BIRTHDAY

My father slides into Atlantic Heights at sunset. He drove all day for my birthday.

He enters with an enormous grin, a beard, his cap for me that says Mason Oil Co., Inc., Chincoteague, Va., and a cake the size of the Gulf of Maine.

The cake says Happy Birthday, Sofie and has a porcelain dog in the middle with white feet and floppy ears. “Couldn’t get you a dog again, so I got you a cake with a dog. Looked all over the tourist shops for that dog.” Pilot came last birthday, a month late, while we waited for the dog rescue van to make its way from Georgia to the parking lot of the New Hampshire State Liquor Store.

My father says, “Call Rosa.” He is determined to make this a party.

Rosa comes, smiling and luminous. She hugs my father. She hugs my mother and grandmother, who take in her tiny short skirt and the hoops in her ears. She brings me a huge bouquet of daffodils. I hold them like a torch, waiting for something awful to happen.

“Oh, food, I am starving,” she says to my grandmother, who is stirring green curry at the stove. Then six of us sit around the woodstove: Dad, my mother, Yiey, Rosa, and me, and Pilot who could have been cooked by now, herself. And in my mind are also Rithy (who caught crickets), and Yiey’s mother, and Luke. I do not look at my mother or Yiey. We have not spoken since Luke’s escape. We will never speak again.

My father wants everybody to be happy. He’s got about twenty minutes to make it happen since he has to head back to Chincoteague at dawn and his eyelids are heavy.

After the curry, he asks, “You got a wish?” as he lights the candles on the cake.

“Yes, I have my wish.” I look at no one. I blow out seventeen candles, and my father cuts the cake into enormous pieces of white cake streaked with chocolate—a thunder-and-lightning cake with chocolate frosting. The frosting is slightly hardened from the trip but sweet and eventually melts on our tongues.

“February twentieth,” he says. “Soon it’ll be March, and I’m home in the spring. How’s it going up here?”

No one answers, we are so full of secrets. We nod our heads, letting the frosting melt in our mouths.

“What’s new?” he says.

I wait. Here’s their chance.

But my mother doesn’t begin, not even with telling him about her soul wandering and who came to bring it back. Rosa does not tell him she gave me her supply of condoms as she did not currently need them, but I must replace them.

Finally Yiey asks him, “How is fish in Chincoteague?”

What is going on? I wonder.

“Abundant,” he says, nodding as well. “Good season. Paying the boat. Paying the fuel. And this.”

He pulls a box out from under his chair. I take the top off the box, and whatever is inside is wrapped in old nautical maps, which he knows I love. When I was little I studied them and traced my finger over Jeffrey’s Ledge, all the ledges, all the places he said the fish swim in schools. I spread open the maps.

Inside them is a dress. It’s yellow. I’ve never worn anything yellow. It has satin straps and looks like something to wear to a ball. I don’t know what to make of it, so I go and put it on. I think it belongs to Virginia of the Old South, but I keep it on. I also put on the Mason Oil Co., Inc. Chincoteague, Va. baseball cap. Then go and sit on the floor between Rosa’s feet. Pilot has eaten, so she drops on the floor and stretches her long legs, pressing her back into me.

There is so much deliberate not-speaking between the Cambodians and me. It’s hard to cut through it. My mother and Rosa talk about how to curl hair that naturally hangs black, shiny, and straight. Above our heads, Luke and I were together last night, imagining what if we’d met seven years from today.

My father sees the shrine in the corner. He sees my mother finding no easy way to be still on the couch. I wonder if he remembers when they were young and she was pregnant with me and he knew the sweet and sharp smell of the incense she burned. Or if he is just worried about the Bong guy in Lowell and wants her to be safe, maybe even find some happiness.

“What did you see in the sea?” Rosa tries. “When we were little—do you remember? You said there was a stop in the sea where you could fill up with fuel and get beer? I believed it and ever since thought there were little stops out there in the sea for snacks.”

“No stops in this sea,” he says. “I’ve seen the wind. You can’t trust it. This wind sweet-talks you. Calls you out on the deck. Invites you to pull up the earflaps, take in the stillness. And you do. Invites you to settle in, might as well check to see if you got reception. The wind lets you talk to your kid.

“When the wind’s got you where it wants you,” my father goes on, “it rips off the hull. Makes you pray to god you paid the insurance.”

I have a flash of a thought. Had my mother been lonely with Dad? Did she ever sleep with his shirt the way I used to, because it smelled like his skin? Wear his cap, like I do now on my seventeenth birthday?

My father’s face turns stern. “Something sure as the stars is going on here. Just don’t kill each other before I get back,” he says.

I feel my grandmother’s eyes on me. They don’t scare me. It’s like we have a feminine presence with us after all these years of hardscrabble love and the determined hunch of my father’s shoulders while he put a meal together for me day after day.

My grandmother’s eyes observe, seem to say, There’s no end of things love can call for.

I beg my father, “Dad, please stay.”

“You know I can’t, Sofie girl.”

I wrap my arms around his neck. His scratchy shirt scrapes my cheek.

“Seventeen,” he says in disbelief. I feel him swallow like he does when emotion’s got him by the throat.

“Please stay.”