Parker Elena Parker no offense but why are you just now telling us you’re not getting in until Christmas Eve? Parker I’m sorry, Lena. This event is important to me. I figured you could work around my new dates. We don’t have reservations for anything those first few days, right? Kevin Ohhh Mom is going to be pissed Kevin Less time with the favorite Parker Our parents don’t have favorites, Kevin. Kevin Easy for the favorite to say Elena Yeah it’s just, you could have told us weeks ago lol. Katy and I wanted to cook a big dinner for everybody the night we all get in bc she needs to go up to Palo Alto the next morning. I guess that’s not going to work? Christi Elena, we wouldn’t have been able to meet up on Tuesday anyway. The kids are going to be out like a light after seven hours of travel. You should know this Elena Oh sorry, Katy and I neglected to plan our lives around Jenna and Manuel lol Christi I didn’t say you should plan your lives around Jenna and Manuel. But if you’re planning dinner for a group of people, you should consider all their schedules. Christi Also, if we’re getting up for Simbang Gabi, I assume nobody wants to stay out late the night before.
Kevin yeahhh babyyyy the only thing better than mass is mass at 5:30 am Kevin how many years do you think it’ll be before Mom lets us do the evening services like normal poenple? Kevin *people Justin poenple Justin lol Elena Maybe we could convince Mom to do the evening mass just on Wednesday??? Then that’ll free up Tuesday night more Kevin so, mass at 7 pm on Wednesday AND 5:30 am on Thursday? are you out of your mind Justin Will you guys calm down we’ll figure shit out when we’re there. Christi WE will not figure anything out, if you’re included in that statement. Elena Lol yeah when have you literally ever contributed to planning, Justin? Justin jesus fine I’ll just shut up I guess Parker Justin, you don’t need to shut up. It’s true that we’ll be able to do some planning when we’re on the ground. Elena, when does Katy get back from Palo Alto? I’m sure we can figure something out that works for all of us, plus the kids. Elena She comes back down Christmas Eve. Around the same time you land Parker Okay, awesome. Would you two want to do the big family feast as Noche Buena dinner instead? Though totally understand if
you don’t want to cook before mass. Elena Yeah that could maybe work exc ept Mom will def still want to do gifts at hers. So it’d be a lot to have everyone over at our Airbnb, and then go to Mom’s to present swap, then Misa de Gallo, then Katy and I go home to clean up after twelve people ... Parker What if we cooked at Mom’s that night? Then we could all pitch in to clean the next morning when we meet up. Kevin Wowwww am so excited to do ten million dishes on Christmas can’t wait Elena Kevin you have no appreciation for anyone or anything. So typical. Here I am, trying to plan to cook for YOUR ungrateful ass, and you’re complaining about POTENTIALLY having to wash like, MAYBE four dishes. Christi liked Elena’s message Justin liked Elena’s message Kevin Nobody asked you to make this dinner Elena, but I guegss now you get to play the martyr so thank god for that Kevin Also why are you liking that message Justin you’ve never touched a dirty dish in your fucking life “Parker, you okay?” “What?” I looked up from my phone at Arthur, who was lying on the sofa, reading something about the Etruscans. He’d swaddled himself in several blankets, making him look like a patchwork quilt come to life. New York had hit its first real cold snap of the season, the kind that clings to you hours after you’ve come in from the chill. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine. Why?” “Because you look like you’re passing a kidney stone.” “Have you seen a lot of people pass kidney stones?” “Just you, right now.” I tried to smile. “Sibling group text about Christmas planning.” “What’s happening, someone cancel Christmas?” “You’d think. I’m getting in a few days late.” “Huh. And
how is that a problem?” I shrugged and glanced at my phone screen. The group chat was still lighting up with furious messages, and Elena and Kevin had each texted me s eparately to complain about the other. “Maybe I should just turn down the event,” I muttered. “It feels sort of selfish not to be there for the holidays.” “What? Come on,” said Arthur. “It’s not like you’re missing Christmas. You’re allowed to have a life. You need to let your siblings be adults for once and sort out their own shit.” I didn’t answer. Arthur took this tone sometimes, a kind of urgent supportiveness, but rather than reassuring me, his suggestions invariably left me even more stressed out, as though I were not only failing at the problem at hand but also acting in a way that Arthur thought was childish or unreasonable. He was looking for his bookmark now, and then he’d mark his page in the Etruscans and make this into something it wasn’t, the first st ep into an imagined downward spiral, like I was another cause he had to advocate for. “No, you’re right,” I said, forcing a sigh. “Yeah. They’ll figure it out.” Mollified, Arthur returned to his book, and I returned to playing referee, this time with my face purposefully blank. As the twenty-third cr ept closer, the cold snap de epened, and I spent hours planning my questions for Juliette. I wanted to spark a real conversation, not just a courteously embellished yes or no. I wanted to show her the ways I’d loved her work. I wanted so badly for her to like me that it was pathetic. The week of the event arrived, and my friends bled out of the city. By Tuesday, everyone from the Bay Area had flown back west, and on Wednesday, Arthur wheeled his suitcase to the door and pushed a wrapped rectangular prism into my hand.
“Book?” I said. “Book,” he said. “Book.” I handed over his gift, too, then slid a nail under Arthur’s messily folded wrapping paper to cut through the tape. A hand-drawn cover came into view. He’d given me a copy of Chi Arts Young Voices: A Poetry Collection. “Wait, incredible,” I said, flipping to the title page, which wore the shaky, unpracticed signatures of all twelve contributors. “Oh, I can’t wait to read this. Any recommendations?” “I don’t play favorites,” he said, ripping through the wrapping of his own present to reveal a copy of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. “Bring it to L. A.,” I said. “You can test the recipes out on your parents.” “Trying to es cape being the guinea pig?” “No,” I lied. Arthur laughed and obligingly stuffed the cookbook into his suitcase. “Thanks, man,” he said as he cracked the door. “And good luck at the event tomorrow. I hope people show up. We’re supposed to get flurries.” Thursday dawned gray and freezing. Still huddled bleary-eyed in my flannel sheets, I tugged my phone under the covers to check the weather. Arthur’s flurries were nowhere in sight. Instead, a winter storm warning was splashed across my weather app. I sat up in bed. “No,” I said, throwing the covers off myself. Cool air cut through my T-shirt. I tapped into the forecast, groping my way through the apartment, muttering, “No, no, no, no.” The snow would start this afternoon and wasn’t projected to end until tomorrow night. I was supposed to fly out of La Guardia first thing in the morning. Jet Blue hadn’t emailed yet, but it was only a matter of time. I tried to rope in the panic, opening the notebook on my kitchen table to review my questions for Juliette. I’d deal with the blizzard tomorrow. One storm at a time.
By the time I made my way to the Upper West Side that evening, buffeted by horizontal wind, three inches of snow had carpeted the sidewalks, and the air had taken on that muffled quality, like we’d all been transported to a New York City hidden beneath a thick comforter. I arrived with half an hour to spare at the store, a new indie called the Dog’s Ear. Overlapping rugs and trailing plants gave the shop the air of a maximalist’s living room, and a rheumy-eyed Labrador was melting off a chair in the nonfiction section. The manager, Chester, an older man with orange-rimmed glasses, stood chatting near the shuttered café area with a woman whose back was turned. She was small and heavyset, wearing a collection of fraying, grayish clothes that made her look draped in centuries of dust. Her shoes were wildly impractical quilted slippers, and she held an enormous green woolen coat in the crook of her arm. “Oh, you must be Parker,” said Juliette Liao, turning to me. “How are you? It’s so good of you to come all the way out here in this mess. I’m Juliette.” I was momentarily speechless. Juliette’s eyes had delicate bags beneath them and six decades of smile lines fanning out from their corners, and as she regarded me, I imagined intricate processes of association and retrieval happening behind those de ep brown irises, the type of connection I’d seen mapped out in all seven of her books. “Hi,” I blurted out. “It’s no problem, really, the subway is running fine. I can’t tell you how great it is to meet you.” “Likewise. I don’t think we’ll have an especially large crowd,” she said, glancing to the snow-filled window. She didn’t sound too bothered by this prospect. Over the next half hour, six people trickled in from the silver-dashed darkness. They seemed scared of the front row. Clustered near the
back of the seating area, they steadied stacks of Juliette’s books in their laps, unwinding scarves, brushing snow from their shoulders. I k ept scanning the sheet-glass storefront. Eight million people lived in New York City. Surely a few more of them could handle a little snow? I wanted this shop to be full to bursting, to show New York’s appreciation for Juliette’s work. She caught me looking. “Worried about the attendance?” “I’m sure people are just running behind because of the weather.” Juliette chuckled. “Oh, you’re sweet.” The door swung open again—I felt as much as heard it, the wind clawing away our precious heat—and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for a dozen latecomers. Instead I got one narrow figure in a black felt coat, red-cheeked from the cold, a crimson knit hat pulled low over her serious brows. I recovered from Selina Chan’s appearance more quickly than I had at the Wiseman Festival. Tight-jawed, I watched her take a seat in the back row and smooth the static out of her hair with two fingers. She unbuttoned her coat and shrugged her narrow shoulders out of it. Beneath, she wore an overlarge cable-knit sweater, dark red, like the gloss on her lips. “Are you two ready?” asked Chester. I tugged my eyes from Selina and nodded. Chester took his time introducing us, the seven-person audience patiently absorbing Juliette’s extensive list of fellowships, their eyes straying every so often to the gap between the bookshelves where we waited. Finally, they clapped us out into the shabby velvet armchairs at the front. I could feel Selina’s eyes on me, but I was surprised by how steady I felt. Maybe I’d worn out the worries this week with the rewriting of my questions, or maybe it was the small audience, but I didn’t feel on edge. The feeling reminded me of a good day’s writing, when you’re
so de ep into your love for something that even the nerves can’t reach you. I gripped my advance copy of House Hearth Home and met Juliette’s eyes. I felt, again, the immensity of the presence in front of me. She settled back into the embroidered cushions and looked at me with luminous serenity. “First of all, Juliette,” I said, “I want to thank you for writing this book. Whenever I come to your work, I know I’m going to a place where nothing else can reach me.” She inclined her soft, round chin. “That’s kind of you, Parker.” “In case we have anybody here who doesn’t know the gist of the book, would you describe it for us?” “Of course.” Juliette lifted a hardback into her hands. The jacket hushed against her dry skin. “House Hearth Home is a frontier novel set just after the War of 1812. It follows a woodcutter who’s searching for a Duckbill Maple, a rare tree, to build a crib for his newborn daughter. This interweaves with the story of his wife, who will outlive him by twenty years, and their daughter, who will outlive him by sixty, and the species of tree, which outlives him by about a century, and the crib itself, which outlives them all by several centuries.” “Yes. Amazing.” I opened my notebook. “I have some questions about that overlap of lives. There’s only a brief window at the start of the book where all these—consciousnesses, I guess, exist at the same time. And these very Christian characters are obsessed with the idea of eternal life, but the book is more preoccupied with nostalgia for slender windows of time. Did you mean to set those two ideas in conflict?” “Not conflict, but in contrast, of course.” Juliette smiled. “The book and its characters do not worship at the same altars. If there is
divinity on earth, I don’t think it comes from the eternal; it comes from the ephemeral. We have only this brief moment together.” She glanced toward the front window, where the wind was ripping at the awning. “I’m glad to spend this particular moment here, by the way,” she added mildly. “I haven’t done an event in years, but frankly I can’t imagine better conditions.” The nine of us laughed, Juliette twinkled, and the snow clung to the corners of the window, smoothing the view of the street into a wide dark oval. We spoke for half an hour about the seven drafts she’d written longhand, about how the book honored her late husband, about the months she’d spent in Missouri for research, then turned to the audience for a surprisingly lively Q and A, considering our numbers. For a fleeting half hour I’d won back the feeling I used to have as a kid, hiding away in Poppy Street Books: that there was no world outside the bookstore, no world I’d rather inhabit than this one. When the Q and A ended, the audience queued for the signing. Juliette carried on unhurried conversations with each person as she dedicated the copies. Selina stood at the end of the line, black coat on, and after reaching the front, she handed her copy of House Hearth Home to Juliette without acknowledging me. I waited for Selina to say something about City Magazine, to tell Juliette who, exactly, she was. She didn’t. She said, “Could you sign this to Selina, please? S-e-l-i-n- a.” “Of course,” said Juliette. “Thank you for being here, Selina.” “Thank you,” Selina said too quickly. “The book was—I mean, it was— it really moved me. All your books do. Have. Since I was a teenager.”
I stared at the point of her nose and the curve of her cheek, the only features I could see beyond the fall of her hair. I hadn’t been aware that Selina Chan could engage in human behaviors like “stuttering” and “being uncool in front of a person you admire.” Trying to be surr eptitious, I slipped my phone from my coat pocket, navigated to the City website, and searched Juliette Liao. Selina had published a review of House Hearth Home late last week. I’d missed it. She hadn’t posted it to social media. I began to read. Beside me, Selina worked her way effortfully through small talk, but in my hand was the articulate fullness of her appreciation. To read Juliette Liao is to be in the presence of such intelligence that you feel small, and then, often in the same paragraph, in the presence of such sensitivity that you feel yourself expanding. I felt that satisfying feeling of juncture, the sensation you get when you’ve been trying to put your finger on the right word and it finally floats up to you out of the dark. This wasn’t a personal essay. There was nothing about Selina’s life in here, about what Juliette’s books meant to her. But the devotion rang through every word, the care she’d taken in drawing lines from House Hearth Home to Willa Cather and the Zen sutras. I glanced over at Selina, feeling a begrudging respect. Maybe, in the past few months, I’d begun to forget this: that criticism could be beautiful, not just a collection of reactions but a way to organize and illuminate the world. I didn’t have to like Chan to acc ept that she was a good critic. There was actually something sad about it, something stalwart and defiant about how fiercely she clung to this art form, which was, by all accounts, dying.
My phone buzzed in my hand. I glanced down. 1 New Message in Chan Pan Support Group I felt a pulse of discomfort and returned my phone to my pocket. The voices beside me had come to a coda. I glanced up to see Selina saying, “Well, it was wonderful to meet you.” As her eyes fell on me, her face turned to cold glass. “Parker.” “Selina.” Juliette looked between us with surprise. “Oh, do you two know each other?” “Yeah. We—yes,” I said, trying to force civility into my tone. “Selina’s a critic with City Magazine.” Juliette’s papery eyelids fluttered rapidly. “Selina! You’ve been withholding!” Selina let out a small laugh that sounded nothing like the derisive snap she’d aimed at me in the past. The sound was low, almost private. “Strangely enough, when you lead a conversation saying that you’re a critic, it tends to set authors on the defensive.” “Can’t imagine why,” Juliette said. Selina laughed again, and I managed to smile. Chester was at the register, closing up, and the other audience members were trickling toward the doors. Juliette stood from her armchair, slipping on her woolen coat. “Well, what are you two doing now? The snow delayed my flight, so I haven’t eaten. I’d love to treat you both to something.” Selina and I stared at each other for a split instant, and I knew somehow that we were thinking the same thing: that however much we hated each other, we wanted to spend time with Juliette more. We looked back to her as one. “No, please,” I said, “I’ll treat you.” “Yes,” said Selina, “Parker will treat you.” I felt a bizarre desire to laugh. Juliette waved her hand. “Coronation gave me a card, bless them. Come on—let’s make a break for it, before the snow gets
worse.”