The Year of the Crocodile Read Free Page A

multimillionaire, and someone else was doing my shopping.
    I’ve never needed to go to Wal-Mart. This is my virgin trip.
    Ha. Virginity. Like the ancient fucking Roman empire, all roads bend my thoughts in the direction of…no, not Rome. The analogy breaks down there. Never Rome. It’s more like Carthage. Which must be destroyed.
    Shit.
    I pause a moment in front of a display of Star Wars footed pajamas to digest that wave of bitter nostalgia. You get used to bitterness. It’s a fucking acquired taste, and after a few years, it’s so familiar that it’s almost welcome.
    I concentrate on my surroundings. I’m stuck in the here and now, no matter what I fucking want, so…
    This is the here. This is the now. Southern California. The place of my birth, to be fucking technical, although a Wal-Mart in Alhambra is basically the opposite side of the solar system from the wealthy half of Orange County where I was born.
    I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. If I believed the internet, Wal-Mart would be a haven of guns and beer and rednecks.
    In reality, I’m basically the only white guy I see. Also in reality, fuck the fucking internet. The internet coughs up hairballs on a regular basis. The shit it’s said about me, for instance. Besides, I know the stats our retail chief feeds me. Cyclone products aren’t cheap, and we do a reasonable business with Wal-Mart.
    Unsurprisingly, it’s a regular fucking store. Blue jeans. Giant cardboard tubs of virulently orange goldfish. Cans of pasta sauce. And there’s Star Wars shit everywhere.
    Speaking of my selfish pro-corporate agenda, I spare a moment of disappointment that Star Wars didn’t sell merchandising rights to Disney two decades earlier. This shit fucking rocks. Blake would have been really cute back when he was two in those Wookie pajamas. Now? He’s outgrown them by about four feet.
    But that’s the great circle of merchandising life in a fucking nutshell. The shit you can’t get for your kid, you buy in bulk for your grandkids.
    Big metal shelves and signs advertise every day low prices. I am trying to make logical sense of this. How can they be low if they’re every day? Doesn’t that make them regular? If I’d been the one hearing this pitch, I’d have interrupted and asked, and the ad guy would have ground his teeth, and everyone would have told me to shut up because it was a perfectly fine slogan, good even, listen to the campaign results before judging, Adam…
    Imagining being a pain in the ass to imaginary people is a great fucking mental distraction from bitterness. I make my way to the bakery in back.
    This encounter is going to be interesting.
    I love Blake. He’s usually a smart kid. But…yeah, if he thinks that I’m the only potential problem in meeting Tina’s parents, he hasn’t thought his shit through.
    The bakery counter is bustling when I arrive. A blond woman is in front, arranging cupcakes behind a plastic shield. The woman I’m looking for—I recognize her from photos Tina has shown me on her phone—is off to the side, behind a barrier. Her head is bent, her dark hair gathered in a messy bun and contained in a hair net. She’s looking down, concentrating on a cake. She’s shorter than Tina, but even the act of squeezing frosting out of a tube-thingy has her jaw set in resolute conviction.
    There’s a plastic wall between us, but I tower head and shoulders above it. I am close enough that I could reach out and tap her on the shoulder.
    I don’t. “Hey.” I pitch my voice to reach her ears alone. “Hong Mei.”
    Mrs. Hong Mei Chen looks up. Her eyes meet mine and her gaze narrows.
    Yep. She sure as fuck recognizes me.
    â€œYou.” That word is imbued with a thousand suspicions. “What do you want?”
    â€œA couple minutes,” I say. “I—”
    She jerks her head toward the front