Shafts of streetlight filtered into the building through the dusty windows, giving off just enough of a glow for Charles to find the pile of boxes destined for Opelika.

"So why do we need these?"

"We make personal delivery."

"Okay, but why these?"

Why these? Because it was one of the few orders he'd personally sold since his business had grown. Ellie and Trip were a glowing young couple that he'd met on a flight to New York. They'd been bumped up to business class and refused his offer to switch seats, instead including him in their enthusiasm over the warm mixed nuts and free mimosas. The pair were en route from one friend's wedding in Malibu to another's on Cape Cod. Afterwards, they were moving back to her Alabama hometown to open a new-school take on a traditional general store. Handmade clothes, vintage hoes, and whole grains. Enchanted by their entrepreneurial drive and soft southern accents, Charles found himself recounting his first flight to America-the nausea, the revelation in the bathroom, all of it.

"I come to America to get rich, and now I am!" he'd finished.

"So you came here for the American Dream!" said Ellie, pleased.

Charles had laughed. "Not only American Dream! Everybody, every country, have same dream! Al Gore think he invent Internet, America think they invent American Dream!" And then he found himself convincing them to develop a line of magnolia-scented lotions and candles. "Magnolia oil you get local, send to me, I do everything else, you sell and say 'local magnolia' and everybody will buy!" he'd enthused, imagining it as the beginning of a southern beauty empire for them, a surefire melding of gracious tradition and modern style. Pooh-poohing their lack of capital, Charles waived his minimums and promised that they could spread out their payments, that their orders could grow as their business grew.

He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else's new life, someone else's realized potential.

Vampires must feel like that.

"Because I sell to them personally, and I make them spend all their money, so Daddy feel bad if they lose. Besides, we never go to Alabama before."

"But couldn't you just mail it?"

"Business is all about the personal."

She looked at him, considering. "Okay, that's a good lesson. I'll remember it. Business is all about the personal."

Love surged in Charles. Gracie wasn't lost. Living away from home those two years hadn't ruined her. Family was still family. "Good girl, xiao bao," he said, reaching out to pat her on the head as she loaded the dolly with boxes.

Grace straightened up and smiled at him, then skipped ahead. She was taller, and she'd loosened up the prim, baby-doll manner she'd had as a girl, all quiet voice and shy eyes. It had been such a shock when Grace, at fourteen, ran away with a boy who flattered her into thinking he was in love with her, who tricked himself into thinking the same thing. A Japanese boy, no less, a fact that Charles felt was a betrayal of the entire nation of China and everything she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. He would have expected that kind of treachery from Saina, maybe, but not of his youngest, a girl who had never so much as ordered a pizza on her own and still liked to be tucked in bed each night by Ama. She was fourteen and the boy was fifteen, so they didn't get far; Saina had come home and tracked the wayward lovers to a family friend's empty beach house in La Jolla. A new Gracie had ranted and raved and called it a Shakespearean tragedy; Saina had insisted that she was being more like silly Lydia Bennet, the runaway youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice, than a Bel-Air Juliet; and Charles had privately lamented and rejoiced at the irresistible beauty of his daughters. But when Grace responded to his order that she never speak to the boy again by wailing at the dinner table every night and trying, again, to run away with him, Charles had packed her off to Cate, which, besides being the only boarding school he'd heard of in California, also used its feminine name to make him think at first that it was an all-girls school. A week into the semester, he missed Grace terribly and was increasingly upset that the school was coed, but by then it was too late to go back on his declarations.

But now here they all were again. Almost all. Charles pushed the last of the magnolia-scented lotion out through the back door and slammed it shut, testing the knob to make sure that the warehouse was locked against any other interlopers.

I-10 East.

EVERYBODY BUT BARBRA was on the phone. She alone had no one to notify, no one with whom to plot or commiserate. Her everyone was in the seat right next to her, driving with both hands on the wheel and a phone wedged to his ear, edging his shoulder away from her as if that would be enough to keep her from overhearing. Grace chattered to Andrew. Even Ama talked-shouted, actually, voice sharp, face animated-to a someone.

Barbra nudged her husband. "How are all the phones still on?"

He took a hand off the wheel to cover the mouthpiece, and whispered to her, "Not end of month yet."

And once it was, what then? Would they just be cut off from civilization, left to languish in Saina's house, relegated to the role of poor relations? Barbra closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool pane of the window, letting the family's conversations wash together. They alternately spoke and were quiet, listening to the people on the other end of their lines with an intensity that exhausted her, ratcheting up their voices with each response.

CHARLES: That is all the names I have. What did they say?

AMA: Yi ding yao zuo fan la!

GRACE: Yeah, I thought tonight too, but they think it'll be too late- AMA: Shei ne me xiao qi? Qian, wo gei qian!

GRACE: Something Palms? Thirty-four Palms? Ninety-nine Palms?

CHARLES: Of course. Everything good also is difficult. No, no matter- GRACE: Oh yeah, that's it, Twenty-nine. So just tonight.

AMA: Hao le la, bu yao zai chao . . .

CHARLES: The money, don't worry about.

GRACE: Seriously? Who, like a bounty hunter?

CHARLES: Enough for this.

GRACE: And they just showed up?

CHARLES: Okay, okay, I wait.

GRACE: Oh my god, Andrew, really? They just took it?

AMA: Hao, wo men bu jiou jiou dao le. Xiao Danzi zen yang ah?

CHARLES: Yes, I wait. You call me again when you have anything. Thank you.

GRACE: Are you okay? Did they do anything to you?

AMA: Ne jiou hao le. Hao, bye-bye.

GRACE: What did you do?

GRACE: (Laughing.) GRACE: But seriously, I can't believe it happened like that. Dad said something about giving it back, but I thought it would be something . . . civilized, at least.

GRACE: Yeah, okay. So we'll see you tomorrow. God, lock your doors! Do you think they're going to try to repossess your iPod or something?

GRACE: (Laughing.) GRACE: Okay. Bye.

Barbra heard her stepdaughter sigh and, despite herself, felt a prick of worry for Andrew. "Grace? What happen to your brother? What are you talking about?"

Grace was quiet for a moment, then she searched out her father in the rearview mirror.

"Dad, Andrew said that a repo man came and took his car."

Charles kept his eyes on the road.

"Did you know that was going to happen?"

Barbra watched her husband's grip on the wheel tighten as he stared straight ahead. Then he shrugged, small.

"I don't know, exactly."

"But you knew that he had to give the car back. You said."

Silence.

"What happened to the other cars? Babs, what happened?"

Barbra hadn't taken her eyes off of Charles, but he didn't seem to react to Grace's question. Well, there was no reason she should be spared the truth. It could hardly have escaped her notice that she'd been pulled out of school, and soon they'd be bunking down in dingy motel rooms across America. She turned to face Grace.

"They were all repossessed last week. Your father didn't want to ask Andrew to drive back home, so his was repossessed at school."

"Daddy?"

Charles shrank into his collar. He really wasn't going to reply. Nothing. In all the years of their marriage, in all the years since they'd met, really, Barbra's admiration of Charles had never wavered. She respected the fact that he wasn't an academic, someone with extant family money and a nearsighted squint; that he'd wrested a cosmetics empire out of the wilds of this foreign land. There had been a time, in the sex-soaked half decade that began their relationship, when the sight of him snapping a shirt straight before putting it on had been enough to send a weakening shot between her legs. But now, in the silence that sank into the pinpoints of the perforated leather upholstery, Barbra looked at Charles and felt curiously maternal. She had never even held a newborn before, but it must feel something like this, this urge to soften the world around him while simultaneously finding herself bewildered by the creature to whom she had once been so intimately connected.

Touching his arm, she pointed at a rapidly approaching In-N-Out sign, and said, low, "We should eat before we get there-we can't ask her daughter to feed us all." Charles turned towards her, grateful, and flicked on the right turn signal.

"Eh?" Ama called out. "Ni yao jia you ah?"

"Wo men qu chi In-N-Out, hao ma?" replied Charles.

"Bu bu bu, wo nu er yi jing zai zuo wan fan le."

Oh, dinner at Ama's daughter's house. Barbra couldn't bear the thought. A casserole. A can of soup hastily heated in a dinged pot. An iceberg salad. Or, even worse, something that had been labored over and was still nearly inedible.

Chicken la king. Beef stroganoff.

Any one of those horrid American cookbook concoctions that Ama's daughter probably tried to solder together out of supermarket ingredients in her desert shack.

But Charles, dutiful to his Ama if nothing else, kept the car on the highway and didn't even glance at the cluster of fast food joints as they zoomed past.

"Do we have to stay there?" asked Grace. "Like, for the night?"

Charles peered at her over his shoulder, trying to gauge his daughter's tone. "Maybe we stay. Rest and leave early in the morning. Ama invited us, so it not so polite to refuse."

Oh dear. Barbra hadn't even considered that possibility. Scratchy Kmart sheets and thin bars of soap. It would be a preview of every motel they were due to check into on this journey, probably with a desperately chugging swamp cooler dampening the hard carpet and sun-faded patches on the vulgar sofas. Back to a life she thought she'd left behind.

Grace said nothing, but Barbra could hear the girl shift in the backseat, and a moment later, she felt a pair of teenage knees jam themselves into her spine. May Lee's daughter. That's how Barbra thought of her sometimes. The last productive thing May Lee ever did. Saina felt like Charles's daughter, and Andrew was a sort of free agent, sunny even in the aftermath of his mother's death and strangely impervious to parenting. Grace was the one she had known from infancy and probably the one who came closest to her practical outlook on the world, but a polite distance always remained between the two of them.

Even in close proximity like this, there was a barrier. Barbra felt her seat jostle and sat up slightly, turning her attention to the dusty world outside the car. She had never really seen the point of the desert. It was a useless landscape, more a failure of evolution than a valid ecosystem. Scorpions and cacti, leftovers from Mother Nature's rebellious phase; shouldn't She have gotten past all that by now?

Twentynine Palms, CA.

328 Miles.

THE HOUSE was way tinier than Grace had been expecting. Of course, she'd seen bad neighborhoods before, but they were always places that you passed through on your way to somewhere else. First of all, the walls on the outside were metal. And not a cool metal, like titanium, which would have made it look maybe like a giant MacBook. No, instead they were something flimsy and dinged, probably tin or even aluminum. A foil-wrap house. Second, there was a bouncy castle out front. Like the kind people rented for little kids' birthday parties. Except that Ama hadn't said anything about it being one of her grandkids' birthdays, and the half-deflated castle was covered with a layer of grime, as if it had been sitting on that same patch of dying grass for months, years maybe.

To be fair, this didn't even really seem like a bad neighborhood. Just weird. If you thought about it, this combination of spaceship house and dusty lawn and bouncy castle wouldn't ever exist anywhere else but out here in the desert. Or maybe Vegas-though Grace had never been there before-it's just that whenever ugly things happened people usually said that it looked like Vegas or Florida.

What if the money really was all gone and they ended up having to live somewhere like this? God, suicide really would be better than that.

Ama had gone quiet. Grace tapped her on the shoulder.

"I haven't seen Kathy in a long time."

Ama didn't turn. Just said, "Mmm," in response.

"Maybe almost ten years, right?"

"Kathy hen meng."

"Busy? With the little ones?"

Because Kathy didn't just have kids, she had grandkids, too. Already. That was like her dad having grandkids. Which meant that it was like her having kids.

Wait, that didn't quite make sense-Ama had been her father's wet nurse, she was older than Grace's father. But really not by much. Ama had only been eighteen when she came to take care of him, cast out by her landowning-class family because she was a wayward daughter who had a baby-stillborn, discarded-out of wedlock. She'd been taken in by the neighboring Wang household because they'd had the misfortune of birthing a child who had thrived in the aftermath of a world war. Almost forty years after that, Ama had arrived in America with a teenage Kathy, whose father was an American GI stationed in Taiwan, though no one ever spoke of it.

Ama's daughter followed in that unfortunate military tradition by finding herself married to a Latino man who discarded a promising beginning as a line cook at Michael's in Santa Monica to become an army chef. Kathy was pretty much a single mother even though she was technically still with her husband; in reality, he spent all his time with hot broilers in Bahrain and giant saucepans in Mosul and none of it at their house near the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms.

And then Kathy's own daughter had gone and wasted her perfectly lovely face-a face that, Ama always said with a sigh of relief, was still Chinese despite her diluted blood-by actually joining the military herself. When she went and married a fellow soldier whose family happened to be from the Dominican Republic and popped out two coffee-colored babies in quick succession, Ama didn't even try to contain her dismay.

It was a misfortune that had been amply conveyed to the Wangs.

Before Ama had even managed to shuffle her stockinged legs towards the yard, the house door flew open and two adorable little kids came running out. Grace didn't even like kids-they were always so sticky-but these kids were like baby cocker spaniels or something, all light-up sneakers and squeals with their hair in two miniature Afros. They ran towards the bouncy castle and clambered in, but it sagged so much under their weight that Grace was pretty sure they'd bounce all the way down through the dirt.

"Ama! Are these them? Look at them!" Grace hated girls who squealed over teacup Chihuahuas, but she finally understood the impulse. Now the two little ones were tumbled together in the middle of the castle, the half-inflated floor sandwiching them as they giggled and waved coquettishly at the strangers. Grace waved back and grinned at them. Maybe the next test would be babysitting these kids or saving them from kidnappers or something-that wouldn't be too bad.

Before Grace could walk over to the little duo, the door opened wider and Kathy came out. Dressed in an oversize gray fleece zip-up and anonymous sneakers, she looked almost Ama's age. For just a minute, everyone was quiet, and then Grace's dad bounded forward and threw an arm around Kathy's shoulders.

"Ah, it is good to see you again! So many years!"

Why was he always bouncing? If Grace didn't know her dad, she'd probably think he was gay. Kathy didn't seem that into him either. Instead of returning the hug, she shrank back, pulling her reading glasses off her head and putting them on.

"Alright," she said. "Okay." Turning towards the castle, she shouted, "Nico! Naia!" and a second later the kids were at her side. "Say hi to uncle and auntie," she instructed them, as Barbra leaned over and patted each of their cheeks for a moment.

"So cute," said Barbra, and then, cocking her head towards Charles, she said, "Hwen de hao." That was another one that Grace knew.