Jason! Jason Chin. I’m realizing how my many nicknames for you won’t really fly in the 21st century, but Jason, it’s good to be writing you. I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for so many years. You might not believe it, but I still have your wedding pictureand your daughter’s birth announcement. I saved them and have been meaning to reconnect for a long time. I don’t know if you’re still in Manhattan. How is Rachel? How old is your daughter now? Are you already an empty nester? I’m coming to Brooklyn in a couple of weeks to help my mother move to a nursing home. Is it possible you’d like to meet?
Jason immediately invited Macon to the Park Slope brownstone. It wasn’t until he’d received Macon’s message that he understood how deeply he regretted their growing apart.
Jason pored over his friend’s profile page. Macon still lived in Los Angeles and was a surgeon at UCLA—chief of the division of cardiac surgery.
He scrolled until he found a photo. Macon, though balding, was unmistakable. He wore a suit and stood with his arm around another Black man, the latter with salt-and-pepper muttonchops.Twenty years of partnership with Thomas Collins, the caption said.And now, my husband.
“Husband,” Jason mumbled to himself, removing his reading glasses. He smiled at the screen until his eyes began to water. “Husband,” he repeated to himself, again and again, as if the word, like a magician’s handkerchief cloth, might yank invisible things into view, bring back all the many memories Jason had forgotten or suppressed.
The day before Macon’s visit, Jason bought more junk food than he’d ever brought into the brownstone: Drake’s Devil Dogs, several boxes of Jell-O pudding, and four Hostess fruit pies in different flavors, which he sliced into quarters as if they were sampling fancy cheeses. He wanted to pay homage to the old days, even if it spiked their blood sugar levels.
“You chopped your hair,” Macon pointed out.
“And you have none left!” Jason replied, and guffawing, they brought each other in for a hug. Toned and glowing from the California sun, Macon was fit. Jason tried to remember the last time he’dhugged Macon, and could only recall the skinny boy he’d chased on the jungle gym.
Rachel and Sadie were at work, so for several hours, the two men sat on the living room couch, tasting and sometimes spitting out their formerly favorite snacks, impressed by their own disgust. Macon told Jason about Thomas, who was an actor, and about their wedding at the Hollywood Bowl.
“Give Mrs. Chin my best. She was always a sweet lady.”
“She has heart troubles. I’m taking her to the doctor Saturday. She’ll be happy to hear about you.”
“My mom thought Mrs. Chin had moved far away.”
“Just to Manhattan Chinatown.”
“Well, that’s far away to Mom.” Macon chuckled. “My mom won’t leave Brooklyn. I keep trying to get her out to LA, but she’s too attached. That’s why we had to settle with this East New York nursing home. But I need to ask you, Jason.” Macon leaned in, a sly grin on his face that reminded Jason of the old, untoned Macon. “Am I in the right Brooklyn? Where did all the white people come from?”
They both laughed, and Jason was glad he still had a friend who could see this. Sometimes, spending time with Park Slope neighbors or his colleagues atVerbena Press, he felt as if he’d only dreamed the Brooklyn of his adolescence. And yet Macon’s comment also made him a tad defensive, for wasn’t Rachel part of that white arrival? If he could have filled the city with carbon copies of Rachel, he would have.
He thought of Sadie, then. He was proud of her for all her research into the history of the Livonia Avenue restaurant. He was also ashamed that she had come to need so little from him. Jason wondered what Macon would have done in his place.
“You know what Sadie found out?” Jason said to him. “The building in Brownsville where my family’s restaurant used to be—it burned down in the late ’70s.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?”
“It’s not clear.” He was already having second thoughts about bringing up the subject. “After my dad closed the restaurant, he rented it to tenants, then sold the building. But right after the sale, there was a fire. There are people in Brownsville who think my father burned it down.”
“Did he?”
Macon’s sly grin reappeared, but this time Jason was taken aback.
“Wait—you’re not seriously asking me, are you?”
Macon’s head wobbled with hesitation. “Your dadwassomething.”
“He was,” Jason agreed.
“Temperamental.”
“Yep.”
“And, I’m sorry, Jason—he was, you know, a bit, uh…”
“Racist. Absolutely. I know.”
“And all the time, ranting about those tenants. Saying he hoped they’d go to hell.”
“Why don’t I remember that?”
