She thought about Chen Popo, coming across Hongli Road with her cane.
"Thank you," Amara said.
It was not forgiveness. They both knew that. Forgiveness was a much bigger and slower thing, and it was not hers to hand out over a stone table at three in the afternoon to a man she had known for three hours. But it was not nothing. He seemed to understand that. He nodded, once, and looked down at his hands.
"I don't know what to do with this," he said, touching the brick. "I tried to throw it in a trash can in the parking lot. While you were with Lin. I stood there holding it over the can for about a minute. I couldn't do it. It felt like throwing away a part of my own arm." He laughed, without any humor at all. "Tell me what to do with it. Please. I'll do whatever you say."
Amara looked down the length of the table.
At the far end, Rosie Delgado was stacking the last of the heavy white plates, three high, carefully, so they wouldn't chip. Rosie was fifty-one. She had three grandchildren and eighteen years in restaurants and a bad left knee she never mentioned and a laugh you could hear from the parking lot. Kenji was carrying a tray of water glasses back toward the kitchen, walking with the particular rolling care of someone who had broken a full tray once and would never do it again. He was nineteen, and every month he sent half of what he made to his mother in Stockton, who cleaned offices at night and had raised him and his two sisters alone. And beyond them, near the front of the hall, the busser was still raking the gravel in long, slow, perfect lines.
"His name is Luis," Amara said, nodding toward the busser. "He's from Oaxaca. He's been raking that gravel every morning for six years. He has a daughter who's starting kindergarten next week." She looked back at Bradley. "Do you know his name?"
"No," said Bradley.
"Do you know hers?" She nodded at Rosie.
Bradley looked down the table at Rosie for a long moment, the way you look at a word in a familiar language that you suddenly realize you have never actually read.
"No," he said.
"You could tip the people who served your table today," Amara said.
Bradley looked at Rosie, and at Kenji, and at Luis with his rake, as though he were seeing them for the first time. And Amara understood, watching his face, that he was.
He picked up the brick. He stood up. He walked down the length of the Long Table, past the white flowers and the empty glasses and the little porcelain fish, to where Rosie Delgado was lifting her stack of plates. She looked up at him, warily, the plates in her arms.
"Excuse me," Bradley said. His voice was quieter and humbler than Amara had heard it all day. "I owe you an apology. And a thank you. And I'm ashamed to say I don't know your name."
* * *
At a quarter past ten that night, Amara sat cross-legged on her bed in the studio in Daly City, in sweatpants and an old Middlebury sweatshirt, with the fog pressed back against the window and the foghorn going, and called Guangzhou.
It was 1:15 in the afternoon in Guangzhou. The WeChat video connection took a long time to go through. When it did, the picture was frozen for several seconds, and then jerked into motion, and Amara found herself looking up at a ceiling. White plaster. A water stain shaped roughly like Australia. A red paper lantern hanging from a hook, turning slightly in some draft.
Then the picture lurched again, and the ceiling was replaced by an enormous, blurry, magnified eye.
"Amara?" said a voice in Cantonese. Cracked and high, like a rusty hinge. "Is that you? I can't see anything. This stupid phone. My son bought me this stupid phone and it only shows me my own eye."
"Turn it around, Popo. The other way. You've got the camera pointing at your face from too close."
Fumbling. A brief view of a cat. Another view of the ceiling. And then the picture settled, and there she was.
Chen Xiulan was ninety-two years old and smaller every time Amara saw her. Tiny and wrinkled, folded into a big armchair like a walnut in a shell, with a cloud of white hair standing up around her head and a pair of enormous pink plastic glasses that magnified her eyes to twice their size. A gray cat was asleep on her lap. Behind her Amara could see a crowded little living room, a television, stacks of newspapers, a calendar from a pharmacy, and the red lantern turning slowly on its hook.
Chen Popo peered at the screen for a long moment through the pink glasses.
"You're too thin," she said.
* * *
Amara told her everything.
She told her about the email at 6:02 in the morning, and Carl, and looks the part. She told her about the navy suit coming up the gravel path between the lemon trees, and the man looking past her for the person he was actually expecting, and I asked for someone who speaks Chinese. Not you. She told her about the brick of money slammed down on the stone, and the hundred thousand dollars, and the rules about fortune cookies. She told her about the silver-haired man standing in the doorway with a newspaper under his arm, and what she had said in Mandarin, and how the silver-haired man had walked past Bradley Kincaid like a lamppost and spoken to her in Cantonese and said that the grannies of Futian were the most frightening people in Shenzhen.
She told her how she had refused the money.
She told her about the lunch. About Mei's grandmother's chopsticks, and the black cod, and Mr. Xu's eyebrows. About Fang's question, and the hand that went to the brick, and the moment when Bradley Kincaid had laid his hands flat on the stone and told the truth. She told her about the fountain, and the boy in the too-big suit on the stairs at Stanford in 1986, and the card with the number in blue ink.