What lay ahead was people, confusion, greed, stuff, the despair of the holidays, the crunch of families that did not get along, duties and responsibilities only half-articulated but completely felt, guilt and regret, endless and passionate. All that was evident in the tableaux before him, the long corridor of mall America, a place he hardly knew, lined on each side by mercantile units offering the usual treasure-jewelry, clothes, shoes, ladies’ undies, toys, a stop here and there for junk food or hooch-all of it lit through the daylight by the red-green-yellow spectrum of holiday illumination, though the temp was a steady seventy-two and the echoes that amplified the ambient noise level testified also to its indoorness. So much data, so many splendors, a multitude of faces and costumes, the range from beauty to grotesque, from health to sickness, from the very young to the very old. It was like a village bazaar he’d once seen in Afghanistan, except for the Afghanistan part. It sucked the energy out of him. He wanted to take cover. It was incoming, like an artillery barrage to the senses, 24/7. He felt his normally impassive face collapse in unwilled but undeniable melancholy.

“Hey, Marine, don’t fade on me,” Molly Chan said.

“I’m about to call a corpsman,” he said.

“Big tough guy like you? You can get through this. We’ll show up with packages and make them so happy and you’ll feel good. The nephews will all worship you, the sisters will wonder why you took me over them, my father will offer to make you a partner in his business, and my mom… well, who knows about my mom?”

It sounded pretty good to Ray. Family. It was something that had been taken from him years ago, on a highway outside Manila when a drunken truck driver hit his mother and father as they drove home from a visit with her relatives. Even discovering that his biological father still lived hadn’t quite filled the hole in his life; maybe the sprawling, argumentative, rambunctious Chan clan would.