MY SON, RITHY

“I old,” Yiey says. She has been lugging plastic bags from my mother’s car.

“Not that old,” I say. It’s Saturday morning, and I need to get to work. But she is tired and asks for a cup of tea. I put the kettle on. She settles into a small chair by the window, overlooking bare trees.

“When I see you, I remember my mother. She tall like you.” I pause, my hand rattles the cups. Can’t she see I’m half out the door? But my grandmother is old and wants to remember. She says, “Everyday, my mother tie my hair.”

I say I know, she already told me.

“It is so hot in Cambodia. She tie my hair in a scarf before I go to work in the field.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Maybe nineteen. I have two baby.”

One was my mother.

The kettle screams.

“Who was your other baby?”

She said, “Rithy, my son.”

“Where’s he?”

I bring her the cup of tea. I tie up my boots.

“In Pol Pot time,” she says. “We have no food. You work in the field or they kill you. Khmer Rouge soldier promise us rice for our kid. But no rice. All the food, they give the Khmer Rouge. They don’t care if we die. They give us water with grains of rice. This is not enough food.

“Rithy sneak from the hut—past the Khmer Rouge guard— to go hunting. Everybody think we will not see him again. But in hour he sneak past the guard again, his scarf full of cricket. A hundred cricket! Your mother pounce on the cricket, stuffing cricket in her mouth.”

My grandmother shows me with her hands and her teeth, how fast they stuffed the crickets in their mouths. In my mouth I imagine the crunch of the crickets’ legs. I try to imagine my mother. How old was she? Stuffing her mouth with crickets.

“He save their live. My son. He know where to hunt cricket.”

The story spins around me, but I have no room for crickets in my memories. It is one of the little secrets my mother never talked about. I don’t know where to put them. It is a story wrapped in the smells of turmeric and peppers. They saved my mother’s life. This story I’ll tell Luke. He’ll understand the crickets even if his memories are already full of dying. And he might whisper to me, “Some things you shouldn’t know.”