YOU SING

“You need fresh air,” I tell my mother. “You need rosiness in your cheeks.” She is large and glum and exhausted looking and sallow, as well. “Maybe it’s good looking for berries in the woods.” She achieves a half smile.

Then I tell her, “I missed you all the time. I had this song I sang to you.” I say this without emotion to my mother.

We are silent. Our hands are busy folding warm clothes from the dryer.

“You sing,” Yiey says.

I shrug, sing a few lines.

Ma sings to me, her long hair flowing.

I love her more than the dark loves dawn.

I don’t go on. This is as close as we will come to expressing affection. It would also be true to shout, I’ve always always hated you.

“Your mother come here to stay because I say. She want to, but she scare. It is bad karma to not take care your kid. No matter how hard your life, you have to take care your kid.”

Yiey likes the house very hot. I am wearing only a T-shirt and leggings. With my father, we kept the heat so low, we bundled in sweaters, sometimes snow pants. But Yiey said, too cold.

My grandmother rubs my back. Her fingers are strong.

“I remember the rabbit,” I say. “From my childhood. I thought my father told the rabbit story, but he said it was you. About looking for the rabbit in the moon. I was happy when I looked for it.”

My mother shakes her head. “A children’s story. When you were little, I told you, look up there at the moon. See the rabbit? I would roll a ball of sticky rice and pop it in your mouth. You would stare and stare, and chew the rice and look for the rabbit.”

“It made me happy,” I say again.

“It a Buddha story,” Yiey says. “One time the Buddha is a rabbit. The rabbit have no food to give the god, so he throw himself on the fire. He give himself. The god thought, this rabbit is loyal. He make the fire grow cold and the rabbit not die, and the god paint his picture on the moon. And now the rabbit on the moon and he is stirring pot, a potion that he drink and he live forever. That a true story.”

“You mean immortality?” I say.

“Yeah,” my grandmother says. “The rabbit on the moon is about ancestor and how the Buddha honor them. He make them live forever.”

I think of Rithy. Now I hold him, too, like my mother and grandmother. I have his story.

My family rides in the curve of the moon.

Luke would like this story. Maybe the ghosts would be more content and settle into their old bones and Luke would sleep.

- - -

“Mom, I’m hungry,” I say. Relieved to not talk anymore, she waddles to the kitchen. She begins rice in the cooker. Soon the house smells like basmati rice. While it cooks, she brings my grandmother and me bowls of hot tom yum soup with tamarind broth. I sit cross-legged on the couch and slurp it down. Then my mother brings steaming rice with red chilies and spring rolls we dip in green mango sauce; she pours from a pot of jasmine tea. We’re not done.

She brings us a platter of bananas fried golden in batter.

We sit back, all of us with our hands on our bellies.

It feels like the first whole meal I’ve eaten with my mother since I was five. My belly is full.

“If you see the rabbit in the moon you are blessed,” my mother says. She believes this bodes well for the new one.

But no sooner have we eaten than her contractions start. “Maybe they won’t do the C-section if he wants to come now,” my mother says through grimaces. Yiey puts on her coat over her sarong, and we pack up to go. Then we ride three abreast in the truck to go to the hospital. The moon comes with us, too.

I imagine many things in the moon. A bump for a pot, a crack for an ear. The rabbit stirring the potion of immortality.