Blake laughed. “You sound guiltier by the second.”

“I don’t need my mom to freak,” Charlie said.

Blake chuckled. “Okay, there are some things a guy wants to know that he can’t really ask his mom, that’s understood. Unless you’re researching building a bomb, I’m pretty trustworthy.”

“You’re saying you can keep your mouth shut? If it’s not a bomb?”

“Or a crime,” Blake said. “If you ask me to keep a confidence about something that’s not dangerous to yourself or others, I’m good for it.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, probably,” he said, taking another big bite of apple.

Charlie gave him a kind of naughty smile. Blake must think he was looking up things like testosterone and wet dreams and the average age a guy loses his virginity. He’d already done all that. “My mother is Amerasian. She doesn’t want to talk too much about her family history. Or mine. I don’t think my biological father is really dead and I think it’s possible her Vietnamese mother isn’t, either. Vietnamese refugees were scattered all over the place. A lot of countries accepted them and families didn’t all go to one place. Some spent decades finding each other. My mother’s father couldn’t have been a soldier—she’s too young for that. Saigon fell and all the Americans left by 1975 but her grandfather could have been a GI. I’m trying to find out who I am.”

Blake stopped chewing for a moment. He started again slowly, finally swallowing. “Whoa.”

“Yeah, you can’t tell her. When the Vietnamese part of her goes nuts, it’s really scary. I’m not real sure how much Vietnamese she really knows, but I’m sure she knows all the swear words. Her temper is stored in the Asian parts.”

“Listen, Charlie, she probably just wants to hold on to that information until you’re a little older, more mature and able to deal with the facts in a grown-up way.”

“No, I played that card. She said there are some things better left buried, and she said a lot of it in another language.”

“Aw, man,” Blake said, resting his head in his hand.

“Well, it’s not a bomb,” Charlie said.

“It sort of is,” Blake corrected. “Why can’t you just look up stuff like how often a guy thinks about sex in a day? Like a normal fourteen-year-old.”

“How often does he?” Charlie asked.

“It’s perfectly ridiculous how often,” Blake said, sounding a little weary.

Eight

So, there was a lot more to Charlie and Lin Su than a struggling single mother and a kid with asthma. Blake decided to get his own laptop out and do a little research. Saigon fell three years before Blake was born, eight years before Lin Su was born... The United States had evacuated all military and civilian Americans in 1975; almost all POWs had been returned before that and only a small number didn’t make it out with that group. By 1980 there were only a handful of Americans left in Vietnam.

Lin Su had told Charlie that her mother immigrated, sponsored by a church. Lin Su was born in the United States. She didn’t know who her father was but her mother said he was American. Her mother, in ill health, gave up Lin Su and she was adopted by an American family at the age of three. That same family, disapproving of her pregnancy at eighteen, told her she was on her own if she insisted on having the baby—Charlie.

What Charlie said made sense—if Lin Sue was born in 1982 or ’83 her father could not have been an American serviceman. Her mother’s father could have been a GI, however, if Lin Su’s mother had been conceived between 1960 and 1967.

From the time of Lin Su’s mother’s birth till now, fifty years of mystery? Or cover-up?

I think people deserve to know where they came from, if possible, Charlie had told Blake.

Blake couldn’t argue with that logic. But he knew a little too much about where he came from and it hadn’t done that much good. Though he had loved his mother devotedly, helplessly, there had been so many times he had wished he’d been given up for adoption. He might not be who he was today, however, had that happened.

Listen, I can keep my mouth shut but I can’t help you with this because you’re defying your mother, Blake told Charlie.

I understand. Just don’t tell her. It could take me years to figure out, especially behind her back, so don’t tell her and jam me up.

Now the information, what little there was, sat like a boulder in his gut and he couldn’t look at Lin Su in the same way. She wasn’t just a single mother of a sick kid soldiering on despite debt and difficulty. Now she was the daughter of a refugee who had been spirited out of a war-torn country as a teenager who then became a mother who couldn’t care for her child. Lin Su had been adopted by the new family who took her in. And then she was cast out when the same thing happened to her. When she found herself alone and pregnant. Oh, God, she wasn’t just a little complicated like he thought. She was as complicated as he was, and probably in a lot of the same ways.

He tried to behave normally around her but was conscious of the fact that meeting her eyes wasn’t easy. He tried to be around as much as ever, which meant at least showing up for a few minutes after school to check in with his neighbors and get the latest updates from Charlie and Winnie, but covering his concern wasn’t smooth. Even though her laugh seemed to come quicker these days, which probably had everything to do with being out of that crappy trailer, his laugh was a little stunted.

“Blake, are you feeling well?” she asked him.

“Fine, why do you ask?”

“You’re a little quiet. You seem preoccupied.”

“Ah, that. It’s just the race coming up. I think that happens to me.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, smiling. “Tahoe, right?”

“Right.”

“Charlie can’t stop talking about it.”

* * *

It was at the end of the week, Friday afternoon while Winnie napped, that Lin Su paid Blake a visit. She went to his front door and rang the bell rather than adopting their casual habit of trotting up the beach stairs, something they only did as neighbors if someone was out on the deck. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said. “Need a hand with something?”

“No. I mean, possibly. If you have a minute, I’d like to talk to you about Charlie.”