He thinks of Ma. He loved her when he first saw her, even if he never told her or spoke with her. He never knew that she spoke several languages, including Hmong, French, and English. He never heard her speak. She took orders in the make-shift bar and always spoke to the others in her own language.

Then one day he said, thinking she didn’t understand English, “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve seen. You are like a candle burning. You are a woman I would like to carry over the mud when it rains. You are a woman I would sing to.”

She said nothing. But the next time she saw him, she said, “There’s a mud puddle outside.” She smiled and put down his glass and ashtray and he carried her across the mud.

It was the beginning of Lin.

She also made shoes, the finest ever seen, the most comfortable, and people came to her from other villages to have their shoes repaired. On the day of her funeral, that was all they could say except that she had made the shoes waterproof by using the sap of plants no longer there after the war, long since bombed.

He doesn’t know that Lin learned the same languages, that she had gone secretly to school at night when it was against the law. And the new people would come to the flower shop where Lin stayed to lecture and be certain they were all reformed. “Yes, yes,” the old man would say. “Our daughter is shy. She doesn’t talk.” But at night she learned to read. And as an adult she has just translated her first book, but she doesn’t tell them.

So, Thomas thinks, she has gone to Ho Chi Minh City. Ha, the world has changed. Life is always changing. He puts his hand on her arm, his fingertips, really, lightly. She puts her hand over his. She looks down, though, suddenly shy. Something has come to fullness.

At Aurora’s, Lin falls asleep that night thinking of home, of her husband. Gesturing, the husband had said to Lin one day after she was learning to read in English, “You win the prize. We give you a certificate, a pen, a flashlight so you can read in the dark when the generator stops!”

Lin laughed at how well he knew her, except that she never kept it dark, always a candle.

“And paper, too?” Lin asked.

“Anything.” He pulled her head forward. She let him. “You should write our stories,” he whispered, and she put her hand over the missing ear. “Does it hurt?”

“Always.”

Now she looks forward to seeing him again. She sees him standing at the door in the late day, greeting her in the brilliant color of their world. She sees him at their little altar, bowing to the ancestors and the gods of compassion that they also pray are real and true. She knows he once denounced them, but a man has to believe in something.