Page 72 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

LittleTu?n. Nothing could less aptly describe the towering figure who’d alternately terrorized and ignored them throughout their childhoods. But Vivi and Calla nodded, allowing themselves to be claimed.

“Of course! I see him in you, Vivi. Same chin, same way of standing, like a stiff, graceless soldier.”

Calla smirked. “You should see her on the dance floor.”

“He was so proud of you girls. I remember now. He talked about you, Calla, and how brave and imaginative you were. Your artistic talent, of course, came from him. And Vivi, he was so impressed by your love of books. A brilliant scholar!”

Vivi and Calla exchanged a glance. They’d rarely heard their father talk about any of the relatives he left behind. Nor had they ever overheard him describing them with anything more than weary tolerance.

She misread their look. “But I’m leaving you standing here, how rude. I’mVõ Th?Anh. Come in, please come in. You’ll want to meet everyone.”

Vivi protested, “This doesn’t seem like the right time—”

“And you’ll stay for the wedding. How lucky. What’s another person! They invited hundreds; nearly the whole town. You’ll see how we do things here.”

“I’m not sure,” Vivi began.

At the same moment, Calla said, “We’d be delighted!”

BàAnh grabbed each of their hands and pulled them inside. The shades were drawn around the high windows, so the first-floor rooms felt dark and close, even with the honeycomb openings in the concrete walls. Sand-colored tile lined the floors and a blocky staircase led upstairs, to what Vivi supposed were the bedrooms.

The sisters followed their host out back, where half a dozen women labored in front of the countertops, chopping mint leaves, descaling shiny-bellied river basa, digging their hands into fistfuls of ground pork. Their voices raised and fell as they worked together to fill platters of food that would later get squeezed into any crevice of the fridge they could find.

Upon their approach, the women quieted.BàAnh took a cleaver and began hacking at a slab of crackly skinned pork as she introduced the sisters to her daughter, a middle-aged woman named Linh, and her granddaughterKhánh, the bride.Khánhwore a swinging ponytail and a pinched expression of anxiety, hewn with sudden, luminous smiles.

“Your first cousin,”BàAnh clarified.

Calla gripped Vivi’s hand and squeezed it. A fly staggered throughout the kitchen, loud and insistent, landing first on Linh’s shoulder, then the bluff of a winter melon, before some enterprising auntie reached out and smacked it down, as if with the mighty hand of Zeus. The blade of the cleaver, hitting the cutting board in a syncopated rat-tat-tat rhythm, droned into Vivi’s head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing fingertips to her temple. “Our cousin? That would makeKhánh’s father—”

“Your uncle, yes.Nguy?nVanKi`êu.”BàAnh wrinkled her brow, an unasked question dancing at the edge of her voice.

Vivi swallowed her humiliation. “Of course. Forgive us, the jet lag has scrambled our minds.”

The women in the room evaded the sisters’ gazes, out of pity or maybe kindness.

Khánh’s smile wavered. “Technically, we aren’t blood cousins. BaKi`êuis my stepfather, but the only father I can remember. He and my mother married when I was a toddler. He’s the best man I’ve ever known.”

“We’re eager to meet him. Our uncle.”

Vivi tested out the word and found that it caught in her throat. Calla nodded, a mirrored unease in her expression. They were afraid that theNguy?ns of LongXuyênwould want an explanation for the silence in their family. These strangers seemed to know so much about the sisters, and Vivi and Calla knew so little about them.

In time, their relatives settled the sisters with their own cutting boards, elbow to elbow with the other women. Calla was tasked with slicing lime wedges, while Vivi wrestled extravagant bunches of cilantro whose mangled leaves left wet, green splotches on the plastic board. They spoke lightly about their intentions in LongXuyên, framing their travel as part of a lifelong desire to understand their family’s roots. Calla, Vivi could tell, was bursting to reveal more, but Vivi gently steered the conversation to the ordinary. She didn’t yet trust her relatives with all the secrets she and Calla held.

She said, “We regret not knowing more about the people we came from. I’m an art conservator, a bit of an amateur historian. I find myself preoccupied with dates and lineage.”

“It’s very boring,” Calla said, in her child’s Vietnamese. But Vivi noticed that, even in the few days Calla had spent inVi?tNam, she’d become more proficient. The rhythm of the language, now immediate and less theoretical, sang on her tongue. Vivi felt a flash of pride. Calla had always been brilliant at anything that held her interest.

“If you want to know such things,Ki`êuis the one to speak with,”BàAnh said.

“He’s home?”

The prospect of meeting their uncle filled Vivi with hope, mingled with a sludge of dread. If he was anything like their father, then it would not be a long or pleasant conversation. Yet, from the easy way his family spoke of him, Vivi thought that perhapsKi`êumight be made of a different, less wounded substance than his brother.

“Resting now. He’s easily worn by the commotion. But he’s the one who carries our stories, the historian of the family. Has made it his mission to know who rutted with who and what illegitimacies it led to.”

“Má!” Linh cried.