same hair. Same everything.”

  Sothy, placing fresh donuts in the display case, responds, “Be careful with those machines.”

  “Dumbass,” Tevy hisses, refilling the canisters of cream and sugar. “Don’t you think Mom would’ve noticed by now if he looked like Dad?”

  By this point, Sothy, Tevy, and Kayley have grown accustomed to the man’s presence, aware that on any given night he might appear sometime between midnight and four. The daughters whisper about him, half hoping that where he sits is out of earshot, half hoping he’ll overhear them. Kayley speculates about his motives: if he’s a police officer on a stakeout, say, or a criminal on the run. She deliberates over whether he’s a good man or a bad one. Tevy, on the other hand, theorizes about the man’s purpose—if, for example, he feels detached from the world and can center himself only here, in Chuck’s Donuts, around other Khmer people. Both sisters wonder about his life: the kind of women he attracts and has dated; the women he has spurned; whether he has siblings, or kids; whether he looks more like his mother or his father.

  Sothy ignores them. She is tired of thinking about other people, especially these customers from whom she barely profits.

  “Mom, you see what I’m seeing, right?” Kayley says, to no response. “You’re not even listening, are you?”

  “Why should she listen to you?” Tevy snaps.

  Kayley throws her arms up. “You’re just being mean because you think the man is hot,” she retorts. “You basically said so yesterday. You’re like this gross person who thinks her dad is hot, only now you’re taking it out on me. And he looks just like Dad, for your information. I brought a picture to prove it.” She pulls a photograph from her pocket and holds it up with one hand.

  Bright red sears itself onto Tevy’s cheeks. “I did not say that,” she states, and, from across the counter, she tries to snatch the photo from Kayley, only to succeed in knocking an industrial coffee brewer to the ground.

  Hearing metal parts clang on the ground and scatter, Sothy finally turns her attention to her daughte
rs. “What did I tell you, Kayley!” she yells, her entire face tense with anger.

  “Why are you yelling at me? This is her fault!” Kayley gestures wildly toward her sister. Tevy, seeing the opportunity, grabs the photo. “Give that back to me,” Kayley demands. “You don’t even like Dad. You never have.”

  And Tevy says, “Then you’re contradicting yourself, aren’t you?” Her face still burning, she tries to recapture an even, analytical tone. “So which is it? Am I in love with Dad or do I, like, hate him? You are so stupid. I wasn’t saying the man was hot, anyway. I just pointed out that he’s not, like, ugly.”

  “I’m tired of this bullshit,” Kayley responds. “You guys treat me like I’m nothing.”

  Surveying the damage her daughters have caused, Sothy snatches the photograph from Tevy. “Clean this mess up!” she yells, and then walks out of the seating area, exasperated.

  In the bathroom, Sothy splashes water on her face. She looks at her reflection in the mirror, noticing the bags under her eyes, the wrinkles fracturing her skin, then she looks down at the photo she’s laid next to the faucet. Her ex-husband’s youth taunts her with its boyish charm. She cannot imagine the young man in this image—decked out in his tight polo and acid-washed jeans, high on his newfound citizenship—becoming the father who has infected her daughters with so much anxious energy, and who has abandoned her, middle-aged, with obligations she can barely fulfill alone.

  Stuffing the photo into the pocket of her apron, Sothy gathers her composure. Had she not left her daughters, she would have seen the man get up from the booth, turn to face the two girls, and walk into the hallway that leads to the bathroom. She would not have opened the bathroom door to find this man towering over her with his silent, sulking presence. And she would never have recognized it, the uncanny resemblance to her ex-husband that her youngest daughter has been raving about all night.

  But Sothy does now register the resemblance, along with a sudden pain in her gut. The man’s gaze slams into her, like a punch. It beams a focused chaos, a dim malice, and even though the man merely drifts past her, taking her place in the bathroom, Sothy can’t help but think, They’ve come for us.