When she pulled away, her eyes looked too wet, and his throat tightened in response. “You, too, princess.”
The door had nearly closed behind him when she caught it and stuck her head through. “Kal?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll be here tomorrow at least. Come see me. If you’re free.”
“You sure?”
“Please.”
He leaned in and kissed her, glad to know it wouldn’t be the last time. She might not be in New York long, but while she was here, he could spend time with her. “I’ll do that.”
He thought about her on the train all the way to Queens.
Chapter 10
Kal’s mother hovered behind his chair. She reached out now and then to rest her hand on his right shoulder, then withdrew it. “Are you hungry?”
“I could handle a salad, maybe.” He had no appetite after the spread at Allie’s, but he wasn’t going to refuse food after she’d hugged him a full three seconds when he walked through the door.
“No salad. Quati, I think. You need protein.” She bustled through the swinging door to the kitchen, where Kal heard her barking orders in rapid-fire Sherpa.
He sat at the staff table beside the kitchen doors. The restaurant was busy, all the tables full and a crowd of customers milling around the entryway waiting for seats to open up. His sister Sangmu was hustling customers into chairs and picking up slack to speed tables along—clearing plates, bringing checks, explaining the cash-only policy to the uninitiated who’d failed to read the notice at the door, on the menu, and posted on no fewer than three wall placards.
Kal had seen his brother Tashi at the grocery earlier, and his other brother, Tenzing, was in the back somewhere working on the produce order, keeping an eye on the youngest, Patricia.
Sangmu looked taller and thinner than when he’d seen her last. He hoped it was just growing up, and not strain from having to bear the weight of Kal’s absence. The next time she approached his table, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“It’s a teacher work day.” She pushed through the doors into the kitchen, throwing “Moron” back over her shoulder.
It was good to be home.
His mother appeared with a steaming bowl of quati and a plate of rice with a lemon wedge. “Here.” She set it down in front of him and resumed her place by his shoulder. “Eat.”
She watched him squeeze lemon over the bowl and shovel the first spoonful of thick, gingery soup into his mouth. Nine kinds of beans, plus greens and spices and whatever else she’d insisted the chef stick in there to restore him to health. He nodded over the bowl. “It’s good today.”
“It’s always good.” She took a proprietary interest in the restaurant, though it didn’t belong to her but to her brother Dorjee, who had the sense to leave it to her machinations. She let Kal eat half the bowl before she sat down across from him and said, “You check your messages?”
He dumped rice into the bowl. “Not yet.”
“I get a lot of calls lately for you.”
Kal nodded, wary of the sharpness that had come into her eyes. His mother never sat down unless there was something she wanted, and she never stood up again until she’d managed to get it.
It took a lot of willpower for an eighty-pound woman to drag herself to the top of Everest seven times. Yangchen Beckett had honed her willpower on her five children. Kal was the oldest, and thus had spent the most time facing the sharp, pointed edge of her blade.
“I got a call yesterday, a man who wants you to write a story for him.”
“I’m no writer.”
“You wrote a master’s thesis. Seventy-six pages long. Never turned it in.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the kind of writing he wants.”
“How do you know if you don’t talk to him?”
Kal rolled his eyes, which made his mother frown. He felt dark and heavy, restless with the urge to escape confrontation, and something else—some glimmer of hope he hadn’t managed to kill yet. It was the same way he’d felt in Kathmandu, when Brian had caught him in the street.