No easy resolutions, Linny might have said to Van if she’d ever dared to bring up the subject again. They seemed to have tacitly agreed never to mention it and that was okay by Linny. They weren’t about to start talking out everything.
At sunset they ate Van’s birthday cake on the back patio, using the furniture that was being sold to a professor at the university. Then a cleaning service would come in to shine the floors downstairs and shampoo the carpets upstairs. “It’ll be all new again,” Van said with a hint of melancholy. Linny was impressed by what she could only call Van’s fortitude. So far she’d never even seen her shed a tear for Miles, though Linny attributed that, more likely, to Van’s inborn sense of privacy.
“I bought you some clothes for your birthday,” Linny told her. “And you can’t return them.”
“I’m not talking about clothes again. Not if you want to hear about Dad and Nancy Bao.”
Linny was surprised. “What about them?”
“I saw her when I went home to see Dad. She came over to the house, and she didn’t know I was going to be there.”
Linny exchanged a look with Tom. “I told you!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? They really are still together.”
“That’s the thing I was trying to figure out, because I don’t think they are. Nancy came over to take care of the house.”
She explained how Nancy, surprised to see Van there, had told her that she sometimes stopped by to check on Mr. Luong, bringing him a few sweet bean pastries or a magazine he might like. She had been the one to tell him about the reality TV show audition, after reading about it in a newspaper. She had also been helping him tidy up the house a little, get things organized. She had kept the living room credenza dusted, the sticks of incense replenished.
When Van asked Nancy why she did all this, she simply said that people in the community cared about Dinh Luong.
“That’s all I got out of her,” Van finished. “She probably thinks we’re bad daughters for not being there all the time to take care of Dad. And I think she must blame me for Na, which I guess is deserved.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Linny said quickly at the pained look crossing her sister’s face.
“Anyway, this still doesn’t answer the question about them. There may be nothing more than an old friendship. Maybe there was more once, but I don’t think there is now. It just didn’t seem like it.”
“I did notice sometimes,” Linny said, realizing it as she spoke, “that when I would visit Dad the house wouldn’t be as dirty as I thought it would be. I thought it was you, or that he cleaned and shopped only when he remembered to or when he felt like it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something else going on with Nancy.” She turned to Tom. “What do you think? You live in that town—you hear the gossip.”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” he admitted. “I never saw your dad and Nancy in the car and I’ve never heard anyone gossip about them. Lots of people have said that Rich and Nancy hardly ever talk to each other but who knows what that means. Who does talk to Rich Bao?”
Linny couldn’t help thinking the mystery extended beyond her father and Nancy, out to their friends, their community and generation, the stories they told and wove about Saigon. Maybe it was their own way of making sense of how they’d gotten from Vietnam to America. That whole generation had its own language, its own clinging to tradition. What are your children going to understand? Her mother had said, meaning they were going to be thoroughly American. The idea had scared her. It was one of the reasons she wanted Linny and Van to go to Vietnam with her.
Maybe Van was thinking about their mother too, because she said, “Look at the sky.”
The stars had started to pop out even before the sun fully set. Linny wondered if her sister was trying to keep that last moment in Ann Arbor, trying to take it all in. “You know what? Mom will never know that all this stuff has happened. I feel like we should tell her that you’re moving.”
Sitting next to her, Tom took her hand.
“I used to think that all the time,” Van said.
“Maybe that’s why Dad stays where he is.”
“Maybe.”
But it seemed a revelation to Linny, a possible answer to his identity. All her life Linny had thought of him whenever she stood on her tiptoes, straining to reach a package of pasta or a box of tea on a high shelf. She thought of him when in a crowd, craning to look around people’s heads, careful to keep track of elbows so as not to get slammed in the face. She thought of him too when entering a room with tiled floors. She had tried to see, or maybe couldn’t help but see, the world from his point of view.
She remembered being a tiny girl, staring at people’s legs while waiting for some parade—maybe a Fourth of July festival or the Tulip Time celebration in the lakeside town of Holland. All Linny recalled was seeing other people’s thighs. Pant legs and skirts all around her, close enough for Linny to see the weave of cotton and the sparkle of poly. Her mother had kept her close, her father standing nearby with Van. On that one day they had seemed like sentries. And then Linny had grown up—though not as up as she had hoped and assumed. She remained, and Van too, the short girls their father had told them they would always be.
In the early shadows of dusk, Linny accepted this. Words hovered in front of her. The Short Girl Café. Bright reds and yellows. Oncidium orchids. And Linny, years from now, sitting down at a table with her father, her sister, Tom. And more. No menus, just rounds and rounds of plates brought out to them on the longest day of the year. Then they would go outside or up to a roof, just in time to get as much of the sky as they could bear. It’s what Linny will have learned to wait for. All that blue. She will see it again and again, crossing the world to follow it home. Each time she will hold out her hand, wishing to save just a little of it, to try to catch the falling hour.
acknowledgments
I would like to thank: Molly Stern, Nicole Aragi, Liz Van Hoose, Laura Tisdel, Juliet Annan, Barbara Campo, Dave Cole, Gabrielle Gantz, Jacqueline Fischetti, Caitlin Pratt, Alan Walker, Richard Kessler, Jim Hanks, Vicky Farah, Pavneet Singh, Theju Prasad, Incigul Sayman, Liz Han, Joseph Nguyen, Purdue University, all of my family, and especially, and always, Porter Shreve.
a cognizant original v5 release october 10 2010
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 26