Mr Lin, Are you smiling?

Three Days until China

The thing about telling everyone you're going to move to China for eleven years is that when you actually do it, nobody believes you at first.

"So you're really going," her coworker Denise had said on Monday morning, standing in the doorway of Room 4 at Sunrise Senior Care while Janine folded Mr. Patterson's laundry. Not a question. More like she was still processing it.

"I'm really going," Janine said, matching socks.

"To China."

"To China."

Denise had pressed her lips together and nodded slowly, the way people do when they support something they personally think is a terrible idea. "Okay. Okay. And you're not coming back?"

"I mean, I'll visit."

"Okay." Another slow nod. "Okay."

Janine had laughed to herself and kept folding.

Tuesday was her last shift, and Sunrise Senior Care did what Sunrise Senior Care always did for outgoing staff, which was buy a grocery store sheet cake with her name spelled wrong on it. The frosting read *Good Luck Janeen!* in blue cursive, surrounded by little fondant flowers that tasted like nothing. Janine ate two slices and told everyone it was delicious.

Mr. Patterson, who was eighty-three and had strong opinions about everything, grabbed her wrist when she came to say goodbye to him. His grip was surprisingly firm.

"You speak Chinese?" he said. He asked her this at least once a week.

"I do," she said. "Pretty well, actually."

He squinted at her. "You sure about that?"

"Mr. Patterson."

"I'm just saying. I watched a documentary. Those tones are no joke."

"I've been studying since I was thirteen."

He let go of her wrist and settled back against his pillow, seemingly satisfied, though his expression didn't really change. "Well," he said. "Don't embarrass us."

She had squeezed his hand and told him she wouldn't.

Walking out to the parking lot for the last time, paper plate in hand with the last slice of incorrectly named cake on it, Janine stopped and stood in the California afternoon sun for a second. The smell of eucalyptus, the distant sound of a leaf blower, the familiar crack in the asphalt near the handicap ramp that she had stepped over almost every day for three years. She took a mental picture. Then she got in her car and drove to Target.

The list on her phone had forty-two items on it, which she recognized was perhaps a sign of a personality disorder, but she had color coded it by category and she wasn't going to apologize for that. She pushed her cart through the travel section with the focused energy of someone defusing a bomb.

Compression bags. Check. Travel-sized laundry detergent. Check. The neck pillow that had three thousand reviews and that she had added to her cart and removed from her cart six separate times over the past month. Into the cart it went, finally. She was doing this. She was a person who bought the neck pillow.

She was reaching for a luggage scale when her phone buzzed.

Mom:Did you eat lunch

Janine:I had cake

Mom:That is not lunch Janine Marie

Janine:It had eggs in it probably. Eggs are protein.

Mom:Dinner is at 7. Your father is making jollof.