But Lin returned to herself. She was a young woman who had to hide her feelings. She wasn’t a tree, she was a pond, and he would have to walk all the way around her to know her.

He was a man who would do it.

He had his back to her the next day when she came to school and she did what her father used to do. She put her hands around his head and covered his very deep eyes and said, “Guess who?”

No one had ever done that to him before. Again he was sweating. He liked her sweet manners. She liked his kindness. He had never been to war, she was certain. Not with his manners. He had lived in France at one time. He said he could help her with French. She could help him with English. Of course, they were perfect for each other. She even remembered a few curse words. “Repeat this. ‘Oh shit,’” she said, and laughed out loud, a beautiful laugh.

Lin’s ambitions now bothered her mistress, who had forgotten her own ambitions of the past, and Lin knew it, so Lin offered the woman gifts and brought her food from Dr. Bread-baker, and called her Mother and sometimes felt bad, as if betraying her own mother, the memories, and her father’s fading photograph.

Over the years, the older woman’s face, once angry and thin, suspicious of everyone, had grown sad. Lin never knew how the older woman often stepped out the door and watched Lin go down the street to learn, thinking all the time, She will soon be gone. And later, the pain was even worse when Lin rode her bicycle to Han Son to interpret for the others. Oh, Mother was never stupid. She always knew Lin had gifts and talents beyond the art of flowers and stems. She was a girl who was good at anything and everything. That was her curse. It would lead her to all roads, like the veins of a leaf, all feeding one plant. But when Lin returned she always brought the woman something special. This time when she returned, the night of all the fretting and incense burning, it was sweet rice to make her happy, and Lin said she was already paid and was going to use some of the money to paint the counter and make it more lively and bright and she was happy and energetic and alive. She painted it the color of pale green with a hint of yellow. Lin said the color was chlorophyll and she’d just learned this word from leaves and school, and the woman who had known flowers so well loved the new word. Co-ro-f iu.

This time, too, when Lin came home she washed the woman’s hair outside in a basin of warm water, pouring it over her graying strands with a cup and noticing the thin back of her neck, the protruding bones there, the birthmark so many have in that place. A pale leaf fell into the tub of water and it seemed so much a part of them both. Lin offered the woman human comfort, the older woman who loved flowers and had spent years hating being alive, while Lin was surprised to have lived and had been thrilled when she remembered the bursts of fire and the rockets like falling stars, thrilled she survived them and proud of her abilities to live on streets, in trees, down roads, but there were other consequences and she hadn’t known what they were at first. Now she who had been without a family helped those who were helpless families find one another, and she swore upon the words of every dead and living savior that she would find her father.