A Good Fall by Ha Jin Page B

don’t mind.”
    I stopped resisting, sat down beside Sami, and picked up the chopsticks Eileen had placed before me. Dinner was simple: chicken curry, tomato salad sprinkled with sugar, baked anchovies, and plain rice. I liked the food, though. It was the first time I’d eaten baked anchovies, which were crispy and quite salty. Eileen explained, “It’s healthier to eat small fish nowadays. Big fish have too much mercury in them.”
    “This is really tasty,” I said.
    “Wait until you have it every day,” Sami piped up. “It’ll make you sick just to look at it.”
    As we ate, Eileen kept spooning chicken cubes into my bowl, which seemed to annoy Sami. “Mom,” she said, “Dave’s not a baby.”
    “Sure. I’m just happy to have someone eating with us finally.” Eileen turned to me and added, “Actually, you’re the first person to sit with us at this table since March.”
    We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me, Dave, which one of you cooks, you or your girlfriend?”
    “At the moment I don’t have a girlfriend, Aunt.” I called her that out of politeness, though she was just half a generation older. I felt my face burning and saw Sami’s eyes suddenly gleaming. Then she gave me a smile that displayed her tiny canines.
    “Don’t call me ‘Aunt,’” her mother said. “Just ‘Eileen’ is fine.”
    “All right.”
    “Then why don’t you eat with us when you come to teach Sami in the evenings? That’ll save you some time.”
    I didn’t know how to respond. Sami stepped in and said, “My mom’s a wonderful cook. Accept the offer, Dave.”
    “Thank you,” I said to Eileen. “In that case, you can pay me less for teaching Sami.”
    “Don’t be silly. It’s very kind of you to agree to keep us company. I appreciate that. But don’t grumble if I cook something you don’t like.”
    Before I could answer, Sami put in, “My mom’s rich, you know.”
    “Sami, don’t start that again,” pleaded Eileen.
    “Okay, okay.” The girl made a face and speared a wedge of tomato with her fork. She wouldn’t use chopsticks.
    The next evening Eileen made taro soup with shredded pork and coriander. It was delicious; Sami said it was her mother’s specialty. She ate two bowls of the soup and asked Eileen whether we could have it more often. “You used to make this every week.”
    Eileen soon learned I liked seafood, and she would pick up shrimp or scallops or squid. On occasion she bought fish—yellow croaker, flounder, red snapper, perch. During the day I found myself looking forward to going to the Mins’, even when I was busy with other things. To distract myself from these thoughts and keep myself from gaining much weight, I often played tennis with my friend Avtar Babu, a fellow graduate student, in art history.
    Sometimes I arrived early at the Mins’ to give Eileen a hand in the kitchen—peeling a bulb of garlic, opening a can or bottle, crushing peppercorns in a stone mortar, replacing a trash bag. I just enjoyed hanging around. If something went wrong in the house, Eileen would tell me, and most times I could fix it. She’d be so grateful that she would insist on paying me for the work in addition to the parts, but I refused the money. The Mins treated me almost like a family member, and I was equally attached to them.
    Sami made good progress in math, but her English improved slowly. She usually followed my instructions, and even tried memorizing all the words listed at the back of her English textbook, yet there were many gaps in her mastery of the subjects. Before her father died, he’d often said he hoped she could enter an Ivy League college. I never expressed my misgivings about that and always encouraged her.
    As I was explaining a trigonometric function to Sami one evening, Eileen came in panting and said, “My car won’t start.”
    “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
    “I’ve no clue. I drove it this morning and it ran fine.”
    I told Sami to do a few