"You don't know what guys are like-"

"No, you don't know what guys are like because you're deciding that you have to be a virgin for some reason. Dude, why is it such a big deal? Are you a Republican or something?"

"I don't care what other people do, I just . . . I just think that things like sex matter. It's your connection with another person. It should mean something." He looked at her, underlit by the glow of the pool. Should he tell her about their father and his unfaithfulness? He hesitated. "Just . . . just don't be stupid, Grace."

Grace scraped back on the concrete and jumped up, kicking a spray of pool water in his face. She stood, looming above him, furious now. "Why are you being like this, Andrew?"

"Like what?"

"All judgy, like you're my dad or something. Are you going to try to send me off to boarding school, too?"

Contrite, Andrew leaned over and grabbed at her ankle. "No! Hey. No. Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you feel bad."

"Well, you did."

"Don't be Gracie mad! Be my friend again." He held up the empty minibottle of Jack. "Say hello to my little friend?"

"It's not going to work, Andrew. Guys can just quote things from movies and everything's cool, but it's not going to work with me."

It was always like that, thought Andrew. Any time Grace felt like someone was disapproving of her, even the slightest bit, it became an all-out battle. Youngest child syndrome. That had made so much sense when he first read about it. He was always in the middle, bringing Grace and Saina together, giving in to their dad, being nice to Barbra. He felt like Rodney King sometimes, arms outstretched, asking for everybody to just get along.

"So is this all real?" asked Grace.

"You being mad at me for no reason? I hope not."God. Andrew. He should be a stupid comedian-he always tried to make everything a joke. Grace briefly considered the possibility of both of her siblings being famous. If that happened, then she'd have to be famous, too, which she was planning on anyway. It wouldn't be fair if she was the only one who wasn't.

"No, asshole. All of this. Us staying in this piece of shit place, Dad not having money for our tuitions, our house being gone. Is that all real?"

For a minute, Grace still expected the answer to be no. She looked for a flicker in Andrew's face, a hidden smile, a creased eye, something that would congratulate her for stumbling on the secret. And then a hail of balloons would fall out of nowhere and all her friends would run out from behind the Dumpsters and the whole place would erupt like an episode of My Super Sweet 16, but instead of giving her a car, her father would give her a giant check and tell her that no one ever expected her to pass all the tests as quickly as she did.

"Grace-"

"It is, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah," he said, gently. "What did you think it was?"

She curled up her toes, scratching them against the concrete, breathing in the throat-searing chlorine, closing her eyes to the harsh fluorescents that cut through the hazy moonlight. She licked her lips. They were salty with sweat. How could she have been so completely, utterly, nonsensically, next-level idiotic? Of course it wasn't like The Game. Her father would never have gone to so much trouble for something that wouldn't make money. Her stepmother would never have agreed to drive with all of them to Saina's house just to teach her some sort of lesson. Grace looked down at her brother's face. Open. Concerned. Andrew was so fucking sweet. He would have done it. He would always do anything for her.

"What did you think it was?" he asked again. So worried.

"Nothing," she said, dully. And then she kicked him in the chest, hard, her bare foot leaving a wet imprint in the middle of his T-shirt, and took off, running back towards the room.

Behind her, she could hear his oof and then a scrabble on the concrete as he struggled up after her.

He reached the door a step behind her and waved the beige key card in her face.

"Tell me what's going on," he said. "Are you just upset about things?"

"Don't talk to me." She snatched at the key. He pulled it away. She reached again and he did the same thing. This dance. She hated it. "Don't make me do this now, Andrew. Please."

Andrew relented and slid the card into the door. The adults lay huddled in one bed, two soft lumps, breathing too lightly to really be asleep. He headed towards the empty bed, tired now, and slipped in without bothering to change clothes or brush his teeth.

Andrew closed his eyes. He could hear Grace unzipping her suitcase, banging the lid against wall, storming into the bathroom and turning up the water. It was freezing in the room, the air conditioner anchored next to the door fanned gusts of cold air back and forth. Andrew burrowed himself into the pillows and pulled the scratchy coverlet up to his neck. He was just starting to drift off into sleep when Grace swiped a pillow out from the pile and tossed it onto the foot of the bed. She yanked the sheets out from under the mattress and got in, kicking her feet towards Andrew's face.

He was disappointed. Andrew realized that he'd been looking forward to the familiar comfort of sharing physical space with someone who wasn't going to drive him crazy with repressed desire, but Grace made it into a war instead. Her dirty feet were tucked under his pillow now, one grimy heel, blackened by running up to the room barefoot, inches away from his nose. He could smell them. They didn't smell bad, really, just like a sweaty T-shirt left too long in the backseat of a car. Sharing a bed should have been like watching movies with his sisters when they were kids, before Saina left, before Grace was sent away, when they would all just pile together like puppies, Grace's legs kicked across his lap, his head resting on Saina's shoulder, Saina doling out snacks from their father's stash: roasted melon seeds, walnut-studded date cakes wrapped in edible rice paper, little rolls of coin-shaped haw flakes, sticks of dried squid sandwiching a thin layer of black sesame. Andrew reached over and squeezed one of Grace's toes, trying to be friendly. She thrashed out at the touch. Fine then. Andrew turned and pushed himself all the way to the very edge of the bed, pulling the sheets with him, making an empty tent between their two bodies.

I-10 East.

JUST THREE DAYS on the road and already her powder-blue exterior was covered in a thin veil of drab dust that made her look grimy and uncared for. Across her windshield, a smattering of bugs. Squished into the tread of her tires: gravel, garbage, gum. On her roof, an avian bomb site with white splatters ringing shrapnel turds. And hitched to her lovely chrome bumper, a horrible box on wheels, so heavy that it pulled at her screws, loosening them thread by thread.

Gone were the days of May Lee and her neat, gloved hands steering the two of them through the palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills. Gone, even, were the days of conveying Ama, who drove as if she were in a wrestling match, all the way to the San Gabriel Valley via an interminable series of surface streets. Gone was the gardener's son, who had washed and polished her along with all the other cars, and never mind that she wasn't used nearly as often.

Inside, things were even worse.

Charles, knees akimbo, farting constantly into the upholstery, was always in her driver's seat. He had stuffed her door pocket full of ancient maps that must trace their way across some forgotten America and was constantly jamming his giant sunglasses into her visor, where they'd fall and hit him on the head over and over again.

Behind him was Andrew, so much bigger now than when he'd last been in that same seat. He scrubbed at her lovely carpet with his dirty sneakered feet and scattered bits of paper inked all over with nonsensical notes. And every time, as soon as he got inside, he placed his metal-cased phone directly on her seat, not caring that the little devil box got hotter and hotter as he continued to use it.

Next to Andrew, in her right rear seat, was the worst of all-his little sister, Grace. The girl was the one who started the abuse, using some sort of tacky blue substance to stick torn magazine pages onto her pristine doors and mashing the glue right into the holes in her perforated leather upholstery. It would probably never come out, even if by some miracle Jeffie reappeared and took a needle to it, as he once had when a baby Andrew spilled his bottle of formula across her entire rear flank.

She supposed that they had to make a home out of her somehow. That they- Wait. She had almost forgotten what was in the front passenger seat clouding her air with some sort of cloying scent: the interloper, the carpetbagger, the stepmother. The one self-named Barbra, who had covered her window with a scarf, though a bit of darkening in the sun could only have improved that ugly face.

This was her lot now. Disgrace, meted out in asphalt miles. Her engine shuddered once, twice, but, ever loyal, she continued eastward, onward, always forward, with Charles's heavy foot depressing her gas pedal and draining her insides.

I-10 East.

"KAI CHE bu yao ting dian hua," said Barbra.

Charles ignored her and stabbed at the voicemail button on his phone. He wasn't a child. He could hold a phone and drive at the same time. He could eat and drive, read the paper and drive, shave and drive. He could even pat his head and rub his belly at the same time, something that used to send Andrew and Grace into shrieks of laughter when they were little, though he wasn't sure why the activity was in such high demand.

The first message: "Hello, Charles, hello." (Pause.) "It's Lydia. Grant spoke to me, I'm very sorry to hear about your company's (pause) difficulties. I do hope it hasn't been too (pause) difficult for the family. And I hope that we'll see you and your wife next week at our fall dinner." (Pause.) "And I'd like to thank you for your generous support of the Gardens over the years, and your continued generous support. It's very kind." (Pause.) "OkaywellIhopethewholefamily'sdoingwellgoodbyenowgoodbye."

Oh, the anxious, aging wives of his white business associates, fingers weighted down with diamonds, constantly tittering on about how busy they were with this committee meeting and that school event, all the while shedding pretty tears for dark-skinned children in distant countries. Charles loved being around them. They flattered him like concubines, wheedling checks for orphans in Burma or wells in Namibia, angling for ever-larger donations of cosmetics to put on the block at one of the endless silent auctions for their children's private schools. Nothing made him feel better than tossing off a check that elicited a breathy gasp of pleasure from one of the wives. Charles remembered the one he'd written for Liddy's dinner. $5,000 a plate. $10,000 for Barbra and him. Well, someone else was going to eat his share of ahi poke or steak roulade or summer trifle or whatever the absurdly fashionable food of the moment happened to be.

Having money made things so easy. Ease. That's what he was born for. By rights, Charles Wang never should have had to doubt the state of his accounts, not for a single moment of his life. By rights, he should have had an ancient kingdom at his feet-if the tide had not been turned by history, who knew how vast his family's holdings would now be?

Second message. "Wang Gege! You don't call, you don't email!" My email got impounded, thought Charles, along with everything else. "Are you switching sides on me, hmm? I'm still counting on your support this November, Wang, don't forget it. You promised to show up with those models on your arm, Gege. I'm waiting for them. That'll spring some wallets open, eh?" Little Mark Shen. The bastard had squirmed his way into Charles Wang's life by wielding a city council seat in Vernon, that tiny municipal fiefdom where Charles's largest warehouse and factory was located. Except that it wasn't his anymore. Someone else could war with that joke of a city, that gutter-and-ash city, about taxes and permissions and inane regulations that were really just bald attempts to rout more cash out of the pockets of honest businessmen. All the campaign contributions that he had given bowlegged Mark Shen were pointless now.

Charles tried not to think about it, but there was a relentless adding machine in his mind that refused to stop its guilty tally of all his unnecessary expenses: the campaign contributions-not just to Shen but also to California's governator and anyone who looked like they might have a chance of becoming mayor of Los Angeles; the donations to charities that meant more to the people running them than to the people they were supposed to help; the tables that he'd taken at dinners; the membership to a country club when he didn't even want to strike a ball across artificial lawns with a stick; the bottles of wine and whiskey ordered to show that $500, $1,000, $10,000 meant nothing to him. Wasn't money supposed to beget money? So how did all of his mighty dollars shrink up and cross their legs and refuse to breed anymore? If only he could claw it all back. Rewind to that moment before some fireball of greed and ambition and catastrophic self-confidence made him stray from the sure path that he'd been on for so many years.

Safe and sure.

Bravery was for fools.

Third message. "Hey, Mr. Wang. Just calling to say that we got your email and that's cool, if you're fixing to come visit us, we'll be here. Uh, we definitely weren't expecting it, but it would be an honor, sir, to have you come in person. We'll see you all in a few days. Oh, this is Trip. BTW. You know, by the way. Yeah. Okay. Have a good drive." At least there was that. The cases of product in the bread box of a trailer that bumped along behind them, occasionally threatening to fishtail the car. Maybe they would be the start of something, a huge lifestyle brand that would overtake Martha and magnolia scent the world. And it would all be because he'd rescued their dreams from the detritus of his Failure-it would be the perfect comeback story.

Charles focused on the road in front of him. At some point the landscape had started to shift from the red dirt of New Mexico to the scrub flats of West Texas. Benighted lands, both of them.

His phone rang; his lawyer's name flashed across the screen. With a sneaky glance at Barbra, who wrinkled her forehead and turned away, he picked it up.

"Hello, I am driving. Is there anything?"

"How's the road trip?"

This lawyer was always bombarding Charles with pleasantries when he should have been figuring out how to reinstate the Wangs' lost acres. They continued in Mandarin.

"I pay you six hundred dollars an hour. It would cost me too much to tell you about it. Do you have any news?"

A laugh. "Well, we're not sure what this means yet, but it looks like you never left."

"What? Where?"

"Home. China."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I, really, but we have obtained a copy of your identification record. Wang Da Qian, age fifty-six, born at 7:35 a.m. on March 14, 1952, parents Wang Wen Xi and Chong Jie-you're still there."

"Impossible!"

"You're a Communist Party member-"

"How can that be?"

"You have three children. And a wife named Mei Li."

"But I do have those. That is me. Who else could it be?"

"Don't lose heart; we'll figure it out. I have a colleague in Beijing looking into it; we'll surely be able to know if this is just some sort of paperwork issue."

"But the land?"

"You must have patience, Mr. Wang. China's not like America. Things take time."

"It's been weeks!"

"And we are edging forward. You don't clap your hands and make things happen over there. We have colleagues who help us, but it-"

"Alright, alright. Enough. I expect more next time we connect. You know, my colleague, he had only good words to say about you."

"Mr. Wang, this could turn into a long journey. The government won't be handing land out. There is no set reclamation process. There are no guarantees of any sort. Even with last year's new property law that you're so hopeful about, nothing is straightforward. I cannot say what will happen if you insist on going to China."

"I know all of that. I don't expect you to be able to figure out how to proceed-I'll take care of that. Your job is to give me all of the information I need to formulate a plan. Be sure that you know more than I do the next time we talk."

When Charles hung up the phone, Barbra was staring at him.

"The land?"

He kept his eyes on the road.

All his life, the land in China had been a promise. Starting back before he could even remember, his father's friends had gathered nightly around the mah-jongg table, cracking melon seeds, drinking tumblers of gao liang, and talking about the land in China. Later, through all the long, humid evenings in Taipei, as he did homework in the next room, their big words had floated in and settled all around him: "We'll get back the land in China," they reassured each other. "We'll go back and demand it." Qu ba di yao huei lai. That's what they told themselves, those displaced men who had once ruled a continent and were now exiled to an island-the landinChina, the landinChina, the landinChina, until it became a promise that seeped into little Wang Da Qian's very bones.

Could they have been wrong?

Or were they so right that he was there already, living out another temblor of his fault-lined life?

"Ah bao, what is 'the land'?"

He didn't want to tell her. Barbra knew, of course. He'd talked about it before often enough, but he didn't want to tell her now that the last of their money, his money, had gone to hire this lawyer who might prove, somehow, that the land was still part of the Wangs. The Nazis had to return looted artworks-why shouldn't the Communist Party return looted birthrights?

"Is this about your such-a-big-deal family, hmm? I tell you before, there is no way you get anything back from the government!"

His wife was never easy to ignore, but Charles kept his lips pressed shut and his eyes on the road. Barbra couldn't understand because she had never had anything. Not really. She grew up in school housing-a single shared room with bedrolls spread every night, showering next to the janitor's kids-and had barely left that meager house before she slipped right into his bed.

If you never have anything, you can never lose anything.

Charles tried to think of an analogy Barbra would understand. What if, he imagined telling her, what if all the Persian kids in Beverly Hills torched their Ferraris and smashed their bottles of Dior Homme before joining the Taliban? What if they marched through the city and snatched up properties, pulling you onto the street and calling you a godless capitalist pig, kicking you with feet still clad in the tasseled Prada loafers they couldn't bear to relinquish? Wasn't your house still rightfully yours? Wouldn't you want it back after they were inevitably vanquished by some makeshift Arizona militia? And wouldn't you just burn with anger at the thought of the state taking ownership of your property after the rebels had been routed? At a ragtag bunch of false politicians trying to build a new America on your hard-won acres?

Of course. And you would be right to feel that way. Everyone would think so. Your wife would support your every effort to regain that home instead of insulting your family and turning up an unappreciative little nose at your goals.

"Big deal, small deal. You would not know the difference," he said, defiant.

"What do you mean?"

Charles shrugged his lip.

He wanted to say it.

He didn't want to say it.

He said it: "You can't understand this! I give you everything you have! You never have to worry about anything!"

Barbra stared at him, eyes big. Her nostrils widened as she breathed in.