They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Dumplings

I picked a dumpling house on Beach Street in Chinatown, up a narrow flight of stairs.

It had eight tables and a television showing a soccer match nobody was watching.

Gabriel Maitland came up the stairs in a dark suit and stopped at the top.

"Is there a menu?"

"No," I said.

"What do we order?"

"We don't," I said. "He decides."

The owner came out from behind the kitchen curtain, an old man in a white apron with flour up to the elbows.

When he saw me, he lifted both arms.

"Doc!" he said. "Doc, you're late!"

"Sorry, Uncle," I said, and then something rapid in Cantonese about the traffic and his wife's knee.

He answered at length, with gestures, and slapped my shoulder.

Then he put his hand flat on Gabriel's back and pushed him toward a table by the window.

"Doc," Gabriel said, sitting. "He called you Doc."

"I stitched his wife's hand in March. She told him I was the only person in that building who looked at her instead of her chart."

"You speak Cantonese."

"Badly," I said.

"He didn't seem to think so," he said.

"He's polite."

I picked up my chopsticks.

Gabriel watched me do it, and for some reason I felt it all the way down my arms.

The food came without our asking, one plate after another.

There were pork dumplings and pan-fried buns, and a bowl of soup with a spoon in it as long as a ladle.

I ate.

Gabriel tried a dumpling and shut his eyes.

"I've been to a lot of restaurants," he said. "I think I've been to the wrong ones."

"Most people have," I said.

"What else is on the list?"

"Of what?" I said.

"Of things you do." He nodded at the room. "A resident who speaks Cantonese and gets called Doc by a man with flour on his face. I think I've only seen the first page."

"You'll have to buy the second."

"You said no money," he said.

"You said it first," I said.

He grinned.

It was a quick, crooked grin, and it reached his whole face and left it looking younger.

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