‘Reporters? No, I’ve-’
    ‘You spend everything on car, go broke?’
    ‘No, no. I’d never-’
    ‘You go broke, don’t take welfare.’
    ‘I’m not broke, Mom.’
    ‘You go broke, you come home to live.’
    ‘That won’t be necessary, Mom.’
    ‘Family always here.’
    Tommy felt like dirt. Although he had done nothing wrong, he felt uncomfortably 
revealed in the headlights of oncoming cars, as though they were the harsh lamps in a 
police interrogation room, and as though he was trying to conceal a crime.
    He sighed and eased the Corvette into the right-hand lane, joining the slower 
traffic. He wasn’t capable of handling the car well, talking on the cellular phone, and 
sparring with his indefatigable mother.
    She said, ‘Where’s your Toyota?’
    ‘I traded it on the Corvette.’
    ‘Your reporter friends drive Toyota. Honda. Ford. Never see one drive Corvette.’
    ‘I thought you didn’t know what a Corvette was?’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, I know,’ making one of those abrupt 
hundred-eighty-degree turns that only a mother could perform without credibility 
whiplash. ‘Doctors drive Corvette. You are always smart, Tuong, get good grades, could 
have been doctor.’
    Sometimes it seemed that most of the Vietnamese-Americans of Tommy’s generation were 
studying to be doctors or were already in practice. A medical degree signified 
assimilation and prestige, and Vietnamese parents pushed their children toward the 
healing pro-fessions with the aggressive love with which Jewish parents, of a previous 
generation, had pushed their children. Tommy, with a degree in journalism, would never be 
able to remove anyone’s appendix or perform cardiovascular surgery, so he would forever 
be some-thing of a disappointment to his mother and father.
    Anyway, I’m not a reporter anymore, Mom, not as of yesterday. Now I’m a full-time 
novelist, not just part-time anymore.’
    ‘No job.’
    ‘Self-employed.’
    ‘Fancy way of saying no job,’ she insisted, though Tommy’s father was self-employed 
in the family bakery,
    as were Tommy’s two brothers, who also had failed to become doctors.
    ‘The latest contract I signed-’
    ‘People read newspapers. Who read books?’
    ‘Lots of people read books.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘You read books.’
    ‘Not books about silly private detectives with guns in every pocket, drive cars like 
crazy maniac, get in fights, drink whiskey, chase blondes.’
    ‘My detective doesn’t drink whiskey-’
    ‘He should settle down, marry nice Vietnamese girl, have babies, work steady job, 
contribute to family.’
    ‘Boring, Mom. No one would ever want to read about a private detective like that.’
    ‘This detective in your books - he ever marry blonde, he break his mother’s heart.’
    ‘He’s a lone wolf. He’ll never marry.’
    ‘That break his mother’s heart too. Who want to read book about mother with broken 
heart? Too sad.’
    Exasperated, Tommy said, ‘Mom, I just called to tell you the good news about the 
Corvette and-’
    ‘Come to dinner. Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.’
    ‘I can’t come tonight, Mom. Tomorrow.’
    ‘Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.’
    ‘I hardly ever eat cheeseburgers and fries, Mom. I watch my diet and I-’
    ‘Tomorrow night we have shrimp toast. Pork-stuffed squid. Pot-roasted rice. Duck with 
nuoc cham.’
    Tommy’s mouth was watering, but he would never admit as much, not even if he were 
placed in the hands of torturers with countless clever instruments of persuasion. ‘Okay, 
I’ll be there tomorrow night. And after dinner, I’ll take you for a spin in the Corvette.’
    ‘Take your father. Maybe he like flashy sports car. Not me. I simple person.’
    ‘Mom-’
    ‘But your father good man. Don’t put him in fancy sports car and take him out 
drinking whiskey, fight, chase blondes.’
    ‘I’ll do my best not to corrupt him, Mom.’
    ‘Goodbye, Tuong.’
    ‘Tommy,’ he corrected, but she had hung up.
    God, how he loved her.
    God, how nuts she made him.
    He drove through Laguna Beach and continued north.
    The last red slash of the sunset had seeped away. The wounded night in the west had 
healed, sky to sea, and in the natural world, all was dark. The only relief from 
blackness was the unnatural glow from the houses on the eastern hills and from the cars 
and trucks racing along the coast. The flashes of headlights and taillights suddenly 
seemed frenzied and ominous, as though all the drivers of those vehicles were speeding 
toward appointments with one form of damnation or another.
    Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound 
chills that made his teeth chatter.
    As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character’s teeth had 
chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliche; more important, he assumed that 
it was a cliche without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not 
physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived 
in a cold climate, so he couldn’t actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. 
Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy 
Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, 
fleeing from Vietnam with his parents, two brothers and sister, under ferocious attack.
    Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able 
to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had 
rattled like castanets.
    They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and 
that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
    The coolness of the November evening hadn’t yet leached into the Corvette. The chill 
that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
    As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remem-bered the peculiar moment 
earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or 
bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in 
the day except him.
    He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some