Six
AIMES
Aimes is trying to get a photo of herself with her beautiful cup of dirty matcha, but neither the drink nor her face is cooperating. It’s one of those days where even the most flattering angles don’t seem to be doing her any favors, and the sheen of condensation sticking to her plastic cup is making it hard to see the beautiful swirls of brown and green. The swirls are the whole reason why she’d ordered a dirty matcha. She really prefers straight coffee, but straight coffee doesn’t get as many likes as a swirly, multicolored drink, so here she is. She tries pouting, but her chin trembles, and before she knows it, a tear slips down her cheek, then another. “Fuck,” she mutters, swiping at her face savagely.
“Amy?” someone says.
“It’s Aimes, actually,” Aimes says automatically. Story of her life, correcting people about her name. She dabs at her face again before looking up. Standing in front of her is a tiny old woman. “Um…I’m not interested.”
The old woman sits down anyway.
Aimes looks around the café. Is this a prank? She wants to ask the old lady to leave, but that would be rude, and she looks like a helpless little grandma, and what kind of monster would be rude to a helpless little grandma? “Are you lost?” she says kindly.
“No, my dear. Come, I help you with that.” She plucks the phone smartly out of Aimes’s hand, aims the camera at her, and takes a picture before Aimes realizes it.
“Wait, you can’t just—huh.” The picture is actually a good one. Aimes’s green eyes are somehow brighter, and her expression of slight surprise makes her look really pretty and innocent. For a split second, Aimes experiences a tiny shot of endorphins at the sight of the flattering photo, then reality overwhelms her once more. She takes the phone back from the old lady and mumbles, “Thanks.”
“I come here to talk to you, Aim-zee.”
“It’s just Aimes.”
“Aimes,” the old woman says. “I like that name. Very good name.”
“What did you come here to talk to me about?” Aimes says.
“Oh yes. I come here to see how you doing. You sleeping well? Eating healthy?”
“What?” Again, Aimes looks around the café, wondering if there’s a hidden camera somewhere. This has got to be a prank. “Who are you?”
“I’m Vera, and I worried about you.”
“Why would you be worried about me?”
Now it’s Vera’s turn to look confused. “Because your boyfriend die. I think that make most people sad, when boyfriend die. Unless he is bad boyfriend?”
“Oh.” Of course she is here about Xander. Very few people have actually heard the news of Xander’s death, but Aimes had known it was only a matter of time before the Internet found out. And when that happens, what would they find out about her? Aimes gives herself a mental shake. If this old woman is here to ask about Xander, she must be related to him. She softens with pity. “Are you his mom? His grandma?”
“Nothing like that. In fact, I am very confuse about who he is, I am hoping you can tell me.”
Panic churns in Aimes’s stomach. “I don’t know—” She stops herself. Her eyes brim with tears again. She is so bad at this. She is so bad at everything. “I’m sorry,” she sputters.
“Oh dear. Don’t get upset. Come, you eat this.” Somehow, Vera has produced a steaming container of what looks like pork rib soup. Aimes looks down at it blankly. A spoon is placed in her hand. “Eat,” Vera says, and Aimes does so without really comprehending just what the hell is going on.
The broth is somehow light and yet rich, a clean flavor that speaks of hours of gentle simmering that goes straight to Aimes’s belly and warms her up from within. If it were possible to be brought back to life by food, then that is what Aimes is experiencing. Except she doesn’t deserve to be brought back to life. Not after what she did to Xander.
“How long you been together with Xander?” Vera says, then adds, “Try the pork, fall off the bone.”
The pork rib is so tender that all it needs is a soft poke of the spoon before the meat slides off completely. Aimes’s brain is torn between squealing, Don’t eat food from strangers! Stranger danger! and OMG this is so good. I feel like a child again. I want a bedtime story now, please. Her mouth opens and says, “About eight months.”
“Quite long. You two look very good together.”
Yes, they do—did—look very good together; that was the whole point.
“What he like, this Xander? He treat you well?”
“Yes. He’s—he was—the perfect boyfriend.” The answer comes out automatically. She’s said it so many times. The perfect boyfriend. Whenever anyone asks, that’s the word Aimes and Xander always used. “Perfect.” Of course, all of their Instagram post captions talk about how impossible it is to reach perfection, how we shouldn’t strive for it, how we should always strive for authenticity instead. But that’s the thing about captions. You want to convey perfection while at the same time appearing like you haven’t toiled away at achieving it. You want to be effortlessly perfect. And that was what she and Xander were. Naturally, casually, perfectly perfect.
What Aimes expected Vera to do is go, “Awww,” like most people do. But what Vera actually says is, “Sound boring.”
“You can’t say that,” Aimes blurts out.
“Why not?”
Before Aimes can answer, a tall thermos thunks down next to the container of broth. “Chinese tea. Pu-erh. Very invigorating, bring you back to life. You need it.” Vera unscrews it, pours out a cup, and puts it in Aimes’s hand. “Drink.”
Again, Aimes obeys without really thinking and nearly burns her mouth with it. She takes a smaller sip, and this time, she tastes it. A taste that is completely different from the dirty matchas and the oat milk lattes she’s been having every day for the last however many years. The word that comes to mind is…“authentic.” She looks down at the cup of tea. It looks completely unremarkable, something utterly un-Instagrammable and therefore uninteresting to her. And yet. Aimes takes another sip.
“Xander was a kind boy?” Vera says.
Aimes nods wordlessly. The less she says about Xander, the better.
“How was he kind? Give me example.”
Damn it. This old woman is something else. “Um, I don’t know, like the normal way.” She struggles to come up with an anecdote, but her brain seems to have been replaced by scrambled eggs.
“How you meet him?”
Ah, well now, this she does have an answer for. The perfect answer. “We were at Trader Joe’s,” she says, and the words flow out smoothly, she’s recited this so many times. “We reached for the last carton of milk at the same time, and our hands brushed each other’s. I looked up and there he was.” Normally, people sigh dreamily at this point. Vera narrows her eyes, but Aimes keeps going. “I said, ‘I’ll make you a banging cup of latte with this if you let me have it.’ And the rest is history.” The perfect meet-cute. Unfortunately, it also happens to be a complete fabrication.
“Sound like a movie,” Vera says.
“Yeah, it was kind of a movie-quality moment,” Aimes says.
“No, I mean, I think I see in a movie before.”
Aimes swallows. Despite the amazing food and tea, she really wants Vera to leave now. “Anyway, who are you? I don’t—why are you here? How did you find me?”
“I told you already, I am Vera.”
“Yes, but why are you here?”
“Oh. I forget that part. I am such an old lady, you know. So helpless and frail.”
Vera clearly looks anything but helpless or frail. In fact, next to Vera, Aimes feels helpless and frail. But she’s too scared of Vera to challenge her, so she says nothing.
“I am investigating Xander’s death. I am investigator.” Vera slides a business card across the table.
It says:
Vera Wong.
Tea expert. Murder investigator. Entrepreneur.
Owner: Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. Est. 1974
“Investigator?” Aimes’s voice feels like it’s coming from afar. She’s pretty sure her soul has left her body. Her entire mind has imploded and is screaming, What if she finds out?
“Oh yes. I solve a murder case last year that the police couldn’t. Actually, they think it was accident, but I know—aha—must be murder. I always know, because I am Chinese mother; there is nothing we don’t know.”
Aimes can feel her left eyelid twitch. She forces a smile. “But why are you investigating Xander’s death? The police told me it looked like a suicide.” Does she sound sad? She should. She is. But the fear is kind of overriding the sadness.
“Maybe it is suicide, maybe not. Someone ask me to look into it, so I do, and my instincts are going off. Something not right here.”
Oh god. It was Aimes, wasn’t it? The “something not right.” Vera can probably sniff the guilt coming off Aimes in rank waves. “Who asked you to look into it? His family?”
“No. Actually, I want to get in touch with his family, but I can’t find them. Can you give me their number?”
Noooo , a small, high-pitched voice in the back of Aimes’s mind squeaks. Why does she keep making things worse for herself? “Um, I—he wasn’t close to his family. Never really mentioned them.” Oh no, that was bad. This is bad. This whole thing is catastrophic, and she needs to stop talking before Vera catches her in too many lies.
“Oh? You been together almost a year and you never meet his family?”
“Well, they’re…yeah. I don’t know. We don’t—we didn’t really talk about that stuff.”
Vera narrows her eyes. Anytime now, she’s going to leap across the table and slap handcuffs around Aimes’s wrists and—
“Hmm. I don’t understand young people relationship nowadays,” Vera says. “In my day, first thing you do when you start dating is get to know each other family.”
“Yeah, well, things are different now,” Aimes mumbles. “So anyway, how did you know where to find me?”
Vera still wears a thoughtful expression when Aimes asks that. She snaps back to the present. “Oh yes, the Instagram, of course.” She takes out her phone, squinting down at it, and taps on it with her index finger. “Here. Your profile. You always posting drinks from same place every morning. I just look at the label on the cup and I visit the café. You should stop drinking coffee, is not good for you, will give you wrinkles. Look at me, I am so old, sixty-one already, but my face look so young because I don’t drink coffee.”
Aimes’s eyes are glued to the phone screen, where there are, indeed, a ton of photos of herself carrying a coffee cup clearly labeled Salthouse Coffee . From a very far distance, she hears herself mumbling: “My grandma is seventy and she runs marathons. I don’t think sixty is that old…” But inside, her mind is squawking, You stupid, dumb girl. Why would you post these photos every morning? Of course any random stranger online could find you. Where are your survival instincts, you moron? But Aimes has been living her life according to fulfilling anything and everything Instagram desires, and posting her morning coffee has been something that garnered a ton of likes, so she never really thought about things as pesky as personal safety. And now here she is, confronted by an actual, real-life investigator. “I know I asked this before, but who hired you?” she blurts out after a while. Possibilities whiz through Aimes’s head, so many of them. So many people hate her, want nothing more than to see her fall.
“Someone who is close to Xander. But you don’t worry about that, is not your problem, okay? Now, you sit here and finish your soup and your tea, and when you are done, you return the containers to me, okay? These things cost money, you know.”
“Wha…where should I take them to?”
Vera taps on the business card. “My teahouse, of course. You come by on Wednesday at seven p.m. I cook dinner for you. Crispy roast duck.” And with that, Vera is gone, leaving behind a plastic container of delicious homemade soup, tea, and a giant crater in Aimes’s aesthetically pleasing life.