A Wedding Invitation

by Alice J. Wisler

  As Beanie studies her fingernails, I say, “We used to have staff meetings each Tuesday afternoon. They went on for hours because our director, Dr. Rogers, loved to tell us how we needed to be extra careful about the New People’s Army hiding in the brush.” Nearing Dovie’s neighborhood, I continue, “Once a group of us wanted to go to Mindanao for a vacation, but he stopped our plans, saying that area of the country was no place for Americans because of the NPA’s activity being heavy in that region.” Shuddering, I wonder why I’m thinking of this military wing of the Communist Party on a night like this. As Dovie has been known to say, our minds can be strange places.

  Beanie is still thinking about the meal served to us at Saigon Bistro. She says, “My ancestors are Chinese, but I don’t care much for their food.”

  The next day I set out to leave early. I told Mom I’d be back at the shop by noon. Natasha will need to go to her office, unable to cover for me. When the clock radio alarm goes off, I feel it is one of those mornings that I could literally sleep until noon.

  As I carry my suitcase downstairs, I see Dovie on the porch with Milkweed. Her opened Bible rests against her lap, her reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. The whole scene is Norman Rockwellesque. I shed my suitcase and open the screen door to join them on the porch.

  Smiling, she closes the book and puts it aside. “Morning, love. Did you sleep well? I heard you up early.”

  “I slept well, thanks. Thanks for letting me come here.”

  “You know you are always welcome.” Rising from the love seat, she reaches over to the small bamboo table where a large Tupperware container sits beside a thermos. She hands me the container.

  As I look through it, I see bologna sandwiches on thick slices of oatmeal bread with Swiss cheese. “Oh, Dovie, this is so sweet of you.”

  Milkweed purrs, jumps off the cushion, and nuzzles my leg.

  Dovie takes the box from me, picks up the thermos, and says, “Hope the tea isn’t too lemony. I must have squeezed three whole lemons in there.”

  I now know that the drive back to Falls Church will be delicious and that makes me smile.

  “Nourishment is vital for your long trip,” she says as she follows me to my car. I often wonder why Dovie never married or had children. I think her maternal nurturing instincts are strong.

  “How has your mother been?” she asks. I think she’s asked this at least twice already over the weekend.

  I reply as I have before. “She’s doing really good.” I know that’s not proper English, but there are times I get tired of hearing myself use the word well.

  “Now, if that cancer comes back, you make sure I’m the first one you call. I know Cecelia won’t be calling to tell me.”

  The sun is just rising over the two sheds in the backyard. I hear the hens cackling.

  I place my suitcase in the trunk and the food she has given me in the passenger seat. “Thank you for everything.” I make my embrace tight.

  “Love to your mother. Drive careful now. Call me when you get home.” She kisses my check, and I catch the faint scent of peppermint, cloves, and worry.

  twelve

  It feels right nice to be back at the shop with Mom. As much as I often want a break from these walls and from customers who can be hard to please, whenever I return from time away, I know I’m where I’m supposed to be. There is something almost magical about running your own business, especially when that business is successful. The man who runs the business next to ours, Sanjay, calls it “the American dream at its best.”

  I drove straight to the boutique, not even stopping at home first, and made it here by eleven fifteen. During the trip from Dovie’s, my thoughts flitted like her monarchs—waves of color that soared into memories—some nostalgic, some bothersome. I saw Taylor’s face in my mind and felt his arms around me as we danced at the reception, and smiled just thinking of the way he smiled. Shortly after that, Carson’s face crept in, and although I tried, I couldn’t push away the array of emotions I felt the last time I saw him. The details of the day he left the camp wouldn’t release from my thoughts.

  Once I arrived in the southern tip of Virginia, I saw Huy and Lien’s faces and went over bits of conversations we had at the cemetery and restaurant. When I stopped to eat a bologna sandwich at a rest area and drink from the thermos of lemon iced tea, I grabbed a mystery from the trunk of my car—the fourth in the series called The Busboy Mysteries—and became engaged in its chapters. Two hours outside of Falls Church, I used the dingy restroom at a gas station that reeked of sour milk and then continued my journey as the sun rose higher in the May sky. I tried to think about the pages I’d read, attempting to use my sleuthing abilities to figure out who killed the redheaded busboy, but the memory of Carson kept me from fulfilling that desire. So I quit listening to Paul Simon. Yet Carson’s smile and the way he made me feel when we were together still seeped in through the vents of my car and mind.

  At one point I shouted. “Oh, just go away!”

  And that worked. For about half a mile.

  Now, at the boutique, I debate whether or not to tell Mom about seeing Lien and her family again. I fill her in on Beanie and Little, and as she listens she drinks from a bottle of flavored water. Looking out the large store window, she says, “Dovie was always the creative one. The one who helped out in every soup kitchen and church function. So I’m not surprised at all.”

  “About what?”

  “That she continues to house those hooligans.”

  Biting my lip, I arrange shelves of scarves. Some of these have been in the store for a year, and I know we need to move them. There are some more trendy ones in one of our suppliers’ catalogs that I hope Mom will let me order soon. “And you, Mom?”

  “What?”

  “You said Dovie was the creative one. How about you?”

  “I kept to myself.” She fills her lungs with air and lets it out slowly, like one does when a doctor is listening to her chest. “I never ventured far. You know I told you that my childhood was spent in my room reading so that I could avoid my parents’ arguments.”

  Mentally, I kick myself. I would never have asked if I’d known she was going to delve into her sad childhood. It tears at my insides to learn of how distraught she felt as a child.

  My spirit soars when I hear her say, “Until I met your father.”

  “Things changed for the better after that, right?”

  “Oh, yes. Your father helped me see that I was adored by him.”

  Warmly, I pat her hand. “He did adore you. I remember.”

  After some browsers enter and leave, Mom says she misses Butterchurn. “Still no sign of him.” Minutes later, she says with enthusiasm, “What about a scones-coffee-and-Elvis night?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here.”

  “What does Elvis have to do with fashion?”

  “He wore clothes.”

  “That makes him an icon for us?”

  “I always liked Elvis. My dream was to ride in a black limo with him.” Mom puts a hand to her heart. “He died on my birthday.” She stares over the rack of tartan skirts.

  “Did Daddy like Elvis?”

  “He would have joined us in the limo, should my dream have worked out.” Smiling, she says, “Your daddy tolerated him because he knew I liked ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Love Me Tender.’ ”

  Each time “Love Me Tender” played on the radio, my mother sang along in her alto voice. Daddy, with his broad shoulders and whimsical smile, would just close his eyes and listen.

  Mom chews a piece of licorice and sniffs. “So will you make a poster for Elvis Night?”

  Soon our walls will be filled with posters. As I fold the last scarf, I say, “We could have a sale on scarves. Elvis wore those.”

  “Did you know that I had a friend who met Elvis?” Her eyes widen as she offers a coy smile.

  “I bet after the concert, he kissed her cheek.” I’ve heard this story more times than I’ve heard Be
anie complain about hypocrites in church. The event with Mom’s friend took place backstage at a concert long after Uncle Charlie met General McArthur in Japan. I think of the two occasions together because each time one is mentioned, the other story typically follows.

  “Yes,” breathes Mom. “Elvis kissed her cheek.”

  The shop’s bell jingles as customers enter. Mother straightens her apron bow and welcomes them. Her smile seems weary this morning, but I push worry from my mind as though it is a piece of debris. I told Aunt Dovie that Mom’s fine, and as of yet there are no signs the cancer has returned.

  But I also know that she has a yearly physical in three weeks. These checkups are to test for one thing above all else. And when Mom returns from the clinic, it can be a miserably cold day, Wall Street stocks at a low, and the House and Senate arguing in the Capitol, but none of that matters when my mother tells me that the cancer cells have not come back. When she gives me that news, my whole world feels like a walk in a park on a golden autumn day.

  As I add a few more strokes of green to my poster for our Elvis Night, there’s the sound of rushing footsteps at our back door. First we hear a male voice holler, “Fire is here, fire is here!” and immediately we are relieved that it’s only Sanjay, our Indian tenant to the left of our shop. “You must see this, you must see!”

  “What?” I swear he watches too many reruns of The Love Boat and Three’s Company.

  Rounding the corner from the back storage room, I see him fully. His thin body shakes like a tree in a windstorm.

  “What is it?” I ask, growing concerned.

  He sputters, “There—there is fire rising.”

  “Where?”

  Mom casts him an uncertain glance. “Do you mean there’s a fire?”

  Sanjay motions for me to follow him. I do, and he runs out the back door into the sunlight. Outside, when he’s convinced that I see flames coming from the large metal dumpster the tenants in this strip mall all share, he stops. Violent shades of orange and red flicker from all angles. I watch the tops of cardboard boxes crinkle from the heat, their beige sides charring into shards of black.

  Sanjay continues to moan, “This is not good, not good.”

  Running back inside the shop, I call the fire department.

  “Is there really a fire?” Mom takes her hands from her apron pockets.

  “Go see for yourself,” I tell her.

  “Who would do that?” Mom asks when she enters the store again ten minutes later. “I don’t know why people have to create such havoc.”

  When the fire truck and police car pull into the front parking lot, Sanjay is waiting for them, guiding them to the back. Mother and I watch like little kids from the store’s restroom window as firemen squirt the dumpster with a hose. With his arms in the air, Sanjay talks. Suddenly, he points to our shop’s back door.

  We see a large policeman make his way across the rear area toward our door. Quickly, Mom and I exit the restroom through the storage room and stride into the shop.

  I stand behind the register and grab a catalog while Mom questions a lemon-colored necklace on the jewelry rack. “Do you think this will ever sell?” She holds it up to the light. “It looks like a piece of candy.”

  When we hear the anticipated knock on the back door, Mom lets the policeman into our store.

  “Did you call about the fire?” he asks. He is large in width and height; I calculate about six-feet-four. Most men are too short for Mom, but he has a good four inches on her.

  “I did,” I confess.

  He wants to know my name. I spell both my first and last names for him as he writes on a pad of paper. With a surname like Bravencourt, I’ve learned that it’s easier to spell it right from the first.

  “We’ve had a number of dumpster fires around this area lately.” He brushes fingers over his chin before continuing. “Seems to be in vogue.”

  “Do you have any idea who is starting them?” I ask.

  “Kids.” He looks up from his pen, frowns. “Playing hooky.” His eyes are blue, like the new line of pencil skirts we just received.

  “Officer Branson,” Mother says, taking a few steps closer to him. She prides herself on calling people by the names on their tags and badges. “If they need work, I’ll let them unload merchandise.”

  This surprises me. It sounds like something Dovie would say. Dovie, who wants to help the world—not my mother, who is suspicious and keeps her distance.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” says Officer Branson as he rubs his mustache. The congeniality leaves his voice as he says, “I don’t think you want these kids in your store.”

  “Oh?”

  “Pretty devious bunch from what I can tell.” He inserts his pen into the pocket of his uniform. Puts the memo pad under his arm.

  “Are they the types”—we wait for my mother to finish—“to steal a cat?”

  At first I think he’s going to laugh at her, and gritting my teeth, I pray he won’t.

  But instead he looks her over, his sympathetic eyes resting on her face. “Ma’am,” he says in a gentle but firm tone, “these deviants will do anything.”

  Mom nods solemnly and then shakes his hand. I think she’s had enough for one day and is encouraging him to go.

  thirteen

  November 1986

  It was the day Lien almost went to the Monkey House. We wondered why she and her family never showed up at the wedding held at the community chapel; it was her mother’s cousin who was marrying a thin man with a nervous twitch. The new couple would relocate to Los Angeles, where family and a Vietnamese nail salon were waiting.

  Carson and I drank from lukewarm bottles of Sprite and helped ourselves to crisp chiayo inside the chapel. Other guests spoke to us, some in English, but mostly in Vietnamese. Carson asked the bride where the Hong family was. She shook her head and then turned to smile for the photographer, who told her to turn to her left so that he could get a side view of her in her silky traditional Vietnamese dress, designed with gold and orange butterflies sailing up the front of it.

  “You wear white gown in America?” the bride asked after the photographer took his lens off of her and focused on a group of teens.

  “Sometimes,” I said and then took a bite of the spring roll.

  “Sometimes?” Carson’s eyes suddenly were like darts, ammunition, ready to act against me.

  “Not all brides wear white gowns.”

  Carson dismissed me with a roll of the eyes, and then he and the bride chatted in Vietnamese and I realized that he could very well be saying that all brides wore white. I wanted to say, I was invited to a wedding where it was the bride’s second marriage and she wore a floral dress with fuchsia stilettos. But neither of them seemed concerned with what I’d seen.

  The groom, decked out in a solid blue shirt, the long sleeves rolled up at the cuffs, and a pair of brown pants with a leather belt, came over to our table and joined in the conversation with his bride and Carson. Getting the attention of the photographer, the groom asked him to take a picture of Carson, the bride, groom, and me. We had to move to get the pose the groom wanted. His eye twitched as he positioned Carson and me on the left side and then stood with his arm wrapped around his bride’s shoulder. After two shots like that, he asked the photographer to snap a picture of just Carson and me. Carson and I were seated again, and Carson moved closer to me as we both smiled for the camera.

  Later, in Carson’s classroom, under a dull fan, he and I sat on benches and talked about effective tactics to teach cultural orientation to our students. Carson said he liked to use the visual aid of the American house, pointing out each room and explaining what people did in each one. Then, slowly and with strain in his voice, he shared a memory of his father at Thanksgiving. His father insisted on slicing the turkey at the meal, but he always took so long that his mother would end up taking over the task to appease the table of hungry family.

  “That was our tradition,” he said. “Knowing Dad would be taken over
by Mom. Yet every year he wanted to be the one to cut the bird.” Carson produced a slight smile, and spontaneously, I grabbed his hand. He let me hold it as I absorbed the excitement of the moment, but once I started to talk about our Thanksgiving traditions, the few I recalled from when my dad was alive, he let my hand go. I assumed that Mindy was on his mind.

  When the door banged open and a distraught Huy entered, I was in the middle of talking about one of my Cambodian students who, as we studied the letter P, had said she wanted to live in a house in California with movie stars, an outdoor pool, a poodle, and plenty of pineapples.

  Using Vietnamese, Huy spouted a large amount of words. Sweat glistened on his face. He paused as Carson said to me in English, “Lien’s in trouble.”

  I was not surprised. The Amerasian could be nicknamed Trouble. Now that she was no longer in my class after having received her graduation certificate, I tried to avoid her. In the marketplace, she’d call out to me, “Miss Bavecoo, Miss Bavecoo!” Her energetic wave made everyone turn and look.

  Carson said, “They are accusing her of stealing money and jewelry from the billets.”

  “How much did she steal?” I asked.

  Carson’s eyes were cold and didn’t indicate he’d heard me. I waited while he said a few things to Huy and then to me, “Lien wouldn’t steal.”

  When Huy left the room, I said, “I think she would.”

  Carson’s jaw was like the barbed wire at the guard’s gate at the entrance to the camp. If I touched it, I was certain that my fingers would bleed.

  “She isn’t like that.”

  “She is, Carson.”

  “How can you be sure?”