Page 33 of See You at the Sunset

“Oh my god, Mimi, we have to go back to the Del Rey. The food was incredible. It’s right up your alley. And the vibes were immaculate. I had this cocktail—” Jia stopped. Did she have that cocktail before she went to the bathroom and ran into Henry? Or was it the one she had at the end of the night when Henry was leaving the restaurant and walked right past her?

“What’s with the scrunched nose? The cocktail wasn’t good?” Mimi asked.

Jia shook herself out of her memory. “Oh, no. The cocktail was amazing! But Henry Shin was there. And he was being all macho-caveman telling me to be careful. And I was like, what business is it of yours? And he was like,growlandgrunt. And he said I had bad friends! Can you believe that? Well, he didn’t exactly say those words, so maybe I won’t put that on him. But still.”

Mimi sat there, staring at her granddaughter, nodding her head as if totally understanding where she was coming from. Yup, Mimi and Jia were of the same cloth. She probably felt the same way about Henry.

“Jia, honey, I’ve been meaning to ask you this. And you know I don’t like to pry.”

Jia slid her gaze over to her grandmother. “Since when have you not liked to pry, Grandmother? I seem to recall you’ve been prying about details in my life and everyone else’s for as long as I’ve been alive. And don’t get me wrong, I love that about you. It’s because you care. And I like to believe I inherited this very trait from you as well,” she said.

“Well, that may be the case. And you’re right, I care. So tell me right now why this young man has gotten so far under your skin. What did he do?”

“What young man?” Jia asked. “Oh, Matthew? I mean, he’s not under my skin exactly. He did say something that kind of raised a red flag last night. And I don’t know how I feel about him helping people sell their homes...” Jia wondered if Matthew had sold the home that Dennis had moved into. Is that how Henry knew Matthew? Maybe Henry was just projecting his bad feelings about Matthew onto her. Okay, this made her feel a little bit better.

“Not Matthew, my dear. Dennis’s grandson, Hank,” Mimi clarified.

“Henry,” Jia corrected her. She could never see him as Hank again. She could barely see him as anything other than Henry J. Shin, Esquire. Jia was so preoccupied by the fact that he was here this summer—what were the odds?—that she didn’t even realize she’d just googledEsquireon her phone to see why lawyers used those letters in the first place.

“Exactly,” her grandmother said, bringing her out of her thoughts.

Jia raised her head from her phone. Mimi’s left eyebrow lifted high to her forehead. Jia’s shoulders dropped as she conceded.

“Urgh,” she let out. “I don’t know that it’s even worth going over. It’s just, he confuses me is all.”

The corner of her grandmother’s mouth lifted. Jia could see where her mind was going. It was time to set her grandmother’s errant thoughts and assumptions straight. Let her know how she and Henry were acquainted. Jia couldn’t have her thinking otherwise.

“Okay, Mimi, here’s the tea.” Jia grabbed both of Mimi’s hands and held them so that she’d be braced for the news. “Henry and I know each other... from before Dennis moved to Sunset Hills,” Jia admitted.

Her grandma stared at Jia for a second, examining her the way that she did when she thought she needed to be reading between the lines. She nodded once, as if coming to a conclusion. “Wait one second,” she said, holding up a finger while walking to the back slider door.

“Mildred,” she called out to the house to the left of them.

“Yeah?” a voice called back.

“Gather the ladies and meet at the bench in ten,” Mimi instructed.

“I’m in my bathrobe. Can we make it twenty?”

“Ten minutes. No one’s paying any attention to an eighty-year-old woman walking around in a bathrobe,” she said.

She went back into the house.

“Did you just call the troops in? Grandma, I don’t want this to be a big Sunset Hills ordeal. I don’t want everyone gossiping about it,” Jia said.

“If you’re this torn up about a boy, especially one that we know personally, we need the troops, my dear. We’ve got hundreds of years of heartache and wisdom between us. We’ll get you through this.”

“Grandma, you’ve got this all wrong. I don’t have feelings for Henry other than maybe annoyance and irritation,” Jia protested.

“And that’s exactly why we need the big guns.”

Ten minutes later, five women were gathered at the northwest corner of the neighborhood park, where a bench dedicated to Mr. Charles K. Lee sat beneath a huge palm tree. Jia being the youngest among them by fifty years, she allowed two of them to sit, while her grandmother sat in a foldable camping chair she’d made Jia bring with them, and Betty rolled up in her electric scooter.

Mildred did indeed show up in her bathrobe, complete with fuzzy slippers and a bonnet over her curlers.

“What’s the emergency, Mimi? Mildred said it was acode red. I was about to drink my morning Smooth Move tea,” Betty announced.

“Oh, Betty, I’m so sorry we interrupted teatime. It’s not actually an emergency,” Jia said.