The Year of the Crocodile Read Free Page B

of the bakery. “You forgot your custom cake order form.” She says those last four words so swiftly that they run together, like she’s so used to saying them that they’ve blurred into one word, no pauses. “I need a custom cake order form before I can talk to you.”
    I blink at her. “Are you fucking serious? You know who I am.”
    She rolls her eyes, then drops her voice in imitation of me. “‘You know who I am.’ Yes, I know who you are. Doesn’t matter. Corporate policy is that we need a written custom cake order form first, then you can give specific direction. You of all people should understand corporate policy.”
    I exhale. “Look. Hong Mei. This isn’t how I wanted us to meet, either. But I wanted to talk about Blake and Tina—”
    â€œSome of us still have to work. We can’t drop everything just because a big, important man wants to have a conversation in the middle of our jobs. You want to talk to me? I didn’t realize buying a cake was such a problem.”
    â€œCome the fuck on.”
    She tilts her head toward the order forms, and…
    And fuck it, why the fuck do I care if I have to buy a fucking cake? If Tina’s mother wants the damned form, she can have the damned form. I retreat to the front, fetch an over-xeroxed sheet, and chase a worn pencil nub out of the plastic tray that holds the papers.
    There are too many choices. What the fuck is the difference between a sheet cake and a round cake? Isn’t a cupcake cake a contradiction in terms? What in all the levels of hell is But-R-Créme , and whose bright idea was it to make “butter cream” sound more disgusting than it already does? I check boxes at random. In the space for “additional instructions,” I write, “We should probably have an actual conversation about our fucking kids.” As an afterthought—I can be polite on rare occasion—I add, “please.”
    I hand this over to her. She frowns at it, then leaves, returning with a square cake frosted in white. “Is this one acceptable to you? I know you’re very, very important, so I want to make sure.”
    â€œIt’s fine.” I do my best to ignore her pointed jabs. “So. Blake and Tina are down for the lunar New Year.”
    She looks over her tools and selects one without so much as a glance at me. “I know this already, because they are staying in my home.”
    I don’t grimace. “Blake told me he wanted us to meet. Tina has been…less excited about the prospect.”
    â€œHow could that be?” Hong Mei shrugs. “I tell her I would love to talk to you all the time. I have so many questions.”
    She loads a cartridge into the back of the silver whats-its-fuck thing she is holding and begins to airbrush parallel lines in peach onto the cake.
    So many questions? Yeah. I’m fucked.
    â€œFor instance,” she says. “Blake said you were in Hangzhou last week.”
    Oh, for fuck’s sake. When I said I was a giant blindspot for Blake, I wasn’t kidding. This bright-eyed bushy-tailed love shit on his part is officially a goddamned liability. Blake literally can’t figure out that people might not like me. He definitely can’t realize that they might have legitimate fucking reasons. While that’s a really fucking flattering way for my kid to think about me, it’s also extremely inconvenient. He has no idea what he has been doing.
    â€œGreat,” I say. “Are we talking about that?”
    â€œI like making conversation.” She gives me a diamond-edged smile that could cut glass. “Get to know you, a little small talk. I’m being polite. I have to decorate an entire cake. You should keep me company.”
    She tops off her parallel lines. I have no idea what she’s drawing. Maybe the beginning of a tree? Maybe the Washington monument? In peach?
    Fine. If we’re going to