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The cherry trees are in bloom here along the Potomac. I often find myself conversing with you in my head. Look at the falling
blossoms, I say. Beautiful, yes? Some people, I know, don’t have the courage for anything, but what is there to be afraid
of? I thought I would spend the rest of my days alone. I can’t help but think of the poet Meng Chiao. “Who says that all things
flower in spring?”

A few characters had been blotted out, a phrase added between the vertical lines of script. Agnes couldn’t help but laugh,
even though there was a slight bitterness in it. How ridiculous that her father should be courting someone across the country.
To be thinking of love when he should be thinking of the grave. She called up Hu Tingjun, her father’s student in California.
“So who is this Qiulian?” she demanded when he picked up the phone.

“Ah!” Tingjun said, his voice wavering. He had always been a little afraid of her since that time she had thrown a glass of
water in his face. But he had a loose tongue, and Agnes knew he would not be able to resist the urge to gossip. “A real beauty
from the mainland,”he declared. “Your father has good taste.”

Agnes allowed this remark to pass without comment. “And why is she so interested in my father? He doesn’t have any money.”

Tingjun laughed. “You underestimate your father’s charms.”He paused, and Agnes could hear him sucking his teeth. “I think
she’s had a sad life. You know what they say—every beauty has a tragic story.”

Agnes frowned, switching the phone to her other ear.

“Her husband was an art history professor at Nanjing University,”Tingjun said. “Struggled against, of course, and died in
a reeducation camp. She married a second time, but this husband turned out to be a violent character—he beat her, I’m told,
and she divorced him after a few years. She has two children from her first marriage, both of them in Guangzhou. She came
here on a tourist’s visa and is staying with an old friend from college.”

“So she’s been married twice already,”Agnes said, “and wants to marry again. She doesn’t have a very good track record.”

“Have a heart, Shuling. What’s so wrong with your father finding comfort in his last days? It’s no good to be alone. No good
at all.”

“I never thought you were a sentimentalist,”she said. “I wish I could hand you some tissues!”

Tingjun sighed. “You’re always the same, Shuling.”

When Agnes hung up the phone, she couldn’t help but think of her mother, whom she had always loved more than she loved her
father, just as you love something more because it is broken. Her mother had lived to the age of seventy-one, longer than
anyone had believed possible, defying the prognostications of doctors, the resignation of her children, and even her own will.
Her father had never murmured a word of complaint in all the years he cared for her. In the mornings, he prepared a breakfast
for her of pureed apples or boiled carrots. At night he brought her three pills — one sleeping capsule, two that he had filled
with sugar—and a tall glass of prune juice. Everything her mother ate had to go into a blender first. She chewed the same
mouthful over and over again with slow awareness, sometimes falling asleep with the food still in her mouth. She once told
Agnes that every bite she swallowed was like swallowing a small stone. The only thing she enjoyed putting in her mouth were
her sleeping pills, and these she swallowed all at once without a sip of water. Perhaps Agnes respected this sickness in her
mother more than she did her father’s health, his natural exuberance, and his penchant for histrionics.

The day before her mother’s funeral, Agnes remembered, she and her brother had gone to a store to look for watches. They had
selected a gold watch with a round face, and her brother had asked the salesclerk if there was a warranty, which struck Agnes
as funny because the watch was going on her mother’s wrist. “Who cares whether it runs beneath the ground or not?” she said.
Nevertheless, her mother had always liked to wear a watch. They bought it for her because her old one was broken.

Then Agnes saw her mother lying in her coffin, the new gold watch ticking on her wrist. The sight of her mother lying in such
a composed state, looking more content and peaceful than she did when she was alive, made Agnes desperate. She brushed her
mother’s cheeks and smoothed out her hair with increasing violence, clutching her hand and kissing her cold lips, all the
while smelling her powder and the undertaker’s handiwork beneath the cloying scent of lilies.

At the funeral reception, her father positioned himself on a stool at the front door of his house so that anyone who passed
by had to confront him. At one point, he sprang off his stool and ran across the yard to speak to his neighbor, who had just
come home from the store and was holding a bag of groceries. Agnes watched as her father waved his arms, his new suit a size
too large for him, the cuffs dangling over his hands and flapping about his wrists. He squeezed his eyes and cried like a
child, beating the side of his head with his palm. His neighbor set her bag down, took his hand between her own, and nodded
in sympathy, even though she could not understand a word he was saying. Agnes’s brother finally intervened, leading their
father away so that the neighbor could go inside her house.

“Try to control yourself,”Agnes told her father.

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone you saw every day of your life,”he said, wiping his eyes.

When the reception was over, after the visitors had departed and her father had shut himself up in his bedroom, Agnes and
her brother stood in the backyard, looking at their father’s garden.

“The two of them lived in their own world together,”her brother said.

Agnes looked at the glossy tomatoes that hung like ornaments from the vines. The winter melons sprawled on the grass like
pale, overfed whales. Above them, the sunflowers rose, their faces somehow human, leaning from their stalks. For the first
time, she wondered about her parents, the quiet life they had lived in that home.

Agnes never asked her father about the letter she found. In October, he informed her that Qiulian would be flying down in
a month and that they would be married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse. He wondered if Agnes would be their witness.
Also if there was a restaurant in the area suitable for a small wedding banquet. No more than three tables, he said.

In the marriage bureau, tiny pictures in pastel frames—a cheetah running, an eagle spreading its wings—decorated the walls
of the waiting area. There was a sign in the room prohibiting photographs. Agnes sighed as she looked at her watch. Her daughters
would be home from school in an hour and would be catching a ride to the banquet with Agnes’s friend. Her brother wasn’t coming.
He had been depressed by their father’s news and told Agnes it was too difficult for him to leave the farm. Agnes got up from
her seat and inspected a picture of a sailboat skimming moonlit waters. The caption read:
You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
It made Agnes laugh out loud, and the receptionist glanced up at her from her desk.

Her father arrived a moment later with his bride. He was beaming, handsomely dressed in a dark gray suit and platinum tie,
two red carnations fastened to his lapel. He introduced Agnes and Qiulian with mock solemnity, exaggerating the tones of their
names, lifting himself in the air and falling back on his heels. Qiulian smiled and told Agnes that her American name was
Lily. Everything Lily wore was white. There was her opaque white dress suit with its faintly puffed sleeves. Her pearl earrings
and two strands of pearls wound closely around her neck. A corsage of white roses enmeshed in a swirl of white ribbon pinned
to her chest. She had decided on white just as if she were a first-time American bride, even though white was no color at
all, what you wore to another person’s funeral. Perhaps it was a sign of Lily’s true feelings.

Agnes grasped her father’s arm and pulled him aside. “How old is she, by the way?” It infuriated her that this woman was closer
to her age than she had expected.

“That’s top secret,”her father said, adjusting his carnations. “She’s very nice, isn’t she? Do I look all right? What do you
think of my tie?” He glanced over at Lily, who stood serenely looking at her shoes. She held a small beaded purse between
both hands, and it seemed from her empty expression that she was pretending not to hear their conversation. “Incredible!”
he muttered. “I’m supposed to feel less as I grow old. But it’s the opposite — I feel more and more!” His eyes widened,
and he knocked his fist against his chest. “Can you believe it? A seventy-eight-year-old heart like mine!” He walked back
to Lily, smiling and patting her hand.

Agnes felt her skin begin to itch. She wanted to lift her sweater, scratch herself luxuriously until she bled, but the receptionist
told them it was time, and they were ushered into a narrow green-carpeted room where the justice of the peace stood waiting
behind a podium. Behind him was a trellis on which a few straggling vines of artificial clematis drooped. It was a halfhearted
attempt at illusion, and, for this reason, it gave Agnes some relief. It startled her to think that she had once cared about
the color of roses matching her bridesmaids’ dresses. That day had been a fantasy, with its exquisite bunches of flowers,
so perfect they did not seem real. At one point, she had looked up at the sky and laughed . . . she had felt so light and
happy. She had worn a white ballroom dress and—of all things—a rhinestone tiara! If photographs still existed of her in that
Cinderella outfit, they resided in other people’s albums, for she had torn her own into bits.

Her father was listening to the justice with an impassive, dignified expression, his hands folded neatly in front of him.
Agnes thought Lily’s smile belonged on the face of a porcelain doll. Her hair was cut in short, fashionable waves and seemed
ridiculously lustrous for someone her age. Dyed, no doubt. Neither of them understood what the justice was saying, and Agnes
had to prompt them when it was time to exchange rings. When the justice pronounced them husband and wife, her father looked
around the room, smiling good-naturedly. He thanked the justice with a bow of his head and took Lily gently by the elbow.

Her father visited less often after he was married. The few times he took the subway to Dunn Loring, he did not bring Lily
with him. Agnes once asked him why, and he said Lily was quite popular at Evergreen House. “People are always inviting her
out to restaurants,”he said. “Or she goes over to other ladies’ apartments, and they watch the latest Hong Kong melodramas.
What sentimental drivel! But she enjoys it, she can’t get enough of it. . .”He told Agnes that one day Lily wanted to eat
dan dan noodles and nothing but dan dan noodles. “There is a restaurant we know, but the owners were away on vacation. Qiulian
suggested another restaurant, but when we got there, it wasn’t on the menu and she refused to go inside. She dragged me from
one place to another, but none of them served dan dan noodles. I was so hungry by this time, I insisted we go into the next
restaurant we saw. But she said she wouldn’t eat at all if she couldn’t have her dan dan noodles. So we ended up going home,
and I had to eat leftovers.”Her father shook his head, though he was clearly delighted by Lily’s caprice.

From her father, Agnes learned that Lily had studied Chinese history at the prestigious Zhejiang University. She liked to
take baths over showers, used Pond’s cream on her face at night, and sipped chrysanthemum tea in bed. She rarely bought herself
anything, and when she did, the things she chose were charming and fairly priced. Her father gave Lily a monthly allowance
of five hundred dollars, which was half the income he received from Agnes and her brother as well as from the federal government.
Lily, in turn, sent money to her son, a book vendor, and to her daughter, a truck driver in Guangzhou.

More than a year passed, and Agnes never saw her.

In December, she walked by Lily almost without recognizing her. She had stopped in Chinatown to buy duck for a New Year’s
Eve party, and a small group of older women approached her on the street. She would not have paid them any attention if the
woman in the gray raincoat had not paused to stare in the middle of readjusting a silk scarf around her head. It took Agnesa
moment to realize it was Lily. By that time, the women had passed, heading south in the direction of Evergreen House.

Agnes stood on the sidewalk, gazing absently at a faded brick building, its pink paint flaking off to reveal dark red patches.
Even in the winter, the streets smelled of grease and the hot air blown out of ventilators. Behind a row of buildings, two
looming cranes crisscrossed the sky. It was odd to think of someone like Lily living here. Agnes went inside the restaurant
to get her duck, and by the time she stepped outside again, tiny flakes of snow were falling. She did not go back to her car
but instead turned in the direction of her father’s apartment.

Outside his door, she heard shrill voices and laughter, the noisy clacking of tiles being swirled along a table. The mahjong
ladies, Agnes thought. Lily answered the door, her mild, empty eyes widening slightly. Her mass of glossy black hair was perfectly
coiffed, and only her wrinkled neck betrayed her age.

“I saw you on the street,”Agnes said. “Didn’t you see me?”

“Yes,”Lily said, pausing. “But I wasn’t sure it was you until we had passed each other.”

“The same with me.”Agnes pulled off her coat and tossed it onto the sofa. “So, who are your friends here?”

“Oh yes, let me introduce you to my neighbors.”The mahjong ladies half stood out of their seats, smiling at Agnes, but it
was obvious they wanted to return to their game.

“Don’t let me disturb you,”Agnes told them. “Is my father here?”

“He’s taking a nap,”Lily said, seating herself at the table.

The living room was brightly lit compared with the dimness of the hallway. It seemed like its own island in space as the afternoon
waned and the windows darkened. The mahjong ladies chattered, flinging their tiles to the middle of the table. They were older
than Lily, in their seventies at least, their hands plowed with wrinkles, with bright green circles of jade hanging from their
wrists. Their fingers, too, were weighed down by gaudy rings, the stones as shiny as candy, purple and turquoise and vermilion.
“He ate oatmeal every day,”a woman with badly drawn eyebrows was saying.