Chapter 4

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was born in a small fishing village in central Vietnam, somewhere south of Quảng Trị and north of the old imperial capital of Huế. I don’t know if the village even had a name, and I’m sure you won’t find it on any map. This was in June of Nineteen Sixty-Eight, and the country was a bit of a mess.

While I was busy being born, U.S. Marines were busy fighting a pitched battle against the North Vietnamese at Khe Sanh, only about fifty miles northeast of our village. Earlier in that same year, while I was still just a twinkle in my mother’s eye, the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet offensive, and the ensuing Battle of Huế had resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. I’m told my father was one of them.

That was probably the turning point for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the year things started sliding backwards. It was certainly a turning point for my family. I wasn’t born yet, so I missed it, but I just wanted you to know what my mother was going through at the time, so you won’t judge her too harshly.

We left our village soon after I was born—my mother told me that—we had been evacuated and moved further south. It seemed we were always being evacuated, always on the move, as the country slowly crumbled to dust underneath us. I remember spending a lot of time in my mother’s arms as we walked, sometimes for days, to the next place that was deemed safe.

As Nineteen Seventy-Four was coming to a close, we ran out of places to evacuate to. I was six years old then, so I had a better understanding of what was going on. I could tell that my mother and the others were worried, but Uncle Chris assured us he could get us out. He had arranged passage for us on a boat, he said.

All I can say for the boat when I saw it, was that it was floating. It certainly wasn’t built to hold the twenty-three people who boarded it that day. But I remember Uncle Chris said all we had to do was get into the gulf and we’d be picked up by a U.S. Navy ship and taken to America.

Well, we made it to the gulf alright, but there were no Navy ships waiting to take us anywhere. Maybe they were all busy doing Navy things, I don’t know. There was still a war on, so I suppose it’s a distinct possibility. There were some merchant ships, but they all passed us by, like we weren’t even there.

To this day, I still don’t believe that Uncle Chris deliberately deceived us. I think what happened is that things were in such a state of constant flux; that what was truth one day could not be counted on the next. But I do blame him for sending us out there, woefully unprepared for anything more than a few hour’s journey.

I suppose you could say that at the tender age of six, I had already developed a healthy distrust of the men in my life. My father had abandoned me before I was born. Granted it wasn’t his fault that he died, but I was a kid, and I felt betrayed. And now, Uncle Chris, who probably wasn’t even my uncle, had abandoned me to this floating museum piece.

Eventually, our boat ran out of fuel, or the engine broke down, I don’t know, but we started drifting out to sea. I remember everyone on board saying how fortunate this was, that we were heading into the shipping lanes, and it was just a matter of time before we were rescued. But the tone of their voices lent no commitment to their words.

They were frightened. I was frightened. I was six years old, adrift on an over-crowded boat that had absolutely no business in the open ocean. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Ships came to us in the shipping channel alright, but they weren’t U.S. Navy, and they weren’t part of some international merchant fleet. I later learned they were pirates. And every time one of these ships came, I was sent down below to hide under a pile of rice sacks. I remember the look of fear in my mother’s eyes as she told me how important it was to stay hidden, no matter what happened, no matter what I thought I heard up above.

I heard a lot of things up above. Six times we were boarded. Six times I hid below under the rice sacks. One time I heard gunshots and emerged to find that one of the men on our boat had been killed. Five times I heard screaming and emerged to find some of the women with their clothing torn—their faces battered and stained with tears.

Three times the battered face was my mother’s.

“I — I think I need to stop now.” Betty wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, the other hand still firmly gripping the wheel of her Subaru wagon. She sniffled a few times.

Karin stopped the recording app on her phone and leaned forward to offer a tissue.

“Just pull off,” Desi said. “I can drive from here.”

“Thank you, dear.” Betty sniffled again, and steered the car over to the shoulder.

A heavy silence hung over the rest of the drive.

The silence continued as the three women reached the cemetery. They walked hand-in-hand through the rows of mostly identical, modest stones—Desi on the left, Betty in the middle, and Karin on the right. Karin was clutching all of the apricot blossoms in her free hand.

“This is it,” Betty said, and they all stopped.

“Do you want to be alone?” Karin asked.

Karin then split up the apricot blossom branches into three equal bunches. Each woman leaned forward and silently deposited their bundle next to the grave marker bearing the Nguyen name. They stood for a long time, holding hands, and saying nothing.

“Desi,” Betty finally said. “Will you take us home?”

“If course, Mistress.”

On the drive back to the farmhouse, Desi sat behind the wheel with Karin and Betty occupying the backseat. Betty’s head was resting on Karin’s shoulder. There was no plan devised for this seating arrangement, it just happened that way.

“I love you, girls,” Betty said, and then fell silent for the rest of the journey home, fingers laced with Karin’s the entire time.

“I think she’s asleep,” Karin whispered as Desi steered into the gravel driveway of the old farmhouse.

“Can you blame her?” Desi said. “Six years old. Jesus.”

The stopping of the car, or the whispering between Karin and Desi—something had awakened Betty Nguyen, because she straightened up and blinked twice. “We’re home,” she said.

“Yes, we are, Mistress.”

“Would you girls consider spending the night? I’ve got extra toothbrushes, and I know you don’t require much in the way of clothes.” Betty smiled, but to Karin it looked forced.

“Of course,” said Karin. “Des?”

After a light supper of sandwiches and lotus tea, the three women elected for an early bedtime. And like the earlier arrangements in the car, the bed order was unspoken, but resulted in Betty in the center, flanked by Desi and Karin on either side as guardians. All three were nude and staring at the ceiling.

Desi rolled onto her side placed a hand on Betty’s shoulder. “Are you alright?” she asked.

“Yes, dear. Thank you.”

Karin rolled over as well and placed a hand on Betty’s other shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If it weren’t for this book, this interview—”

“Not your fault, honey. I should have told you girls a long time ago.”

Karin shifted herself around. She was now curled into a fetal position, knees draw up toward her chest, with a hand on Betty’s hip and her head resting aside Betty’s shoulder. Desi took up a similar position on the other side. Betty pulled up the covers, and the three women drifted off to sleep.

Early the next morning, Karin awoke to the unmistakable smell of pancakes on the air. She assumed they were blueberry pancakes, because this had become a sort of tradition as well. She smiled.

Karin fondly remembered the days when Betty would take turns impaling ‘her girls’, until they were well used and completely senseless—Betty wielding a wicked-looking strap-on that looked like it couldn’t possibly fit, yet somehow it always did. And then in the mornings Betty would make blueberry pancakes, as if they possessed some kind of magic rejuvenating properties that would make the three of them ready to go for another round.

Grinning and opening her eyes, Karin looked over at the empty space in the big king-sized bed. It was not Betty, but Desi who was missing this morning—Betty was still in the middle, eyes closed. Karin let out a contented sigh and curled herself around Betty’s body, draping a hand lightly on the resting woman’s chest, and remarking at how peacefully she slept.

“Good morning, dear,” Betty said.

Karin flinched. “Geez, I thought you were asleep.”

“Your girlfriend Desi might think she’s stealthy at getting out of bed, but I assure you, she is not.” Betty rolled over to regard Karin. She was wearing nothing but a warm smile.

Betty touched a finger to Karin’s cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what, Mistress.”

A broad smile crossed Betty’s face. “You know, you girls don’t need to call me that. I’ve never insisted—”

“I know, but… Well, I want to. Is that okay?”

“Yes.” Betty paused, her gaze seeming to be fixed on Karin’s mouth, as she slid her finger down from Karin’s cheek to the tip of her chin. Holding Karin’s chin softly between her finger and thumb, Betty placed a gentle kiss on her lips.

“Thank you,” Betty said again. “I’ve been needing to tell that story for a long time.”

“Mistress, I—”

But before Karin could articulate her thought, Desi burst through the bedroom door, clad only in a kitchen apron and holding a plate of still steaming blueberry pancakes.

“Breakfast, ladies,” she announced.

Betty took a deep lungful of the sweet aroma that filled the air. “Is that my secret family recipe?” she asked.

“If you mean the one you printed from the internet and taped to the side of your fridge, then yes.” Desi’s grin was a mile wide and Karin detected a less than subtle impish quality about it. “Eat at the table or in bed?”

Karin and Betty looked at each other. “In bed,” they said.

Desi handed the plate to Betty, and pulled three forks from the pocket of her apron, right before stripping it off and jumping back into the empty spot in the king-sized bed.

The three women stayed in bed for a while, even after the pancakes were gone.

“Are you surprised I had a tendency to beat the hell out of little shits who preyed on women?” Betty was slumped forward over the dining room table, holding her head in her hands, her slender fingers woven into her short-cropped dark hair. She was loosely clad in another silken robe, midnight blue this time.

“No.” Karin turned her gaze to the record button that beckoned on the screen of her phone.

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about your mother?”

Betty drew a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “Oh, what else is there to tell. The tea set belonged to her, it was passed down from her mother to her, at least that’s what she said. How it managed to get to America with us on that hellish journey, I have no idea. Maybe it came later. Maybe she just purchased one that looked like it, though I doubt that. We didn’t have the money for frivolous things like tea sets.”

“Mother, why do we pour the water into the cups first instead of pouring it into the pot?”

Mother stroked my hair and smiled. “Because water that is fresh from the stove is too hot, and it will burn the tea leaves, spoiling the taste. We pour it in the cups first so the extra heat goes into the cups, and the water that goes into the pot is cooler and won’t burn the tea.”

I nodded. Mother was very serious about her tea, and I always had her full, undivided attention when we were preparing it. I relished those times with her, and I suppose that explains why I enjoy the ritual of tea preparation to this day.

“And can you tell me why we use the soldier cup?” Mother said. “The big one in the middle?”

“So everyone gets the same flavor. If we poured it straight from the pot, the first cup would be too weak and the last cup would be too strong.”

“Very good, dear. Would you like to pour it in?”

I nodded again and carefully wrapped my fingers around the handle of the tea pot. My hand shook a little as I lifted. The full pot was heavy and it looked impossibly old and fragile. I was always afraid that I would break it, but Mother trusted me.