For my own part I would as soon be descended from that
heroic little monkey.—Charles Darwin
When Mikey, at age forty-nine, next saw Tuyen Phan—blond Ann Mott now—on that San Francisco day in ’24, she was soon bombarding him with questions as to what he’d been doing with himself for nearly a decade.
They were sitting on that bench in Golden Gate Park, watching my Lillian Mott ride torn cardboard down a concrete slide again and again on a thermal and fogless morning, Ann smiling once Mikey had finished with his what became of me? update.
“The Westbank?” she said. “I’d imagined you living the white-guy run-from-civilization fantasy. A beach village was my bet.”
“Nope.”
“Right there, all this while? And domesticated too?”
“Yup and yup.”
And snooping-curious Mikey had questions for her. Because though he’d indeed seen her movie, the particulars of how Ann Mott ever came into being were still beyond his comprehension. Particulars such as her pregnancy, which he had known nothing of, and that post-Ocala, just as Susannah and I began discussing a starting-over move from New Orleans to San Francisco, we’d been impelled to weather that storm. Clark and Robertson ultimately offering, even, to set 2015 Tuyen up out West so we could help with the parenting. San Francisco being, quite fortuitously, a place where such nontraditional arrangements make perfect sense.
