Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

the head. I’d often imagined her going down with the Titanic , Leo Di-Caprio splashing and spluttering beside her, and Mair’s enigmatic smile sliding slowly beneath the surface of the icy water. She was wearing her Titanic smile there at our kitchen table and I knew it masked something terrible.
    “Mair, what have you done?” I asked.
    “She’s sold it all,” Sissi blurted out. “The house, the shop, everything.”
    It couldn’t be true, of course.
    “Mair?” Again I looked at her. She raised one eyebrow fractionally. No denial. It felt as if the floorboards had been pulled out from under me. I plonked down on one of the spare chairs.
    “We’re going to have a better life,” Mair said. “I decided it’s time to move.”
    “Please note the high level of consultation,” Sissi hissed.
    “How could you make a decision like that without talking to us?” I asked. “This is our home. We all grew up here.”
    “We should all die here,” added Granddad.
    “A change is as good as a holiday,” said Mair. “I’m thinking of you all. You’ll thank me for it.”
    “Is it too late to unsell?” I asked Sissi. She was our contract person, our unpaid clerk and accountant. I was sure she’d have checked the paperwork. She pulled a wad of documents from her Louis Vuitton local rip-off handbag and dropped them onto the table.
    “The deed is signed, witnessed and incontestable,” she said. A shuddering sigh erupted from the Arny end of the table. Granddad was seething in the doorway. We all knew the land documents should still have been in his name but he’d listened to Granny on her deathbed. Listened to her for the first time in his life.
    “Sign them over to the girl,” she’d said. “You could keel over any second, then the bastards at City Hall will suck all the taxes and rates out of it. There’ll be nothing left. Sign it over to the girl.”
    So, that’s what he’d done, a final promise to a woman he’d never really honored or obeyed. The one time he’d done what she asked him, and look where it got us all. As the sole owner, his daughter had no legal obligation to involve them in her decision. No legal obligation.
    I took some time to think.
    “All right,” I said. “Look. Perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.”
    “It isn’t?” Sissi was sizzling like pork in deep fat.
    “No.”
    Of course I was lying. I was as upset as any of them but I had to put some temporary repair work into my family.
    “No. Look, we all know this house needs a lot of work,” I said with a knowing look on my uncertain face. “The roof leaks even when it isn’t raining and we’ve got a world of termites. We could use the money from the sale of this place to find somewhere better…” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Arny shaking his head. I thought if I ignored him the gesture would go away. “Perhaps a little out of town, a short commute. We could even have a little yard with – ”
    Sissi let forth with that haughty laugh she’d learned from her TV soap.
    “Oh ho. But you haven’t yet heard the best part,” she said. “There’s more to it. The move is already taken care of, little sister.”
    “I don’t get it,” I admitted.
    “The money I got from selling this old place I’ve invested in a lovely resort hotel in the south.” Mair beamed with pride. “We’ll all have such a lovely time. It really is a dream come true.”
    It was the type of dream you have after eating spicy hor mook and sticky rice directly before you go to bed. I could feel the knot. The south? They were blowing each other up in the south. Everyone was fleeing north and we were supposed to go south?
    “How far south?” I asked.
    “Quite far,” she said.

Two
“ I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully .”
    —GEORGE W. BUSH, SAGINAW, MICHIGAN, SEPTEMBER 29, 2000
    T he new owners were building a tall skinny condominium on our home so we had exactly two months to dislodge ourselves from our heritage. Thirty-four years of my junk and memories packed into cardboard boxes. And it was a journey into the unknown. All Mair had to go on was a computer-generated artist’s impression of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant at Maprao in Chumphon province. I had to look it up. It’s one of those Thai provinces nobody ever goes to. You have a rough idea where it is but you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. If it was a country it would be Liberia.
    We had family powwows in that first month, each