The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read Online Free Page A

guests on their way in or out and snark about them once they leave, I take my four smoke breaks. The American returns from whatever important business he was on and gives me an overeager, toothy smile. I even decide to crack open my Beginner’s Japanese Textbook.
Banzai!
    But I don’t touch the glass of water.
    On my way to bed, I pause in the stairwell by the second floor. There are footsteps from the hall and I back up against the banister, my heartbeat quickening—I will tell her I’m sorry, I will tell her I didn’t mean to forget the water.
    But it is Mr. Henry who rounds the corner, not the girl in the bath, and he looks at me quizzically when he finds me lurking on the stairs.
    “What are you doing?”
    A good question. I’m not really sure myself. The words that come out of me next feel clumsy on my lips, as if they’re not mine: “Uncle, I have a question. Was there ever a tree out front?”
    “A tree?” He is taken aback. “Yes, there was a tree, a big cây hoa sứ. White and yellow flowers that shed everywhere.Your father and I had to sweep them up every morning. But that was long before you were born, maybe forty years ago. It was cut down during the war. Now, since you’re still up, go and finish the rounds for me and make sure the kitchen and the door to the roof are locked.”
    I N THE MIDDLE of the night there is a thunderstorm, one of those sudden, violent, lashing storms you get this time of year that come out of nowhere, drench the world, then end as quickly as they started. Lightning silhouettes the crooked Hanoi rooftops and I drift in and out of sleep while the rain throws itself against my window.
    But Thursday is so sunny you wouldn’t believe a storm even happened were it not for the nasty humidity. It creeps into the hotel from outside, making my collar go limp. Today I’m trying my hardest to be
perky
. Mr. Henry has been giving me odd looks since our conversation on the stairs last night, and I just want things to be normal again. I try whistling as I go about the morning tasks, and even smile at the American when he passes through the lobby on his way to the big black car waiting on the street again.
    But everything feels unpleasantly moist, and my headache is back with a vengeance by the afternoon. Thang and I each take a cigarette and go outside. We squat down on the curb and immediately start sweating. It’s so hot that the smoke I’m inhaling feels cooler than the air.
    Thang is always excessively careful about how he extinguisheshis cigarettes, painstakingly grinding them into the sidewalk or even looking for a puddle in the street to actually douse them. Loi, on the other hand, flings his cigarette butts to the ground with violent, spastic movements. Once he accidentally threw one backward and it hit me in the face, an inch below my right eye. Now I only take smoke breaks with Thang.
    My cousin takes a drag, then exhales and speaks out of the corner of his mouth.
    “I forgot to tell you—the room’s free,” he says.
    “What?”
    “The room you were asking me about yesterday when you went crazy and ran up the stairs—two-oh-five. I checked the book and it’s free. No one’s staying in it now.”
    It is at that moment that the first potted plant falls from above and smashes on the sidewalk at my feet. A second one follows shortly afterward and lands to my left in an explosion of terra-cotta, clods of dirt, and the remains of a hibiscus. I immediately recognize the blue-glaze phoenix design on the shards of the first pot—it’s from my mother’s rooftop garden.
    “Oh shit, man! Shit! Get inside quick!” Thang hollers at me while he remains on the curb, slowly stubbing out his cigarette. He narrowly avoids being hit by a third potted plant. I grab him by a yellow khaki sleeve and drag him up the front steps and into the lobby.
    “Shit, shit,” he says, looking outside over his shoulder. “It’s like 1972 again. Shit, man, what
was
that?”
    I don’t answer him