Elizabeth looked at Jane, who said nothing. Kitty rolled her eyes.
“If this is what it takes, I’m never getting married,” Mary said.
“Won’t your online boyfriend be disappointed?” Kitty said.
Alexa grinned and kissed her husband to a round of applause.
Jade cooed with delight.
Lydia barreled into the table, champagne splashing out of the glasses in her hands and onto the tablecloth. “Party time!”
Kitty reached for a glass, but Lydia pushed her aside.
“Way more FOBs here tonight than I thought,” she said, downing the first glass.
“Lydia!” Jane cried.
Kitty looked near tears, batting at Lydia’s arm. “Mommy, can I have champagne? Tell Lydia to give me the other one . . .”
“Lydia, sit down and be quiet,” Elizabeth added. “You can’t say things like that.”
Jade waved her off with a mild laugh. “LB, let her have her fun.”
“Can I—” Kitty tried. “Mommy . . .”
“Ai ya, Kitty, have whatever you want.”
“Oh, please,” Lydia said, sliding into her seat. “It’s, like, a compliment. It means that they actually got here, didn’t they?”
Mary sniffed. “Fresh off the boat is a pejorative—”
“People can hear you,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Remember where you are, please.”
Lydia mocked her with a quick raise of the eyebrows and rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, draining the second flute. “I’m at my friend’s wedding. You’re lucky you were even invited.”
“Your manners, Lydia.”
Lydia waved her off. “Chill, would you? Try and remember what it’s like to have fun.”
“Or you ought to try and have less,” Mary replied.
Lydia jabbed her thumb against the tip of her nose, oinking at her in response.
“Lydia,” Jade sighed. “Who taught you to do that? You look so ugly.”
“She started it.”
Apart from their squabbles and Lydia’s insistence on abandoning sobriety, the reception otherwise passed in an orderly procession of courses and easy conversation. They watched the bride and groom pour tea for each other’s parents, slice and shove wedding cake into each other’s faces, and dance the first dance. Jade burned through a stack of Pizza Hut napkins ferreted from her purse as she cried through the toasts, and the Chen girls all learned how many people their mother seemed to know (and how many people seemed to know something about the five of them). As they picked at the last of their cake, they splintered into the usual factions: Mary sullen at the table, Lydia and Kitty unrestrained at the bar, and Jane and Elizabeth on the dance floor, trying to make each other laugh.
When she’d had enough of the crowd, Elizabeth returned to their table to see Kitty and Lydia pushing their way through to the floor. They draped their arms over one another, bony hips jerking side to side as they whooped and pouted in exaggerated sensuality. Performing for cameras that weren’t there. One day they might learn to admire people other than the Hilton sisters, but for now, they were the stars of their own reality show, too glamorous for their neighborhood by far and too busy to be bothered.
Mary grunted in greeting, sliding Lydia’s untouched glass of water from across the table.
Elizabeth sank onto her seat, toeing off her heels and flexing her aching feet. Jade had howled in complaint any time she’d even looked at her camera case that evening—not that it would have fit in her purse—but she couldn’t imagine a better time for pictures. The aunties and uncles this side of drunk, the kids losing themselves to the music on the dance floor, and no one paying attention to what she was doing. It wouldn’t be hard to find some shots—the uncles gambling on cards; the waiters loitering by the galley, smoking behind the kitchen. Jade thought it a waste of time, hiding behind a camera instead of taking center stage, but she didn’t understand the appeal of things that didn’t make money. Elizabeth liked to look. It taught her to slow down, to notice the details. It taught her how to be in the world.
Jane slid into the free seat beside her. “What’s on your mind?”
Elizabeth created a frame with her thumbs and index fingers and centered Jane. “Snap.”
“So you’re bored.”
“Who could be bored at a wedding?” Elizabeth said with a wave of the hand. “Did you see Kitty or Lydia? Are they still conscious?”
Mary gravely shook her head. “The kind of attention seeking they do won’t earn them the response that they’re looking for.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Not the response you’re looking for, but I think they get something out of it.”
Mary sniffed, turning back towards her reading. “It’s so inappropriate.”
“What’s appropriate for you, Mary?”
Mary didn’t answer in time. A rumble of discontent rippled from the center of the dance floor, the thick mesh of bodies parting to reveal a figure marching through with short, rapid-fire steps. No one else could move with such singular intent and focus, such predatorial precision. No one else would have a crisis at someone else’s wedding. But Jade Chen was not anyone.
The pulsing beats of “Waiting for Tonight” blasted, and Elizabeth took a gulp of her champagne, steeling herself for the landing.
Jade crashed against the table midsentence, white-knuckling the back of Jane’s chair as she tried to catch her breath. “Didn’t know,” she gasped, “knew the family, but Aunt Pippa didn’t say, horrible, and I, ai ya, why is he at Alexa Hu’s wedding, and she told me . . .”
Elizabeth pushed one of the water glasses towards her. “Mother. Breathe.”
She took a bracing breath. “You’ll never believe who came tonight.”
Jane and Elizabeth glanced at each other and shrugged. Mary didn’t even glance up from the wedding program.
“Our angel investor!” she cried. “He’s come for the wedding, would you believe it, with friends, and he’s so excited to meet you, Jane.” There could be no denying her conviction. If she believed it, it was as good as destined. Verification was for the weak-willed and nonbelieving like Elizabeth, who doubted that the investor remembered anything about Jade’s life, never mind wanting to meet her daughters.
“And you too, LB. I’m sure there’s lots of . . . politics to talk to you about. They’re smart, you know. And single,” she said. And there it was—the urgency of the occasion. “He and Bryan are good friends.”
Among the neighborhood, there were certain golden sons, long-awaited, much-anticipated, and over-appreciated. But with great prestige came great expectation—academic achievement, professional acceleration, Chinese wives, and Chinese sons all their own—and apprehension. Fattened as they were on endless praise, minor liberties, and their mothers’ devoted attention, they often wasted what freedom they earned. Bryan, Mr. Alexa himself, fell among that lauded group, shaping his life out of what his parents wanted: piano lessons, Ivy League, law school, corporate ladder climbing. When she was younger, she had envied those boys for their freedom, but what good was freedom to choose if you never chose anything at all?