Why was it a big deal? Why did he keep it in the garage without using it? There was enough room in there for both his motorcycle and his car. Why did he park outside?
Why had he been so angry?
No matter what it was, she had to make it up to him, and she could start doing that immediately. She slipped into the garage, grabbed the ladder she’d seen earlier, and carried it out to the front porch. There were so many leaves clogging the gutter she worried it might fall off and hit someone in the head. It also looked bad. After getting the ladder as stable as she could, she climbed up and tossed handfuls of leaves down to the ground. She’d cleared a good portion of the gutter when Kh?i walked the motorcycle up the driveway, returned it to the garage, and strode toward her.
Her plastic bags of groceries hung from his fingers by his side, but he let them plop to the ground as he stalked over and gripped the ladder, looking up at her with a deep frown on his face. “What are you doing?”
She tossed another handful of leaves down. “There are too many leaves in here.”
“Come down,” he said firmly. “It’s not safe.”
“But I’m not done. Wait a little—”
“Now, Esme.” The words came out sharply, louder than she expected, and her foot slipped on the ladder.
She flailed about helplessly for a heart-stopping second but managed to get ahold of the gutter so she didn’t fall. With her face pressed to the grimy metal, she whispered thanks to sky and Buddha. That fall would have broken her butt.
“Please. Come down now,” he said in a hard monotone.
The instant her feet touched the ground, he turned the ladder on its side and carried it back into the garage.
She threw her hands up in the air and followed him. “Why are you doing this? I’m not done.” She still had a lot of gutter left to clean, and she hated leaving a job unfinished. Without thinking, she grabbed his shoulder and said, “Anh Kh?i, put it back—”
He whipped around instantly and wrapped an arm across his chest so he could rub at the shoulder she’d touched. “You have to stop all of this.”
“I’ll finish later, then, but—”
“No, there won’t be any finishing. You. Have. To. Stop. Do you understand? You. Have. To. Stop.”
Her bottom lip trembled at his slow, exaggerated pronunciation. “You don’t need to speak like that. I understand you.”
He made a frustrated sound. “You don’t. You’ve been reorganizing my stuff in ridiculous ways, cutting down trees with a meat cleaver, touching that motorcycle, touching me. It all has to stop. I can’t live this way.”
When his meaning sank in, Esme’s shoulders drooped. “Ridiculous?” she repeated in English. That didn’t sound good.
He clawed both hands through his hair. “Yes.”
She looked at the half-cleared lawn and wiped her dirty hands on her pants as her heart shrank and her face flamed. Ridiculous. If she were classier, she’d know what that meant. Now that she thought about it, it probably wasn’t very classy for her to do yard work or clean his house or any of this stuff. Esme in Accounting probably hired people to do this work. But the real Esme, the country girl M? who always smelled like fish sauce, just wanted to be useful. She hadn’t thought about how it looked.
Had she been embarrassing him and herself all this time?
“I’ll stop,” she made herself say.
“Really?” he asked, sounding so hopeful it made her pride smart even more.
She nodded. “I promise I’ll stop now.” She would have shaken hands on it, but he’d included touching him in the list of things that had to stop. She wiped her palms on her pants again, but something told her the thing that disgusted him wasn’t something she could wash away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ENGLISH DICTIONARY
Ridiculous: inviting derision or mockery; absurd
VIETNAMESE DICTIONARY
Absurd: dáng cu?i
Ridiculous, a dry monkey’s ass. She’d show him how ridiculous she wasn’t.