But now Quoc was not inside. When Dzung pedaled slowly past and looked beyond the open doorway for his son, the others in Tam’s front room stopped talking. One of them waved perfunctorily, then returned to cutting an insole. The others avoided his eyes.

He did not want to, but Dzung continued to pedal down the familiar broken sidewalk, feeling his legs move ever more slowly as he neared his home. He clutched the handrails on his cyclo. He squeezed his eyes together. He shook his head. He stared up at the hot and cloudless sky. But it did no good. There were no answers. He was pulled like a magnet to his wife and children even as he wanted more than almost anything to avoid the sad sight that he knew awaited him.

Paralysis, that was his karma, propelled by the inevitability of suffering. Going home would hurt, but staying away would kill him. And so the only thing that was left was to keep pushing the pedals of the cyclo until some outside force intervened, deciding what should happen next.

His daughter Thuc was crying, a mix of bewilderment and sorrow. He heard her long before he maneuvered his cyclo around a narrow bend and saw her standing on the sidewalk outside their home. She appeared so small in the middle of the concrete, almost infantile, with one hand pulling at her lower lip as she stared bleakly inside the house. As he neared her it was hard for him to comprehend that she was really even nine years old. And yet the look on her face told him she would never be young again.

The baby had given Thuc her first faint glimpse of adulthood. How many mornings had her little brother sucked hungrily at her shoulder as she stood barefoot next to the bed, her toes crimped into the dirt, cradling and loving him so her mother could have another five minutes of sleep?

She saw Dzung and ran toward him on the cracked pavement. Her small triangle of a face was desperate. Her arms were outstretched. Her eyes told him she wanted him to make this go away, that she needed to be a baby again. He stopped the cyclo and picked her up, kissing the tears out of her eyes and clutching her to him. He was rocking her now, and she began to bawl.