The Refugees: Someone Else Besides You Summary & Analysis

Thomas and his father (Mr. P.) drop by his father’s girlfriend Mimi’s condo. Thomas has never met Mimi before; when he meets her, he sees that she is slender and has full, auburn hair. Thomas thinks about his mother, who by the end of her life had gained weight and worn wigs because her hair had faded.

Thomas goes to the bathroom (although saying he had to use the bathroom was just an excuse to go to the condo and meet Mimi), and when he returns, Mimi is preparing coffee in her kitchen, which has a stainless steel oven and electric stove. Thomas’s mother had had a vintage gas oven and stove, and she had been in her kitchen when she died of an aneurysm the year prior at age 53. Mimi offers Thomas coffee, but Thomas says that he only came by to drop his father off because his father’s car had been stolen the previous night. Mimi tries to make more conversation, but Mr. P. says Thomas has to go.

Thomas explains that he is 33, but that Mr. P. didn’t think anyone was a man until he became a father. His father had had five children, and though all of his sons had outgrown him, his height became largely forgotten. He is a broad-chested man and still trim enough to fit into the paratrooper’s uniform he’d worn during the Vietnam War.

Mr. P. walks Thomas to the door and says he’ll need a ride home the next morning, and then he closes the door. Thomas thinks back to when his father had arrived at his apartment six weeks prior with everything he owned in the car. While Thomas had struggled with the suitcases, his father, at 63, had braced them with his leg and dragged them up the stairs. Thomas had realized that living with him now would be harder than it was during his childhood.

The next morning, while Thomas processes refunds and listens to his service representatives, Thomas pictures Mimi and Mr. P. lounging on the couch together. She is the first of his father’s mistresses and girlfriends that he’s seen, though he (and his mother) had known that there had been many others.

During Thomas’s lunch break, he calls his ex-wife Sam’s home number just to listen to her answering machine. Sam is a tenth-grade geometry teacher, while Thomas is a customer service manager for a company that sells hearing aids, oxygen tanks, and wheelchairs, and at night he is a watchman at a luxury high-rise.

Thomas says that the job is perfect, because after Sam left him and Thomas’s mother had died, he could no longer sleep. He mostly sits in the lobby, watching video monitors. He reads the newspaper or plays solitaire, occasionally calling Sam and saying nothing, just to hear her say “Hello?”

Sam is patient, but her patience ran out the previous year when she turned thirty-four. She had told Thomas she wanted a child, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready to be a father. This was not the first time they’d had this conversation. He thought about Mr. P., who had treated his sons like his own personal army and cheated many times. Sam had told Thomas that he is not going to turn out like his father.

Thomas’s shift ends at dawn, and he returns to the apartment into which he’d moved after his divorce. By the time Thomas’s mother passed away, he was very familiar with loneliness, and invited Mr. P. to live with him, suspecting he might also be lonely. His father, to his surprise, had said yes.

Thomas sleeps for two hours, and then drives back to Mimi’s apartment. Mr. P. is showering, so Mimi makes Thomas a cup of coffee and he tells her a bit about his two jobs. Then Mimi says that it’s not good for a boy his age to be without a woman and begins describing some young women at her temple. She explains that Vietnamese women are better for men than American women, and that they liked men like Thomas: “Neither too American nor too Vietnamese.”

Mr. P. appears and he and Thomas leave soon after. In the car, Thomas’s father asks when the last time Thomas spoke with Sam was. Thomas responds that they spoke after his mother died. His father asks how he would get her back without talking to her and chastises him for giving up too easily. His father also notes that he looks terrible—that Thomas was only “half a man” before he met Sam, and he is now half a man again.

Thomas questions Mr. P., asking if he’s going to marry Mimi and then find another woman to have on the side. He remembers once when Thomas’s mother had asked him where his father disappeared to on Friday nights. He had no idea, and was terrified by her questioning.

Mr. P. says that Thomas should never have let Sam go. Thomas starts to cry. He remembers that he had not cried during Thomas’s mother’s funeral, but when he drove from the church to the cemetery, the tears gushed out. In that instance, his father had waited until Thomas was finished before saying anything. But now, his father says that it’s time they did something about Thomas’s situation.

Thomas doesn’t know what “doing something” means; only that Mr. P. usually said it when he was going to punish his sons. It is also what he’d said when Thomas had come home one day from fourth grade and reported that a kid had spat on his lunch and called him a “slant-eyed fag.”

Mr. P. had taken Thomas to the boy’s home and knocked on the door. He spoke with the other boy’s father in low, angry tones so that Thomas couldn’t hear what he said, until his father kicked the man in the groin and then punched him in the throat. As the man fell down on his porch, Thomas saw the kid behind him, wide-eyed. They had then left.

Thomas and Mr. P. go to pick up a rental car, then to a barbershop, where Thomas gets a very short haircut. Thomas’s father then takes him to Sam’s doorstep. As he knocks on the door, Thomas says that this is a mistake. His father says that they’ll have the advantage of surprise, but neither one of them is prepared for the fact that Sam opens the door and they see she is pregnant.

Sam is surprised to see them, and says they should have called. Thomas says they were just taking a drive and thought they’d stop by. She is skeptical, but she lets them in. Thomas enters cautiously, looking for another man. Sam and Thomas start to catch up, and Thomas explains that Mr. P. has moved in with him. Sam responds that that must be an interesting situation.

Mr. P. compliments Sam on the house, but she says that most of the decorations are her roommate’s. Thomas’s father points to a pipe on top of the TV and asks where she bought it. He and Thomas are surprised to hear it’s from Hue, and that Sam visited Vietnam. Thomas’s father says he would never go back—that the Communists would call him a war criminal. Sam goes to the bathroom, trying to avoid an argument.

When Sam leaves, Thomas looks for traces of a man, but can only find mementos from their life together. When Sam returns, she shows them pictures of her vacation. When Thomas sees a picture with her and a man with sandy-blond hair, he asks if this is the father. Mr. P. excuses himself out the front door. Sam tells Thomas that a woman doesn’t need a man to have a child. He says that she might as well say the earth is flat. He asks her who the father is, but she says he doesn’t have the right to ask her.

Thomas leaves and gets in the car with Mr. P. As they pull out of the street, Thomas’s father sees Sam’s car and tells him to stop. He gets out of the car and slashes all four of Sam’s tires. When he gets back in, Thomas yells at him, asking why he would do something like that. His father asks why he didn’t say  or do anything—he could have easily stopped him.

As they argue and drive away, Mr. P. claims that Thomas wouldn’t know right from wrong because he never makes any choices. Thomas questions if it was right of his father to cheat on Thomas’s mother, or if it was right to drive her to her grave. Thomas’s father says he never loved Thomas’s mother. He wants Thomas to be with a woman he loves.

At home, Mr. P. takes a pill, thinking he might have pulled a muscle in his neck, and Thomas gives him a massage. After he falls asleep, Thomas hangs his shirt in his closet and notices his mother’s wig on a Styrofoam mannequin.

The next day, the police find Mr. P.’s missing car. His father goes with Mimi to retrieve it from the impound lot while Thomas sleeps between shifts. When they return, his father goes to clean the car, leaving Thomas alone with Mimi. Seeing his father and Mimi together, he realizes that Thomas’s mother and father should have married other people, even though he would not have been born. He wonders if Sam had realized this before he did, and that’s why she divorced him.

Mimi starts to chat with Thomas, but he’s in a dull mood. He asks her, “You know he’s going to cheat on you, don’t you?” Mimi doesn’t react at first, but then she gets up and walks over to the door. Before she leaves, she turns back and says, “Aren’t there times when you’d rather be someone else besides you?”

Thomas goes to work, changes his clothes, goes to his second job. Near dawn of the next day, he falls into bed until he hears a knock on the front door: Sam. She asks how he could have slashed her tires. Thomas retrieves an envelope full of cash that he had withdrawn the day before and gives it to her. He had planned to slide it under her door that evening.

Sam tells Thomas that when she saw the tires, she wanted to kill him—but that she also thought he cared in some strange way. Thomas steps forward and puts his hands on Sam’s stomach. He places his ear against her belly. He speaks softly to the life within it, saying, “I can be the father.” He says it again, louder, to make sure that Sam can hear it.

Sam tells Thomas to stand up and asks if he knows what he’s saying—or what he’s doing. He says he has no idea. Thomas reaches up to touch her face, noticing age spots that had not been there when they’d divorced the year before. They hear a floorboard creak upstairs: Mr. P., who has crept out of his bedroom and is wondering and waiting for what is to come, just like Sam and Thomas.