JAM

The incense burns. I am almost Luke’s lover. We live in a cabin near the ocean, where seals will soon have pups and sun themselves on the breakwater, and I cook rice for us and sometimes we lie together in each other’s arms until 9:00 p.m.

Tonight when it’s time to go, he makes me coffee. He puts in three sugars and three fingers of milk. He makes toast to warm me and slathers my toast with bright raspberry jam. It makes me feel childlike and in love.

“Stay warm,” he says.

- - -

I’m also the schoolgirl who gets out of bed for my shift on Saturday in a Cambodian house. I imagine him kicking up the fire in the woodstove. I make coffee with hot milk and sugar the way he does for me, and I drink.

I drive to work.

In the parking lot, I call my father. I’d give anything to hear his voice.

“It’s my girl,” he calls into the phone.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Gonna lose the call. The signal won’t hold.”

“Just wanted to hear your—”

I hear him faintly. “. . . try to make it home . . .” I hear. “. . . don’t know.”

“Are you coming?” It is almost my birthday. But I hear only silence. He’s somewhere offshore, in the Atlantic Ocean. I need to stop calling. It only hurts when it’s done.

The trees still bend to each other, weighted with snow. The plows have scraped snow from the streets, yet ice caps on piles of snow remain like scar tissue.

But I love the color of the jam Luke gives me on toast. It brightens all this long February.