The police never caught the man, and, after a while, there was no more reason to mention him. Even so, I thought about him every now and again, especially on Sunday mornings during mass when I rose from kneeling. It was then that I remembered how I had gotten off my knees to see my mother dashing by the living room window, barefoot on the sidewalk before all the people in their cars, hands raised high in the air and wearing only her nightgown in the twilight, shouting something I could not hear. She had saved us, and wasn’t salvation always the message from our priest, Father Dinh? According to my mother, he was already middle-aged when he led his flock, including my parents, from the north of Vietnam to the south in 1954, after the Communists had kicked out the French and seized the northern half of the country. Fantastically, Father Dinh still had more hair than my father, a tuft of white thread that shone under the light illuminating the stained glass windows. His voice trembled when he said, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and I could not help dozing in the hard-backed pew while he sermonized, remembering Emmy Tsuchida’s nipple and looking forward only to the end of mass.
It was in the crowd jostling for the exit that Mrs. Hoa touched my mother’s elbow one Sunday, a few weeks after the break-in. “Didn’t you enjoy the father’s sermon?” Mrs. Hoa said. Her eyes were curiously flat, as if painted onto her face. My mother’s back stiffened, and she barely turned her head to say, “I liked it very much.”
“I haven’t heard from you yet about your donation, dear. Next week, perhaps? I’ll come by.” Mrs. Hoa was dressed formally, in an ao dai of midnight velvet embroidered with a golden lotus over the breast. It must have been unbearably hot in summer weather, but no perspiration showed on her temples. “Meanwhile, here’s something to read.”
She produced a sheet of paper from her purse, the same fake alligator skin one with the silver clasp I’d seen last week, and offered it to me. The mimeograph was in Vietnamese, which I could not read, but the blurry photograph said it all, gaunt men standing at attention in rank and file under fronds of palm trees, wearing exactly the tiger-stripe fatigues I’d imagined.
“What a handsome boy.” Mrs. Hoa’s tone was unconvincing. She wore the same white high heels I’d seen before. “And you said your daughter’s in college?”
“On the East Coast.”
“Harvard? Yale?” Those were the only two East Coast schools the Vietnamese knew. My mother, who could not pronounce Bryn Mawr, said, “Another one.”
“What’s she studying? Law? Medicine?”
My mother looked down in shame when she said, “Philosophy.” She had scolded my sister Loan during her Christmas vacation, telling her she was wasting her education. My father had agreed, saying, “Everyone needs a doctor or a lawyer, but who needs a philosopher? We can get advice for free from the priest.”
Mrs. Hoa smiled once more and said, “Excellent!” After she was gone, I handed the mimeograph to my mother, who shoved it into her purse. In the parking lot, crammed with cars and people, my mother pinched my father and said, “I’m following Mrs. Hoa. You and Long run the market by yourselves for a few hours.”
My father grimaced and rubbed his hand over his head. “And what, exactly, are you planning to do?”
“She knows where we work. I’ll bet she knows where we live. It’s only fair I know the same things, isn’t it?”
“Okay.” My father sighed. “Let’s go, son.”
“I want to go with Ma.”
“You, too?” my father muttered.
I was curious about Mrs. Hoa, and helping my mother was an excuse not to spend my morning at the New Saigon. My mother and I followed her in our Oldsmobile, heading south. Mrs. Hoa drove a small Datsun sedan the color of an egg yolk, peppered with flakes of rust. Superimposed upon the Datsun was the Virgin Mary, her image reflected in the windshield from her picture on the dash, as dim as our handful of fading color photos from Vietnam. My favorite featured a smiling young couple sitting on a grassy slope in front of a pink country church, Ba in his sunglasses as he embraced Ma, who wore a peach ao dai over silk cream pants, her abundant hair whipped into a bouffant.
“Nam xu,” my mother said, turning left onto Story Road. Thinking she wanted a translation into English, I said, “A nickel?”
“Five cents is my profit on a can of soup.” As my mother drove, she kept her foot on the brake, not the accelerator. My head bounced back and forth on the headrest like a ball tethered to a paddle. “Ten cents for a pound of pork, twenty-five cents for ten pounds of rice. That woman wants five hundred dollars from me, but you see how we fight for each penny?”