Shifu wanted perfection in everything, and he demanded that his family be the perfect American family. Nothing made him happier than a family outing, everybody getting dressed up and going out to a nice restaurant for a meal together. He was in his glory at times like that.
But the kids were older now—Tiffany was twenty-one. Christen was twenty, and Neo was a senior in high school—and they had their own lives. They wanted to be with their friends, not with their parents—at least not all the time.
But Shifu couldn't understand that, and it genuinely hurt him when one of the girls refused to watch television with him because she had something else to do. He couldn't understand the children wanting to grow up and go off on their own. Victoria dreaded the day one of them decided to leave the nest. It wouldn't be an easy parting.
But he had never hurt them, at least not physically.
Verbally, psychologically—that was something else. Whenever report cards came home, he would never praise them for the A's. He'd berate them for the B's. But that was Shifu's whole philosophy of life: The glass was always half empty, and no matter what, things were never good enough. Not for him.
That's why money was so important to him. "It's the dollar that counts, babe," he would always tell her. Money was the only thing that made him happy—money and what it could buy. He loved to shop, loved to buy things for her and the kids. Christian Dior suits for her, spur-of-the-moment vacations, diamonds and gold jewellery for the girls, ridiculous toys for Neo—like the hunting bow that was never used. You could kill a bear with that thing, but it just ended up hanging on the wall over the window in Neo's room, collecting dust. But that was Shifu. He thought nothing of spending four, five, six hundred dollars on a single meal. When it came to his family, price was no object.
Every six months they had new cars, and Shifu was crazy about cars. He'd bought Neo the blue Camaro they had now. The thing was so soaped up Neo had to call home from a pay phone the first time he took it out. He couldn't control the thing, it was so powerful. Shifu had to go pick him up and drive the car back. Now Shifu was telling Neo he was going to buy him a Lamborghini Excalibur, asking him what the priests at school would say if they saw him driving up in one of those.
Victoria just shook her head. There was no reasoning with Shifu when it came to possessions. If he decided they had to have something, they had to have it. Case closed.
It was money and the things money bought that made him feel like he was someone. When he was a poor kid in Chinatown, he felt that he was a nobody. Now he had money, and that made him a somebody. She knew that was the way he saw it. You were worthless unless you had a roll of bills in your pocket, unless you drove a Cadillac, unless you could buy whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. That was what made you a somebody in Shifu's estimation.
Money. That was the problem. It was the trigger that brought out the bad Shifu. Whenever the money started running low, the bad Shifu started coming out. And even though she'd never dream of asking, she knew the money must be running low now. She could smell it.
Where the money came from, she didn't want to know. Some of it came from Shifu's currency exchange business, the Sunset Company, named after the street in Dumont where they lived. Shifu traded foreign currencies, and his business often took him to England and Switzerland.
As far as she knew, that was all legitimate because Shifu filed tax returns and declared that income. In June he'd gone to Zurich to conclude a deal to sell a large sum of Nigerian currency. He'd had high hopes for this deal because he was talking about buying a house in Saddle River that he'd become fixated with, a million-dollar home right around the corner from former President Nixon.
But when he came back from Switzerland, he was in a foul mood. The deal had fallen through at the last minute. They'd screwed him, he kept muttering. The house in Saddle River wasn't mentioned anymore after that.
But currency exchange wasn't his only source of income. There was other money, money that was off the books. There had to be, considering the way they lived. But Victoria didn't ask.
She tore off another piece of bread and dropped it in front of her feet, enticing the ducks to come closer. She remembered times when they'd had to borrow food from the neighbours, they were so broke, and it wasn't that long ago. From borrowed cans of Campbell's soup to extravagant meals at fancy French restaurants—that was their life. To call it a roller coaster would be an understatement. There were ups and downs, and the thrills could be very thrilling; but unlike an amusement park ride, the scary parts were for real.
She glanced over her shoulder at Shifu on the phone and sighed. He was talking to John Sposato. A year ago Shifu had had high hopes for John Sposato. They were going to make a lot of money together, he'd told her. How, he didn't say, but from what she'd gathered, that big payoff hadn't happened yet.
John had had something to do with the currency deal that fell through in Zurich, and Victoria had a feeling that Shifu was just trying to recoup his losses with Sposato now. She remembered the time last summer when she got a call from New Jersey Bell in the middle of the month asking for a down payment on their monthly bill.
"Why?" she asked. Because your charges for the current month are already over seven thousand dollars, the woman from the telephone company said. Victoria nearly fainted. The calls were mostly third-party calls, long distance to Europe, made by Sposato from his place down in south Jersey.
She'd told Shifu about it, expecting him to go through the roof, but he didn't. It was business, he'd said. He had faith in Sposato. John Sposato knew what he was doing, he'd said. Victoria didn't believe it, and she had a feeling Shifu really didn't either. Shifu rarely trusted anyone that much.
Her doubts about Sposato were confirmed when she finally met him. The fact that Shifu let her meet him said a lot in itself because he was very strict about keeping his business life separate from his personal life. Even though at the time Shifu never said it directly, she knew that he wanted her opinion of this new partner— and if he wanted her opinion, that meant he had doubts about the man.
She remembered when she first set eyes on Sposato in the parking lot of a truck stop on Route 80 in central Pennsylvania. To call him a big fat slob would be putting it nicely. His hair was long and stringy and looked as if it hadn't been washed in a month. His last few meals were all over his shirt. He came with his wife and three children, and the toddler screamed and fussed the whole time. The woman gave the poor thing a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal to keep it quiet. They never bothered to feed any of the kids a real meal, and repeated hints that the toddler's diaper needed to be changed were ignored by both parents.
Shifu was thinking about buying into the truck stop with Sposato, and they were here to check out the place. At first Victoria assumed this would be a legitimate investment; then she met Shifu's partner in the flesh. But Shifu was high on Sposato in those days, so she didn't dare spoil it by expressing her gut feelings about him.
The day after they returned from Pennsylvania, Shifu made an appointment with a real estate agent to see houses in Saddle River. She was the agent who showed them the house he'd wanted so badly. Victoria watched Shifu's face from the backseat of the agent's car as they drove through the neighbourhood. Shifu's eyes narrowed when he spotted a video camera mounted on a high pole in the driveway of one grand home. There was another camera sticking out of the mailbox. She knew he wouldn't like this. Shifu insisted on privacy.
But when the real estate agent told him that this was where Nixon lived, his face changed. Victoria knew exactly what he was thinking. Living in the same neighbourhood as a former president of the United States meant prestige. Shifu liked that. From a dirt-poor kid in the Chinatown projects to back-fence neighbours with a former US President. That would really be something for Shifu. That night after dinner he kept joking about what it would be like taking Cerberus out for a walk in that neighbourhood, running into Nixon out walking his dog.
Victoria closed her eyes and sighed.
''No! Just shut up about that!'' Shifu yelled.
The ducks scattered in fright. Victoria glanced over her shoulder and saw Shifu scowling into the pay phone as his voice boomed across the pond. The ducks paddled across to the other side.
Shifu was jabbing his finger into the air, lecturing the phone as if Sposato were right there in front of him. She couldn't make out what he was saying now, but his tone was clear, and the anger in his face confirmed it. What little patience Shifu had was wearing thin. She wondered whether Sposato realized how close to the edge he was skating. From what Shifu had said, Sposato was supposedly a smart guy. For his sake she hoped he was smart enough to stay on Shifu's good side.
Shifu banged the phone down, then picked it up again and punched out another number. She strained to hear who he was calling now.
"Hello, Lenny? It's Shifu." All of a sudden the anger was gone. He was smiling into the phone.
Victoria turned back to the pond. She didn't want to hear anymore.
On the other side of the water the ducks were cowering in a huddle, their wings pulled in tight. She tore up what was left of the loaf and scattered it on the bank, then folded the plastic bag and got up from the bench. There was no use hanging around any longer. The birds were too scared to come back. The day was starting to get hot anyway. You could feel the humidity rising already. She walked across the grass to go wait in the car. It was going to be another wicked day.