Florence Chen is Missing Ep02

Won's tattooed daughter tells him her friend has disappeared.

Won agreed to meet Rachel at the shop on the Lower East Side where she’d landed part time work scooping overpriced artisanal ice cream to wealthy tourists and helicopter parents. Won thought the job was a waste of her time and talent, but Rachel told him she liked being paid to watch people, and because the store owner forbade her to look at her phone while working, she got a lot of book reading done.

Won had to take three subway lines and walk a few long blocks to get to her work, but he was glad to make the trek if it led to his spending time with his daughter.

Rachel was serving a customer in the tiny shop when Won arrived and he was disappointed not to be able to give her a hug hello. Halogen overheads cast shadowless light on a yellow and white motif, with Rachel positioned behind curved glass cases displaying vats of candy-colored ice cream. Her yellow overalls and yellow hat displaying the ice cream brand’s playful logo contrasted her complexion and personality. She was tall and broad-shouldered and had Won’s wideset eyes and Tamara’s freckles, with skin that darkened quickly under sunlight. Her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, making her cheeks seem chipmunk-like. Won stood to one side, watching Rachel exchange precisely packed cones for money, chatting with her in the moments when customers were not present. She showed Won her latest tattoo: a flower on the underside of her right wrist.

“What kind of flower?”

Rachel shrugged.

“I don’t understand why you need so many.”

“Each marks a life event.”

“So what’s that flower for?”

“Getting this job.”

“Why not an ice cream cone?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

A young father entered the shop holding a toddler in his arms. Won found the man dashing in his fashionable athletic gear and a freshly purchased Yankees baseball cap. The man and his daughter ogled the vats of ice cream in the glass case, then he asked Rachel in heavily accented English if his daughter could try the macadamia brittle. Rachel shook her head. “Sorry, we don’t give samples.”

“No sample?” The man was incredulous. Rachel gave him a Cheshire smile, but otherwise did nothing. The man went back to perusing the vats of ice cream, but now he was frowning.

Won heard the door open again. The man entering was old, poor, and possibly insane. He did not fit with the shop’s branding. The healthy young wealthy father stepped back as the old man shuffled past him to the counter, his head unnaturally stooped, hiding his face like people who live on the streets do; the rips in his stained winter coat emitting little puffs of feathers as he moved. Won considered intervening but stopped when Rachel reached for a children’s size cone and began packing it with Maple Swirl. The European tourist, seeing Rachel’s focus shift to the old man cutting before him, began to order, but Rachel held up the scoop to stop him talking, then stretched over the counter to hand the old man the cone. The man took it wordlessly and without looking up at Rachel, walked out.

To Won it appeared to be ritual.

The European father gestured at the departing wretch, and said, “Why he gets free sample?”

Rachel smiled again. “That wasn’t a sample – it was a gift.”

Won thought the tourist’s perplexity seemed a lot of trouble for overpriced ice cream, but he was beyond determining what drove people, and a lactose intolerance prevented him determining the confection’s worth.

When the tourist and his daughter left with their cone, Won asked Rachel, “Do the store owners know you’re giving their fancy ice cream away to bums?”

“Do you mean the unhoused? Yeah, they told me to stop feeding them.”

“And why haven’t you?”

“I want to see how far I can take it before they fire me.”

That was a good enough reason for Won, who had given up lecturing Rachel about how she was wasting her time there, and she’d given up explaining to him how people intrigued her, because every time she told him, he’d say, “They’re not so interesting when you see what they’ve been up to.”

Rachel’s mother had warned her about Won’s burnout, but Rachel always tried to get him to talk because she was curious about all the sordid acts he’d investigated, and how he got people to open up to him. She knew that Won never foot-pursued any perps or got into shootouts. Instead, he cracked cases by sitting in windowless interrogation rooms, talking to witnesses and suspects for hours over lukewarm coffee or cans of soda gone flat, until they finally went on record to tell him what he’d known all along. He never described the peculiar mixture of dread and intense curiosity when walking a fresh crime scene, collecting evidence in Ziplock bags, marking shell casings, noting locations of shoeprints and tracing the direction of blood splatter patterns. She instinctively knew her interest in people was connected with his, and she was inexorably drawn to the same refracted beacon of human behavior that burned Won out. Over meals and on walks through the city, she’d leave openings for him to talk about his cases, but he never took the bait. Instead, he’d jokingly ask when she was going to have a kid because he wanted to be a grandpa with all the fun and none of the responsibility, then deadpanned that a child could assist her in caring for him during his inevitable descent into dementia and incontinence. Rachel allowed his misdirection with a laugh, then replied that Won would have to keep his shit together a little longer before she was ready to have a kid.

Everything between them was code: expressions of fear and love and concern nestled in ridiculous suggestions and bad jokes. They preferred it over expressed feelings, perhaps due to their oriental strain, or the byproduct of Won’s compartmentalization of his life.

It surprised Won when Rachel got tiny, tattooed dots above the knuckles of her left hand, just like his Okinawan grandmother’s – a woman who spoke no English and died before Won was old enough to talk to her. No one in the family claimed to know why his grandmother wore those dots, so Rachel getting them was both her homage and acquiescence to the family’s frustrating lack of transparency. Following suit, Won never told Rachel of his pride in her interest and identification.

After another set of customers cleared out of the shop, Rachel leaned on the counter and turned to Won. “Do you remember my friend Florence? From elementary school? She came to the apartment on playdates.”

“I remember. Chinese girl. She liked to pretend to clean up your room.”

“It wasn’t pretend. She thought organizing my books alphabetically was fun.”

“I liked her. She never wanted snacks.”

“Her mom texted me out of the blue yesterday, asking about you. It took me a while to even remember Florence. She said Florence is missing and asked if you could help.”

“Did you tell her I’m retired?”

“I figured you should do that, since she asked for you.”

“Text me the mother’s number.”

Rachel pulled her phone from her pocket and swiped the screen. “Are you going to help her?”

Won stared at his phone screen until it dinged, and he saw Rachel’s forwarded text. “I’ve got other things to do.”

“No. You don’t.”

Won looked at his daughter. She was giving him the same Cheshire smile she’d shown the tourist. “I’m busy with work.” He said, wincing at his defensiveness.

She kept smiling and shook her head. “You do the same job every day. It’s routine. A rut. You buy your frozen meals from that same store. Even your clothes. Pleated khakis. Old man slip-on athletic shoes. Fleece vest. You’re a walking advertisement for mediocrity.”

Won crossed his arms and feigned offense. “Employee discount. And nobody cares how I dress.”

“You know what happens when people give up? They die.”

She said it with a smile, but suddenly the joke wasn’t funny and Won staggered inwardly from her truth’s blunt force. “You’re too young to be this cynical.”

“I’m my father’s daughter.”

Won looked at the shop’s tiled floor and nodded, feeling flattered and hurt.

Rachel lifted the hinged countertop and stepped out to give Won a goodbye hug. “Florence’s mom sounded desperate. You’re good with desperate people. I’ll see you later.”

Won stepped out of the shop and on to the bustling sidewalk, still wounded by Rachel’s assessment. He passed the homeless old man as he turned onto Bowery to walk into Chinatown for a haircut and ear cleaning. He trotted across Canal Street and strolled past food stalls displaying exotic spiky fruits and whole fish on ice, contemplating aiding a desperate person. He turned on to the alleyway where his Chinese barber was standing outside, sneaking a smoke. The small man wore a white smock sprinkled with tiny clippings of black hair, and smelled of menthol, industrial laundry detergent, baby powder, and Vitalis. He greeted Won with a nod and smile, reflexively glanced at Won’s scalp, then stubbed out his cigarette and held the door to his shop open. In the twenty years Won had been coming to him, they’d never exchanged names, or spoken at all, but he seemed to know when Won was coming, and he always remembered exactly how Won wanted his hair cut.

Won waved the man to enter first, then he pulled out his phone and texted the number Rachel had forwarded, introducing himself to Mrs. Chen.

The reply back was immediate: “no texting please call”