A Good Fall by Ha Jin

and you might set off the alarm again. I’ll pick up something on my way home.”
    “What happened to Connie? Why can’t she do the shopping and cooking? You shouldn’t spoil her like this.”
    “She’s busy, all right? I can’t talk more now. See you soon.” He shut the phone and stood up to see if his colleagues in the neighboring cubicles had been listening in. Nobody seemed interested.
    He sat down and yawned, massaging his eyebrows to relieve the fatigue from peering at the computer screen. He knew his mother must feel lonely at home. She often complained that she had no friends here and there wasn’t much to watch on TV. True, most of the shows were reruns and some were in Cantonese or Taiwanese, neither of which she could understand. The books Tian had checked out of the library for her were boring too. If only she could have someone to chitchat with. But their neighbors all went to work in the daytime, and she dared not venture out on her own because she was unable to read the street signs in English. This neighborhood was too quiet, she often grumbled. It looked as if there were more houses than people. Chimneys were here and there, but none of them puffed smoke. The whole place was deserted after nine a.m., and not until midafternoon would she see traces of others—and then only kids getting off the school buses and padding along the sidewalks. If only she could have had a grandchild to look after, to play with. But that was out of the question, since Connie Liu, her daughter-in-law, was still attending nursing school and wanted to wait until she had finished.
    It was already dark when Tian left work. The wind was tossing pedestrians’ clothes and hair and stirring the surfaces of slush puddles that shimmered in the neon and the streetlights. The remaining snowbanks along the curbs were black from auto exhaust and were becoming encrusted again. Tian stopped at a supermarket in the basement of a mall and picked up a stout eggplant, a bag of spinach, and a flounder. He knew that his wife would avoid going home to cook dinner because she couldn’t make anything her mother-in-law would not grouch about, so these days he cooked. Sometimes his mother offered to help, but he wouldn’t let her, afraid she might make something that Connie couldn’t eat—she was allergic to most bean products, especially to soy sauce and tofu.
    The moment he got home, he went into the kitchen. He was going to cook a spinach soup, steam the eggplant, and fry the flounder. As he was gouging out the gill of the fish, his mother stepped in. “Let me give you a hand,” she said.
    “I can manage. This is easy.” He smiled, cutting the fish’s fins and tail with a large scissor.
    “You never cooked back home.” She stared at him, her eyes glinting. Ever since her arrival a week earlier, she’d been nagging him about his being uxorious. “What’s the good of standing six feet tall if you can’t handle a small woman like Connie?” she often said. In fact, he was five foot ten.
    He nudged the side of his bulky nose with his knuckle. “Mom, in America husband and wife both cook—whoever has the time. Connie is swamped with schoolwork these days, so I do more household chores. This is natural.”
    “No, it’s not. You were never like this before. Why did you marry her in the first place if she wouldn’t take care of you?”
    “You’re talking like a fuddy-duddy.” He patted the flatfish with a paper towel to make it sputter less in the hot corn oil.
    She went on, “Both your dad and I told you not to rush to marry her, but you were too bewitched to listen. We thought you must’ve got her in trouble and had to give her a wedding band. Look, now you’re trapped and have to work both inside and outside the house.”
    He didn’t reply, but his longish face stiffened. He disliked the way she spoke about his wife. In fact, before his mother’s arrival, Connie had always come home early to make dinner. She would also wrap