A Wedding Invitation (17 page)

November 1986

V
an came into my classroom with two other Vietnamese men the minute my afternoon students left. Standing beside my desk, they presented me with a bottle of Coke. I thanked them and asked how they were doing.

The men—older men with solemn faces that I’d never seen before during my visits to the neighborhoods—formed questions, questions directed at me for Van to translate. Van stressed that I must be truthful. As Lien’s teacher, I needed to tell them what I thought of her. I agreed that I would be honest in my answers and so admitted that, yes, Lien came to class with items that did not belong to her. Yes, I thought she could steal. She had taken a pair of scissors from my desk drawer and had taken them home, secretly returning them a couple of days later; a fellow student had seen her slipping them into my drawer and shouted that Lien was a thief.

After the questions stopped, the men nodded, thanked me, and left. The room suddenly felt eerie, making me wonder what had just taken place.

Due to the questioning session, I missed the agency’s van that afternoon and had to slowly walk the half mile back to my dormitory. I had a Bible study to attend, which lasted a long time, making me not get to the mess hall for dinner until almost eight. I looked for Carson, but he must have already eaten or was with students. I couldn’t find him.

The next afternoon I found Carson alone in his classroom. We had both missed the van back to the dorms.

“Did they question you?” Carson’s tone was low. He shoved his lesson planner into a knapsack he often carried around camp.

“Who?”

“Van and the councilmen.”

I thought of the two men who’d entered my classroom with Van yesterday. I’d had no idea they were councilmen. From the look on Carson’s face, he had some bad news to share. I hoped that Van hadn’t conveyed to him what I’d shared with the men. “They did. Did they question you, too?”

His sigh lifted from his lungs and then he sat down. “The council members from Neighborhood Nine agreed to search the Hongs’ billet.”

“And?”

“They didn’t find any of the jewelry and the only money was in a tin can and it amounted to a measly thirty pesos. Lien didn’t steal anything. I don’t know why her reputation makes everyone certain she would steal.”

“So, since they found nothing, this means she’s not guilty, then?”

Carson shook his head. “They think she stashed it somewhere else.”

Maybe if she held a better rapport among her people, I wanted to say, they wouldn’t be so quick to accuse her. But then I realized that the dust or dirt of the earth would never be thought of as innocent. Regardless of whether she had the behavior of an angel, she would always be looked down upon.
Some things do not change, Samantha
.

Defeated, Carson laid his head against his folded arms on his desk.

I wondered if he’d let me hold him. I placed a hand along his back. When he didn’t protest, I put both arms around him and laid my face on his shoulder.

“Mr. Hong told Lien that she can’t come by this classroom to see me anymore. He’s not letting her go out freely. He’s keeping her on a tight rein.”

“I’m sorry,” I breathed into his shoulder.

A warm November wind pelted the tin roof, and the rats along the overhead beams grew quiet. I felt a cramp in my leg but didn’t want to move away from Carson. I wondered if he cared more about the Hong family than anyone else in the camp. His capacity to wrap himself around the four of them was amazing to me. Sure, I felt a fondness for many of the refugees, but I knew my devotion could never match his. It set me in awe—and it frustrated me.

Carson’s breath brushed against my encircled bare arms. I had this feeling that if he moved his lips, they would brush against my skin. I held my own breath, the longing growing with each moment.

Suddenly, the door to his classroom opened and Brice walked in, a smirk on his face.

Carson got up and stepped away from me, leaving me to catch myself from falling by grabbing the edge of his massive desk.

Brice sauntered over to us. “Want to go get dinner? I’m starving.”

“Sure,” said Carson.

“Did you hear that Lien’s not allowed to come visit you anymore?” Brice shrugged. “Just as well. She’s a handful. Do you think she really stole all that stuff?”

“Just a jade necklace and some bracelets,” I said.

“That’s not what I heard. I was told that she took a few dozen pieces of jewelry from five billets in the Neighborhood Nine, and at least seven hundred pesos.”

Carson looked pained.

I wanted to tell him that it would be okay, that I was here, that I’d be glad to sit with him and just listen to the wind.

He looked at me and said, “Let’s go eat.”

My heart lurched.

Slowly, I followed him and Brice out of the warm classroom, into the damp evening air. But my longing stayed, sticking onto my skin more tightly than Dovie’s butterfly cocoons wrapped on tree limbs.

twenty-two

D
ovie, Beanie, and I clean up the kitchen, removing dishes from the dishwasher and placing them in the cupboards. Little calls from her daughter Liza’s in Florence, South Carolina, where she’s spending the holiday weekend. Dovie answers the phone and talks a bit and then repeats to us what Little just told her. “Says Liza wants to join the convent and become a nun.”

Beanie rolls her eyes and mutters, “Has she lost her mind?”

“Well, well,” my aunt says after listening a while longer, “I suppose that might work.” To us, she says, “Little says that Liza wants to study overseas. Maybe Paris.”

“Why does everyone want to go to Paris?” Beanie says to me.

“It’s romantic,” I tell her. I’ve always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and dine outside at a street café under the stars. And just maybe, be with someone who touches my arm, causing fire to pulsate through every vein.

“I’ve seen all those movies that are set in Paris. Don’t look like a place a person like me would fit in.”

“Aren’t you part French?” I ask, setting a plate atop the stack of others in the cupboard.

“Sammie Sugar, I am part everything, but that doesn’t mean I understand it all.”

When the kitchen is “put back into place,” as Beanie says, Beanie, still murmuring about Paris, heads up the stairs to her room to listen to the radio. Dovie hangs a dish towel on the rack by the sink and tells me she’s going outside to check on her butterflies and make sure the hens are rounded up and secure in their coop.

Knowing that I need to sleep because I can’t be up like I was last night, I stick to my nightly ritual and brew a pot of coffee. As the crickets and bullfrogs serenade each other across neighbors’ lawns, I join Milkweed on the porch’s love seat.

The silent porch only makes me think of Carson. I sip from my mug of coffee, and although its aroma is strong, stronger still are the fumes from the fireworks. They filter through the air like the scent of a woman’s perfume lingers even long after she’s departed.

“Dovie?” I ask after she returns from making sure all her insects and chickens are safe. I know that ideally she’d like to believe that the chickens would go to their roosting spots by themselves each night without assistance, but there has been a spotting of a fox in the neighborhood, and Dovie doesn’t want to subject her possessions to an attack.

“Yes, dear?” Dovie’s voice has that lovely Southern charm to it. My own mother works hard at hiding her Southern accent. For whatever reason, she doesn’t eagerly admit that she was born and raised in Winston. I think it’s because, once she married Daddy, they lived in various northern regions and people teased her about her drawl.

With my legs stretched out on the ottoman, I ask my aunt, “Did you ever think of becoming a nun?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, indeed I did.”

“Really?”

She plops her tall body onto the space beside me on the love seat. “Yes, I also wanted to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and an interpreter for the United Nations.”

I search her face to check if she’s serious.

Her laughter is loud. “Me? Can you believe those dreams I once had?”

“I can. I once wanted to be a secret agent.”

“Is that so?”

“After our trip to Scotland. Daddy told me I’d make a great agent, and he was sure that Scotland Yard could use me.” I never made it to Scotland again, or London. But after traveling to the United Kingdom during our family vacation, I did yearn to live and work overseas. When I read about the need for teachers at the refugee camp years later, I eagerly applied and hugged Mom a few times when my application was accepted.

Dovie pats my leg like one would pat her child’s, only my aunt has never had children. “I want you to know that you shouldn’t worry so much.”

“Worry?”

“Yes, I see those worry lines on your forehead.”

I rub my forehead with my index finger.

“Samantha?” My name hangs from her lips like a cloak from a hanger.

“Yeah. I know.”

“Know what?” Her brow wrinkles as her eyes look into mine.

This time I pat her leg. “That God loves me and wants me to trust so that I have no need for worry.”

She relaxes. “I know you have a lot on your plate.”

“You mean Mom and the shop?”

“And the past and the future.”

I inhale and nod.

“I’m not sure what that boy meant to you in the Philippines, but you are here now. Release your fears to God.”

In my mind I see a mass of orange and black decorating a field, beginning a journey. “Like the butterflies?”

“Exactly.”

The crickets chirp wildly through the trees as the ceiling fan sputters, casting a breeze over my legs. I think of how we miss so much of nature’s offerings because we’re too occupied with our own dilemmas, yet if we listened to her music more, we might find the solace we desperately need.

“Release and be still,” my aunt says.

“I loved him.” Once the words leave my mouth, I wonder who has spoken. I think about clarifying or retracting them, but I’m too tired to try.

“I know.”

“I won’t get hurt again.”

She places an arm around my shoulders. “No, you won’t. You won’t be hurt twice.”

I rest my head against her arm. “How can you tell? How do you know?”

“I’ve been in love. Never found a man who could handle being my husband, but I know about love.”

“How do you think Mom ever got so she could trust a man?”

“You mean your father?”

“Yeah. She says the two of you lived in an environment where there was little love and trust.”

“You know that’s true, Sam. She’s not making up the ugly incidences of lies and deceit and abuse that infested our childhood. But as I got older, I refused to let it keep me from living. God had to do a load of healing in me.” Squeezing my shoulder, she continues. “Gradually, I learned that not everyone is out to get you. Your mama just is taking longer to see the same.”

At this point in her life, I doubt my mother will ever change and soften like her sister, Dovie. Suspicious and cautious, she has become old before her time.

“She loves us, though, Sam. She may not want the affection or tell us that she loves us, but she does. Believe that.”

My eyes well as I long for the days with Daddy when Mom smiled more often and I felt the strength of family.

Dovie kisses my cheek and gently wipes a tear that has crisscrossed my face.

We sit together as dogs bay in a neighbor’s yard and a few firecrackers pop into the distant air. Then, after commenting on the brightness of the moon, we leave the porch and head inside. I wait as Dovie locks the front door and then watch her climb the stairs to her bedroom, Milkweed trailing closely behind.

Dovie pauses to say that she hopes I sleep well; I tell her the same.

twenty-three

B
eanie makes me blueberry pancakes and sausage links for breakfast. She insists that I try the new syrup shipped from her friends in Vermont. “It’s the real stuff, Sammie. None of that artificial sugar substance. You have not lived until you have tasted real maple syrup.”