“You should try that on!” Mrs. Zhou encouraged my mom.
“You think so?” she asked.
I yanked on her arm. “Mom, no,” I whispered. I looked around for Hank. Anybody! Help! But my mother escaped with it into the changing room.
As I waited for her to change, I paced outside the door, thinking of my dad’s face if he knew this was happening.
Two minutes later, my mother emerged, looking stunning, positively radiant, like Cinderella about to go off to the ball. I wanted to cover up the full-length mirror with my hands so she wouldn’t see how good she looked.
Her new friends raved. “You have to get that,” Zhou Tai Tai gushed.
As she twirled around in the gorgeous red dress, I held my hands up for old times’ sake.
“Eggplant!” I said, and pretend clicked, like I was holding a camera. It was this thing my mom and I liked to do, especially whenever we tried on something nice at the mall. We’d pretend to take a picture of it and say eggplant because that’s what we used to say in China instead of cheese. It was just a fun game, because of course we couldn’t actually buy the dress.
Except today my mother didn’t smile. She pretended to not hear my “eggplant.” Mrs. Zhou asked me what I was doing, and I quickly put down my hands.
“Nothing,” I muttered, glancing at my mom. Why wasn’t she into it?
My mom ducked back into the changing room. When she came out, she was wearing her normal clothes and holding the red dress on the hanger. As she was about to put it back on the rack, Mrs. Zhou stopped her and said, “You’re not going to get that?”
The other women all chimed in.
“It would be criminal not to get that dress!”
“Red’s such a good color on you!”
“If I had your figure, I would buy two!”
My head bounced from tai tai to tai tai, not sure which of their statements I should refute first. Before I knew it, we were at the checkout counter. I watched in horror as my mom pulled out the crumpled bills from her purse—$187.99, plus tax. There was no discussion. There was no pause. There was no asking me what I thought. She just slid the cash across the counter like it was Monopoly money.
As the saleslady happily wrapped up the dress, I felt tiny bumps of panic all up and down my arms. Dad is not going to like this!
Hank was waiting for us at the store entrance when we walked out, wearing a brand-new outfit: a crisp white button-down shirt, fitted tan blazer, and smart gray slacks. His new shiny leather shoes clicked on the marble floor as he made his way over to us.
“Whoa!” I said when I spotted him. “You look amazing!”
Hank chuckled. “Do I clean up real nice or what?”
My mother’s new friends stared at Hank. “Is he your husband?” Mrs. Zhou asked my mom, alarmed.
“No,” my mom quickly said.
Mrs. Zhou put a hand over her chest and exhaled, like thank God. Hank, who couldn’t understand a word of Mandarin, smiled politely at the women. As Mrs. Zhou and the others exchanged numbers with my mom, I was still thinking about Mrs. Zhou’s question—Is he your husband? Why’d she have to make that face?
In the car on the way home, I gave my mom the silent treatment. I was mad at her for not sticking to the clearance section and buying a dress on sale, for not posing for my camera when I said eggplant, and most of all, for making friends with those horrible snobs.
But my mom was unusually quiet too. As Hank drove, she looked out the window. I wondered if she was thinking about my dad and the fight that they were definitely going to have. I could almost hear the thunder in the car and nibbled my cheek in anticipation of the downpour.
Back at the motel, my mother tried to smuggle the shopping bag into the manager’s quarters without my dad noticing, but of course he spotted it.
“What’d you get?” he asked.
Hank and I glanced at each other. I pointed at Hank’s new leather shoes, trying to distract him. “Look, Dad! Aren’t they cool?” I asked.
“They feel good too,” Hank added, stomping around on the carpet.
But my dad wasn’t interested in Hank’s shoes. “Oh, c’mon, let me see what you got,” he pressed my mom. He walked over and reached for the bag, and before she could stop him—she tried to hold it out of reach, but he was too fast—he pulled out the dress.
We all watched as my dad touched the satin, his coarse hands moving like needles against the soft fabric. “You got this on clearance?”
She pressed her lips together, a self-imposed silence.
My dad looked at her, puzzled, and asked, “When are you ever going to wear this?”
“I’ll wear it!” my mom insisted.
But before she could say any more, my dad spotted the price tag, and it was like KA-BOOM!
“Two hundred dollars for a dress? Are you crazy?” he yelled. He stuffed it into the bag. “You’re taking this back.”
My dad was furious, and so was I—mad and scared. Was this what my mom was going to do with her new credit card? Swipe and sign all our money away?
“It’s my money too!” Mom yelled back. “I work hard for it. And on top of that, I have to do the housework and cook all the meals.”
“But you like cooking the meals,” my dad said.
“I don’t like cooking the meals!”
I thought about all the nights my mom stood over the hot stove after a long day of cleaning. Sometimes, she’d pull out pieces of paper with math formulas written on them from her pockets and look at them while she cooked. Or she’d sew up a hole in my backpack while keeping an eye on the rice. My anger at her thawed a little.
Hank stepped in. “It’s okay. We’ll make the money back tomorrow. I promise. I work here now, remember?” Hank rubbed his hands together. “I’m going to give this motel a little something I like to call the Hank magic.”
As Hank bid us a good night and clicked back to his room in his new leather shoes, my mom sat down on the sofa and lovingly stroked her new dress. “Okay, maybe it was a bit much, buying it in one go. Next time, I’ll put it on a payment plan on my credit card,” she muttered.
My dad’s jaw dropped. “You applied for a credit card? I thought we talked about it!”
“No, you talked about it. You decided,” my mom said, crossing her arms.
My dad fumed as he walked over to the cash register. “You think all that money in there is ours?” he asked my mom. “It’s not ours. It belongs to many, many investors, all of whom need to get paid before we do.”
“Yeah, and you always think about everyone else before your own wife!” Mom cried, reaching for a tissue. Tears glistened in her eyes.
“You guys!” I exclaimed. I was sick of all the fighting, and besides, as soon as Dad mentioned our investors, I remembered we had much bigger problems right now. “I have something to tell you.”
My parents both looked up.
“Lupe and her dad can’t be on our insurance plan,” I said.
My dad looked taken aback. “Why not?” he asked.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, remembering that Lupe had sworn me to secrecy. “They … uh … they already got another one.”
My dad took a seat on the couch next to my mom.