BREATHING IN THE BUDDHA

It’s Sunday. My father’s out fishing. It’s today or maybe never. Could be only a few more landings till the government closes shrimp season. That’s the rumor.

I lift a tote of shrimp I could have taken to Atlantic Co. I lift it up the porch steps, over the door sill, then slide it across the floor and into the kitchen. One batch at a time, I drop the shrimp in my pot of boiling water. One minute.

A car pulls up in the street. In the full light of day I see a maroon car, Luke’s car, with the rust of New Hampshire winters eating into the fenders. He’s not in camouflage; he’s in jeans and a navy fisherman’s sweater. He is coming toward my door. I rub my hands dry and watch him. His walk is deliberate. He turns to glance at a kid up the street, the neighbor’s cat that streaks by.

He knocks. My hands are red and wet. Pilot is barking. I am wearing leggings and a ribbed shirt. My hair is up in a clip. My body’s tender on the first day of my period.

I open the door.

Pilot leaps into his arms. She never forgets someone who has given her food. Luke comes down to his knees for her. I see Luke’s bowed head of dark hair.

“My father’s not here.” I back up to keep from touching his hair.

“I need to talk to him,” he says. “Find out when he’s planning to fish.”

“He is fishing.”

“Did he say how long?” He looks up.

“Till supper. Maybe.”

He lifts his hands from my dog’s ears, slowly stands.

“Are you good at processing shrimp?” I say.

“Teach me.”

Lines from Rosa’s love song almost spill out of me. I cover my mouth to keep me from laughing and manage to open the door all the way without tripping on Pilot.

He comes in.

Has he ever seen a kitchen as small as this one? We work over the mound of shrimp in the kitchen sink, ready.

“Flip it over,” I say. “Open the shell. Pull out the meat. It’s a three-step process.”

I glance at his face. The past is in his face. I see that he hasn’t slept. He turns his exhausted eyes to me.

“Just be careful of these.” I touch the long needle tail of the shrimp he is holding.

“You got to pop the head,” I say. “Like this.”

I hold a shrimp so he can see my finger slide down the line from the shrimp’s head to the tip of the sharp tail. I twist the tail to expose the eatable flesh. Then pull the flesh out of the head and shell that encases it. I drop the curve of meat into the basin. I drop the crusty outside—eyes and all—into the trash bin.

Luke gets it in a heartbeat.

Open, twist, pull. We work.

I am aware of his hands. They are large and careful, manipulating something so small. There is something about what we are doing that feels sacred. An image of my grandmother comes into my brain. When I was little, I remember seeing her lift her hands, palms touching, and bowing to a fish. She said something in her strange, bad English. Something about giving respect.

The work with our hands—Luke’s and mine—is as regular as breathing. I turn a shrimp in my hand. I begin to pull open the peel and a stream of water spews into my face and Luke’s face.

“Ahh, it peed,” I burst out laughing. “Ahhhhh.” Luke wipes the wet from my face with the heel of his hand, holding the carapace in the other. I am laughing. Pilot yelps, waiting for a shrimp to drop.

“You must be a great cook,” Luke says. “You’re cooking for a banquet.”

I don’t say yes, I don’t say no. I don’t say it’s illegal what I’m planning to do with these shrimp. I say, “I don’t know what it is about you, but when I’m with you, I wonder what it would be like to be a Cambodian girl. Things about my mother’s culture. Maybe because you’re so different from my life. I’ve always been my father’s girl.”

“You’re an enigmatic girl.” He studies me. “Your mother who’s coming. She’s Cambodian?”

“She’s crazy.” I shrug. “She’s not anything to me.”

Pilot catches a shrimp and runs with a pink tail hanging from her mouth.

“Out,” I yell at her. “Out.”

I want to talk about the gun. Where’s the gun? I hope you have gotten rid of the gun.

I remember a story. My grandmother and her friend sit together in the dusk. They talk in Khmer. When I was little I must have understood some Khmer. It’s a story tucked deep inside me; it’s hard to find and let into my head. I don’t remember the story now, but I smell the hot peppers my grandmother was pressing with a mortar at dusk. Her story scared me so much-—or maybe it was her own grief as she told the story—the smell of the peppers reminds me: be very afraid.

“One trip,” Luke says, “I was banged up from an incident the night before. Had two black eyes. Reeked the hell of beer. Your dad must have thought he was taking on bad luck. Found a new guy.”

I look over at the circle around his eye, close to the maroon color of his car. I want to touch his check. Suddenly a deep sadness takes me over, and I want to tell him to quit drinking his life away. And I barely know him. I can’t stop this wave of sorrow that wants to take me over and I’m so scared it’s not about him but it’s about my mother ’cause I just met him. How can it be about him? I just want . . . I don’t even know what I want. I want to go back to being my father and me.

“Look,” I say. “Thanks. Thanks for helping.” I wipe my hands on the checkered towel around my waist.

He pauses. I’m flaking on him, as Rosa would say. He knows it. My face must have closed down to him. “You want me to tell my father to give you a call?”

He looks at me like I kicked him in the gut. Shakes his head. “Keep him out of it,” he says.

He’s at the door, shoving his arms in his jacket sleeves.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “My father told me you were the only crew he’d had on board he trusted enough for him to get some sleep.”

He nods, his face stony.

I think of my father and Luke as both soldiers and being there for each other. But Luke is down the front steps.

I say, “He runs a tight boat.” I don’t say my father told me I’d never see him again.

My dog is blocking Luke’s escape. She leaps and dances in his path as he tries to get to his car. She bows down in play between him and the car’s door.

Already I’m second-guessing and plotting how I could see him again, even while he’s trying to tell Pilot to get in, go home, to me. We won’t see each other at school. We’re not going to my spring dance in my high school gym with Daniel and the cross-country team. I’m not going to invite him here for my father’s fried chicken and potatoes. I say finally, “Which cottage is yours?”

“Five,” he says almost under his breath. Then looks at me one last time, shaking his head, like what the hell was he thinking? Like, what do you expect meeting some high school girl under a bridge?

I sing Rosa’s melody to myself slow as the setting sun, just the way I take in the last few drops of gin I find in the cupboard. My father never said don’t drink. He should have. I simply ache, like the Spanish dancer in the song. I sit on the floor, letting the drops of gin burn my throat, and it feels like a shadow is beside me, a weight dragging me.

With this weight I go back to the bin of shrimp. Open, twist, pull. Discard the tiny carapace. Keep my father home.