"I would like to meet Mr. Herrera," Lin said in English. "Tomorrow morning. At seven o'clock. At the factory." He paused. "No presentation. No slides. No managers, except you. Just Mr. Herrera and his line." He turned his head toward Fang and said something brief in Mandarin, and then back to Bradley. "Dr. Fang will come with me." And then, after a moment's consideration, he looked down the table at Amara. "And Ms. Adeyemi, if she is willing. Dr. Fang's English is not quite as good as she likes to believe, and Mr. Herrera, I suspect, does not speak Mandarin."
Fang said something sharp under her breath in Mandarin, which Amara did not interpret, and which made Huang Bo cough into his napkin.
"I'd be glad to," Amara said. "I'll need to swap a shift."
"Of course," said Lin. "A hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Two-hour minimum." He did not smile. "I believe those are your terms."
At the edge of the gravel clearing, Teddy Marchetti, who had been standing in the same spot for almost an hour holding Amara's folded apron against his chest, turned quite suddenly and walked away down the lemon-tree path toward the kitchen, very fast, with his head down. He did not come back for some time. When he did, his eyes were red, and he told Kenji that the pollen from the lemon trees was terrible this year, and Kenji, who was nineteen but not stupid, agreed that it was.
* * *
Lunch ended at 2:45.
The delegation left the way Grace's notes had said they would, in a precise order of seniority, with handshakes and the exchange of business cards, each card offered and received with two hands and a slight bow and a moment's careful reading before it was put away. Bradley's people managed it badly. Owen dropped one of his. Marcus held Huang Bo's card in one hand, by the corner, and then realized and quickly took it in both. But Bradley did it correctly, Amara noticed. He had been practicing. He received Fang Lihua's card with both hands and looked at it, really looked at it, front and back, for several seconds, before he put it in his inside pocket. Not the left pocket. The right.
Huang Bo shook Teddy's hand at the end of the lemon trees and told him, through Zhou, that the black cod was the best he had eaten in America and possibly the best he had eaten outside his own mother's kitchen, and that if he ever said this to his mother he would deny it. Teddy received this as though he had been awarded a knighthood.
When the table had emptied, Mei came out of the kitchen with her long dark wooden box under her arm and went down the table collecting her grandmother's chopsticks, pair by pair, from their porcelain fish, wiping each pair gently with a clean cloth and laying it back on the faded red silk.
When she got to Huang Bo's place, she stopped.
On top of his chopsticks, folded neatly, lay a small red paper envelope. Inside it was a crisp new hundred-dollar bill and a note in Mandarin, written in a round, careful, slightly schoolboyish hand on the back of one of his business cards. For the family of the grandmother. Her chopsticks brought us good luck today. With respect, Huang Bo.
Mei stood holding it for a long moment. Then she put it in the pocket of her chef's jacket, closed the box, and went back to the kitchen without saying anything to anyone, which was, Amara knew, the most emotional thing Mei had ever done in public.
Lin Weiguo did not leave with his delegation. He sent them ahead to the cars. Then he turned to Amara, at the end of the Long Table, and said in Mandarin, "Would you walk with me for a few minutes? I'd like to see the fountain."
* * *
The fountain stood in a round clearing at the center of the hall, ringed with tall ferns, under the eucalyptus. It was old, much older than the restaurant, a wide shallow stone basin with moss growing in the joints and along the lip. In the middle of it a thin stream of water ran from a bronze spout into a small upper bowl and spilled over the edge into the main basin with a soft continuous sound. The bronze heron stood in the water on one leg, looking down.
The afternoon light came slanting in from the west wall now, long and gold, and lay across the gravel in bars between the shadows of the iron ribs. A busser was raking the far side of the clearing, slowly, in long straight lines.
Lin stood at the edge of the basin with his hands behind his back and looked at the water for a while without saying anything. Amara stood beside him and waited. She had learned long ago that the people worth listening to were usually the ones who were not in a hurry to start.
"My mother's stall," he said finally, in Mandarin, "was next to a fish tank. At the Fuhua market. A big concrete tank, for live fish. There was a pump in it that ran all day and all night. Thirty years, that pump. I did my homework next to it every afternoon until I was seventeen." He smiled faintly at the water. "When I came to America, to Stanford, I couldn't sleep. For the first month. I lay awake every night in that dormitory and couldn't understand what was wrong. Then I realized. It was too quiet. No pump. So I went to a department store in Palo Alto and bought a little fountain for my desk. A plastic one, with a little plastic rock and a little light. Nineteen dollars. I slept like a child."
"Do you still have it?"
"My wife threw it away in 1994," he said. "She says I listen to everything except her. She is not entirely wrong." He glanced at her. "I'm a habitual listener. It's a bad habit in a husband and a good habit in a businessman."