“Yeah, I can tell.”
“Well, you know how it is with a cold. Head’s all stopped up, throat’s scratchy. And that cough syrup makes me feel dopey.”
“Caney was worried about you, so I thought—”
“I told him it wasn’t anything serious.”
“He sent you some lunch.” Vena set the box on a bar dividing the kitchen and living room.
“Looks like he sent enough for the whole trailer park.”
“How does vegetable soup sound to you?” Vena held up a plastic container.
“Oh, I couldn’t eat a thing.”
“Maybe there’s something else here that might taste good.”
As she rummaged in the box, pulling out packages, jars and bottles, Vena held them up for Molly O’s approval.
“We have a Hershey with almonds, dill pickles, peanuts . . .”
Molly O groaned.
“Banana Bikes, crackers, juice, doughnuts, bubblegum . . .
and pigskins.”
Molly O’s laughter led to a fit of coughing; Vena waited until it passed.
“And he sent you a bouquet,” Vena said as she pulled out a dusty vase stuffed with faded plastic roses which had been in the front window of the Honk since it opened.
Obviously pleased, Molly O said, “Ain’t he something?”
Vena put the vase on top of the TV, then leaned close to study two black-and-white snapshots propped against the cable box. In one, Caney, at seven, was astride an Appaloosa colt, a slender man with a receding hairline holding the reins. In the other, the same man, nearly bald, held a frowning baby.
“This must be Dewey O’Keefe,” Vena said.
“Oh, Caney told you about Dewey.”
“It’s funny. He looks like I thought he would from hearing Caney talk about him.”
“Dewey was crazy about that boy. So thrilled to have a son.
Didn’t matter that another man fathered him, that didn’t matter to Dewey at all.
“And when Brenda came, well, he just couldn’t get over the wonder of me and him creating a child.” Molly O dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “I see him in Caney, in Brenda . . . and now, with her baby coming, I’ll have another part of him with me.”
“Have you heard anything yet? About Brenda?”
“No, but every time the phone rings . . . Well, I try to keep my mind occupied. Read my magazines, do a little knitting.”
“What are you making?”
When Molly O held up the half-finished bootie she was working on, Vena recognized the blue yarn she’d bought at the Wal-Mart a few days earlier.
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it,” Molly O said, “that a foot can be that tiny.”
Grabbing for more tissues, Molly O tried to cover a sneeze.
“Vena, I’m scared to death I’m gonna give you this cold. No sense you staying here breathing my germs. What would Caney do with both of us out sick?”
“You sure I can’t fix you something before I go? Maybe a nice bowl of pigskins?”
Molly O made a face. “I’ll pass, but I’d drink a glass of juice.
And I probably ought to take a couple of aspirin.”
“Where are they?”
“In the bathroom.”
Vena went down the hallway and opened the first door she came to.
The room, light and airy, smelled faintly of baby oil. White dotted swiss curtains covered the windows, beneath them a small chest painted pale yellow, stenciled with hearts. A changing table was neatly arranged with stacks of receiving blankets, diapers and gowns. A folded quilt covered the seat of a high-backed pine rocker standing in the corner.
On a table beside a white wicker crib against the far wall rested a framed photograph of Dewey O’Keefe, placed there by a woman who trusted the miracle that the heart of his heart was beating in the child of his child.
T
HE MAIL NEVER CAME before two or two-thirty, but Bui started watching long before then.
He’d been expecting a letter from Nguyet for over a week, each day growing more anxious when the mail carrier had nothing for him. But today he was certain his waiting would end because last night he had seen Nguyet in his dream.
She was writing to him by candlelight and as her hand moved across the page, he heard her voice whispering the words as she wrote them.
I do not think I can make you hear with words on paper what is in
my heart because you are so far away. I have started many letters,
but this one I will finish for I have something I must tell you . . .
Then a wind turned suddenly against her, lifting her hair from her shoulders, ruffling the paper on which she wrote.
. . . for I have something I must tell you . . .
She did not look up, did not take her eyes from her writing as a current of air began puffing at the candle.
. . . something I must tell you . . .
With each flicker of light, she was disappearing, her voice growing fainter and more distant until at last it was silenced.
Too late, Bui reached for her in the darkness, but she was gone.
*
“She’s just got a bad cold, Life,” Vena said as she set a blue plate special before him. “Probably be back tomorrow or the next day.”
“Well, you never can tell. Friend of mine over in Poteau, he had a cold one day, the next week he was dead of pneumonia.”
“We could use some more tea over here,” Bilbo Porter said.
Vena grabbed four menus to deliver to a table of secretaries from the courthouse, refilled tea for Bilbo and Peg, then wrote up Wilma’s order for a club sandwich and took it to the pass-through.
“Where the hell is Bui?” Caney said as he flipped two beef patties on the grill.
“Standing out there by the mailbox.”
“Why?”
“Said he’s going to get a letter today.”
“Mail won’t be here for—”
“I told him that.”
“He’s gonna do me a lot of damned good out there.”
Vena left Caney growling in the kitchen, then went to the register where a young couple waited to pay their check.
As soon as they walked out, the phone rang.
“Can you get that?” Caney yelled.
“Honk and Holler,” Vena said into the receiver, then pulled out her pad and began to write. “You want those with mustard or may-onnaise?”
“Hey, Vena,” Bilbo shouted. “How you gonna hook a tray on that one?”
Vena turned to see a horse and rider coming across the lot. The rider was a burly man in his sixties, the horse the gelding she’d taken from the pasture the week before.
“You suppose Brim’s gonna order something for hisself or something for the horse?” Bilbo laughed.
“What?” Vena said to the caller as she continued to stare out the window. “Sorry, you said hold the onions on two?”
She turned her face to the wall as Brim Neely walked in. Then, just as she hung up the phone, Caney came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“Finish up those burgers for me, will you?”
“Caney . . .”
“Looks like I’ve gotta see a man about a horse.”
Vena went into the kitchen, but stood near the door to hear what Brim Neely had to say.
“Sorry to come at your busy time, Caney, but . . .”
Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry . . .
Someone had plugged the jukebox, so Vena heard more of steel guitars and fiddles than she did of the conversation out front.
“. . . knew he’d been ridden, but couldn’t figure who the hell would . . .”
“. . . got in a little trouble, but . . .”
Yonder comes a gal with a red dress on / Some folks call her Dinah . . .
“. . . reckoned I had me a horse thief . . . said he saw you and a woman . . .”
“. . . hard not to get caught . . .”
“. . . goes crazy at the sound of gunfire . . .”
Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry . . .
Vena stepped out of the kitchen and walked purposefully toward Brim Neely. “I’m the one who took your gelding,” she said. “Caney didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So if you’ve got a problem . . .”
“No, ma’am, I ain’t got a problem. Seems to me everything’s settled.” Brim moved toward the door.
“Thanks, Brim,” Caney said.
“You know, when you called, I figured some of my stock got loose. Reckoned if one of those damned steers got close to the Honk, it’d be hamburger by now.”
“Got to turn a profit somehow, Brim.”
“Well, I best be getting on. You take care.”
Vena watched as he unhitched the gelding from a bumper guard out front and led him around the side of the building.
“Caney, I feel like a fool. I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble.”
“There’s not gonna be any trouble.”
“Then why was he here?”
“ ’Cause I bought the gelding.”
“You what?”
“He’s a fine animal, Vena. Well bred, healthy. Apparently he’s spooked by gunfire, but other than that . . .”
“Where are you gonna keep it?”
“Back there in my pasture.”
“Your pasture?”
“Yeah, Brim leases it from me.”
“But I don’t understand why you wanted to buy a horse. You don’t even—”
“Well, I figured it was the only way to keep you out of jail.”
Then, grinning, Caney rolled back into the kitchen. “You finish those burgers up for me?”
*
As soon as Bui had closed the drapes in the Reverend’s study, he sat at the desk and switched on the lamp. Then he reached inside his shirt for Nguyet’s letter which lay warm against his skin.
When the mail carrier had handed it to him earlier in the day, Bui had known he would not read it until he was alone in the church. Feeling Nguyet’s words pressed against his body had been enough to bring him to this moment.
After he removed the outer envelope addressed to him by his cousin in France, he studied the smaller one inside, his name printed neatly by Nguyet’s small hand. He smiled as he imagined how she had gripped the pen tightly in her slender fingers to write the strange name of the town where he lived.
Then, as he withdrew the pages from inside, he dizzied at the scent . . . the incense Nguyet burned each night at the altar, the mint plants she tended in her garden, the smell of the jasmine soap with which she bathed her skin.
He unfolded the pages and smoothed out their creases, his fingers tingling as they swept across the words.
Anh yêu Bui,
Em có vãi tin buôn`
. . . hurts my heart to say we can never be together now. For my need to come to you in America has cost me too much.
Bui blinked his eyes to clear his vision, certain he had misread the words.
Because I was too impatient to wait, I borrowed from my sister’s husband all the money he could give. I paid it to a man taking many people on his boat to Malaysia, but my money was not enough. He demanded more. Much more than money.
“Ông ta muôn´ gì?”
Bui whispered.
“Cái gì?”
On the night I was to meet him and the others to begin the voy-age, I discovered he had left me behind. The boat had sailed, not at the time he told me, but two days before.
Bui felt the pain twisting inside him, the force of it rising in his chest.
So now I have nothing but shame, a shame that lives inside me, for I am carrying a child. But not the child of the man I love. . . .
As Bui lifted the letter to his lips, the empty church echoed with the sound of his keening.
*
Molly O had a hell of a time getting to sleep. She couldn’t breathe through her nose, coughing left her gasping for air and her throat felt like she’d swallowed nails.
She’d finished off the cough syrup, enough to make her woozy, inhaled nose drops until she thought she’d drown. Then she’d slathered her chest with Vicks and rubbed some onto the soles of her feet, therapy learned from her mother, who swore the procedure opened clogged passages and induced sleep.
There might have been something to it because sometime near two, Molly O fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep, so exhausted she heard nothing . . . not the wind chimes clanking on her neighbor’s porch, not the episode of
Andy Griffith
running on her TV in the living room . . . and not the pounding at the door.
But she came wide awake at the sound of one word spoken outside her window.
“Mom.”
As she hurtled down the hall, her greased feet slipped on the cold linoleum and, flying through the kitchen, she jammed her hand on the refrigerator. But she didn’t care about a trail of foot-prints in Vicks or the pain in her wrist.
Nothing else mattered now that her baby was home.
She flipped the lock, flung the door open and rushed into the chill night air.
“Brenda, Brenda, Brenda,” she chanted as she enfolded her daughter in her arms, rocked her back and forth, and cried.
“Hi, Mom,” Brenda said, her mouth crushed against Molly O’s wet cheek as she was whisked inside.
“Oh, honey, I’ve been so worried about you. Where have you been? Why didn’t you call me?”
“No, don’t turn on the light,” Brenda said too late.
“Here, let me look at you.”
Brenda turned her face away from the light, but not before Molly O glimpsed the bruise on her chin, the scratches down the side of her neck.
“My God! How did you—”
“An accident, that’s all.”
“Honey.” When Molly O turned Brenda toward her, she discovered the injuries were less alarming than the pallor of the girl’s skin, and her eyes, which looked old and empty.
“Brenda, what’s happened to you?”
Molly O tried to hold her, but Brenda twisted away and dropped onto the couch.
“What’s happened? Why, I’m a star, haven’t you heard? The greatest country music star Las Vegas has seen since Dolly Parton.
I packed them in at the Golden Nugget, a real hit.”
“Why, that’s wonderful, darlin’,” Molly O said, trying to sound like she believed her own voice.
“Don’t suppose you got any cigarettes, have you? I’m about to die for a smoke.”
“You think it’s wise for you to be smoking?”
“Wise!”
“Well, they say it’s not good for you when you’re carrying—”
“God, here we go again. I just walked in the door and you’re already on my case. What is it with you? I thought you’d be glad to see me. Welcome the prodigal daughter home. Oops, ‘daughter’