The Bride Test Read Online Free Page B

berth, he jogged to his front door, avoided the thorny weed bush that thrived in the shade beneath the awning, and let himself in.
    Inside, he removed his shoes and immediately peeled his socks off. Heaven was bare feet sinking into his house’s 1970s shag carpet. Initially, he’d hated it— the pea-green color was offensive— but walking on it felt a lot like taking a stroll in the clouds Mary Poppins style. It used to smell funny, but time had fixed it. Either that, or he’d assimilated the scents of mothballs and old ladies into his identity. He was going to keep the carpet until the house became officially condemned by Santa Clara County.
    There Quan was, sitting on Khai’s couch with his feet up on Khai’s coffee table, watching some finance program on CNBC as he drank Khai’s only cold can of Coca-Cola— he could see the condensation dripping over the cursive lettering just like in a commercial. The rest of his soda was room temperature because you could only fit one can into his fridge at a time. The valuable real estate was taken by Tupperware containers filled with his mom’s cooking. She thought he was going to starve to death if she didn’t personally feed him, and in true Mom fashion, she never did anything halfway.
    “Yo, you’re home. How’s it going?” Quan asked as he took a long slurp of Coke and then hissed as the burn worked down his throat.
    “Fine.” Khai narrowed his eyes at his brother. The hiss and burn from the cold Coke was one of Khai’s favorite things, and now he had to wait four hours until a new can was ready. “Why are you here?”
    “Dunno. Mom told me to come. Apparently, she’s on her way.”
    Ah shit, he saw nonsensical errands in his near future. What would it be this time? Driving to the grocery store all the way in San Jose to buy discount oranges? Or importing commercial quantities of seaweed extract from Japan to cure his aunt’s cancer? No, it had to be something worse, because she needed both her sons involved. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it might be.
    “I need to take a shower.” His clothes were wet and sticky, and he wanted them off.
    “You might wanna be fast. I just heard someone pull into the driveway.” Quan took a good look at Khai then, and his eyebrows arched. “Did you just run home from work in a suit?”
    “Yeah, I do every day. This kind is engineered for motion.” He pointed to the elastic cuffs at his ankles. “And the fabric breathes really well. It’s also machine washable.”
    Quan grinned and took another slurp from his pilfered Coke. “So my brother’s been running the streets of Silicon Valley like an evil Asian Terminator. I like it.”
    The strange imagery made Khai hesitate, and just as he opened his mouth to respond, a familiar voice outside the house announced in Vietnamese, “Here, here, here, here, I have lots of food. Help me bring it in.” His mom never spoke English unless she absolutely had to. Basically, she spoke English to the health inspector at her restaurant.
    “What?” Khai asked in English. He honestly didn’t know how to speak Vietnamese, though he understood it well enough. “I still
have
lots of food. I’m going to start feeding the homeless if you—”
    His mom appeared in the doorway with a proud smile and three boxes of mangoes. “Hi,
con
.”
    Because he didn’t want her to break her back, he stuffed his socks in his pocket and took the boxes from her. “I don’t eat fruit, remember? They’re going to go bad.”
    He was almost back out the door with them when she said, “No, no, they’re not for you. They’re for Mỹ. So she doesn’t miss home too much.”
    He paused. Who the hell was Mỹ?
    Quan got to his feet. “What’s going on?”
    “Help me bring in more fruit first.” To Khai, she said, “Put those in the kitchen.”
    Khai walked the boxes into his kitchen in a state of utter confusion. Why was this fruit in
his
house when it was supposed to prevent
Mỹ
, whoever she