Excerpt from My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Maybe. I'm cleaning up the dinner dishes while Val gives Victor Jr. his bath (which he still insists on her doing and probably will until he's in college) and once we both have a go wrestling the little porker into his pajamas, Val and I will climb into the frilly canopied bed that came with this rented place and fire up the flat screen and watch until our pupils start vibrating, when we'll fall asleep or else get busy. We leave the screen on so I get to see Val in my favorite way, her nakedness strobed dusky blue, the cold flame of her body flashing on and off above me. She's always ready, if you know what I mean, which she tells me is not always the case for women at her older young age. Sure, she's got a lot of years on me and probably before this last year I might have gagged on noticing any dustings of gray in the hair of a woman I was getting with, but then I would have caused Val to swallow back the bile, too, for how painfully unfledged I was. My twee neat goolies. If they're no fatter now at least they've got an educated hang, like the bags under old soldiers' eyes, each drape an unsung but unforgettable campaign. Val got this about me, right there in the airport food court, she somehow understood I'd been away on a harrowing journey and that I should receive some sheltering for a while. Sometimes the plush tide of her hair on my belly, my chest, my face feels so good tears come to my eyes and she'll rub her eyes with the wetness. Our lashes interlace. Our noses rumba and slide. And we taste the salt from ourselves, which is the tastiest salt there is.


Recently, I did a good thing for Val. I'm still thinking about it. I haven't told her about it yet and hope I never have to, unless she's really got to know. I was actually out shopping for some mini-barbells for Victor Jr. and when I was driving back into Val's neighborhood I noticed a shiny black SUV cruising very slowly down at the far end of a street parallel to ours. I pulled over and pretended to make a call. The SUV was creeping forward like a limo might, but something about the way it was moving was sketchy, it wasn't really pausing long enough to be checking house numbers, more like pretending to check but being lazy about it, as if the numbers didn't matter. An older lady was walking her dog and the SUV stopped beside her and she warily went over to it, her Pekingese yapping. The person in the SUV must have said something funny or charming because the lady smiled and tucked her dyed reddish hair behind her ear. Then she craned in slightly, clearly examining something the driver was showing her; then she shook her head. I made a quick U-turn and from the opposite direction sped to our place. I slipped the car inside the garage and without pausing grabbed a baseball cap from the rack and doffed it bill-back and borrowed the neighbor kid's BMX lying in the grass and pedaled out as fast as I could so I wouldn't be seen leaving our house. When I saw the black SUV turn onto our street I hooked in earbuds and ran over evening papers on the driveways, tightroped the curb, tried to bunny hop an ornamental yard stone, and fell on my ass but popped right up again like any kid would. The SUV-I could make out the driver now, white guy, dark sunglasses, short cropped dark hair-accelerated ever so slightly and drifted over to the wrong side of the street to where I was doing a wheelie on the sidewalk.

The smoked window rolled down. The driver was muscly in the neck and shoulders and arms but must have been a shrimp otherwise because his seat was pitched high and forward, very close to the steering wheel, just the way my tiny grandma used to have hers while she drove, her knuckles practically grazing her chin. This guy was maybe late thirties at most but had a receding hairline and was rocking an overmanicured five-o'clock shadow plus oversized mirror-shade aviators and stippled black leather driving gloves and I almost asked him how long he'd been driving Formula 1, but instead recast myself as goat-faced and sleepy-eyed, as dim as the fescue I imagined myself chewing, and just stared at the dude like he was an endless plains vista, a portrait of beige.

Excerpted from My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee. Copyright © 2021 by Chang-rae Lee. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.