A Pho Love Story

by Loan Le

  Soon enough I’m half walking, half leaning on Bảo as he moves us into an empty classroom. Empty for how long, we’re not sure. I hate how I’m a cliché, crying in the middle of the hallway. People are probably thinking we broke up. They’re going to go to class and gossip. Roll their eyes, but then forget about it next period.

  I tell Bảo everything as I nestle against him, last night’s ugly words between me and my mom flowing out of me in a furious, murky stream. If I could take back last night, I would. If I could go back to the beginning of this year—before everything—I would.

  Even if it means never meeting Bảo?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE BẢO

  I don’t know what else to do but hold Linh. Drop a kiss on her head now and then. And just hold her more. She’s trembling, her voice breaks, and I don’t have anything to give her but physical comfort. Still, it feels empty, temporary, and Linh needs more than that.

  “I mean, I’ve never seen them look at me that way. Especially my mother. It looked like I broke her heart.” Linh sniffs. “And maybe I was too honest toward the end. Throwing that photo in their faces only complicated things more.”

  “Don’t think that. You got it out there. All the things you were holding back for months. It’s there.” I wouldn’t say that telling my mom about Linh made things better—but it didn’t make things worse. Just uncomfortable. I’m more disturbed that she pretends as if we never had that conversation, as if she hopes I’ll forget about it.

  “But now everything’s a mess!” Linh gestures to the ground, as if the argument with her parents were physical things just scattered below our feet. “It’s all out there, but tangled up, messy, and—”

  “It’s out there,” I try saying. “You don’t have to lie anymore.”

  That’s not the right thing to say. I can tell by her face falling, her voice turning dull. “I guess that was the actual problem for them. Lying. Me, lying. You saw it from the beginning.”

  “Hey, don’t go there,” I counter as gently as possible. “If you’re a liar, I am too. And parents blow up. They say things in the heat of the moment. I’ve argued before with my parents. You have too, probably.”

  “Not like this, Bảo. Never like this.” She slides off the desk, sniffing and wiping back stray tears, looking so defeated.

  “It hurts, Linh. I know it does. But there’s always a way out.”

  “How?” Linh asks, an edge to her voice. “Tell me how. Because I don’t think I can keep doing this, Bảo. Trying to defend what I’ve been doing. And what we were about to do, digging into the past.” I read between the lines. Does she want to give up?

  “Don’t you want to know?” I ask, reaching for her hands. “Don’t you want us?”

  She doesn’t move.

  “Oh.” I never thought a nonresponse could hurt me so much. Not a word, but that look on her face. Empty.

  “I don’t think I can keep doing this, Bảo.”

  “You’re scared, Linh. I know you are.”

  “Ever since we started this… no, even met, I think, my life has been about putting one fire out after the next.”

  “So, what? You think it’d be better if we’d never met? Never spoke to each other again?”

  The bell ringing to announce first period cuts through our silence.

  “Maybe, Bảo. Maybe.”

  CHAPTER FORTY LINH

  Everyone is just about settled in class and any minute now a school aide will start her rounds, trying to catch kids playing hooky from class. The noise in each classroom—chattering, laughing, the droning of a documentary—reaches me. I’m not sure where I’m going until I stop by rote.

  Ali, to no surprise, sits at the front of her AP History class. She sees me through the door window, a smile ready on her face. She stops mid-wave. Then her hand shoots straight up.

  “Mrs. DuBois?” she says, the sound muffled.

  “Yes, Allison.”

  “Can I go to the bathroom?”

  “Why didn’t you go before? We’re just about to—”

  “Thanks!” Ali bolts from her chair, swiping the bathroom pass from the whiteboard’s frame.

  Out in the hall, she pulls me aside and lays her hands on my shoulders. “Linh?”

  And I just cry.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE BẢO

  I’m not sure how long I stay seated in the classroom, but the period bell ringing makes me stand. I don’t feel like myself as I walk out, the teacher looking curiously after me.

  Linh doesn’t want us.

  Somehow I make it to another classroom, and only when Việt arrives do I realize it’s Forensic Science today. He offers a packet of Orbit gum. When I don’t take it, that somehow draws his concern. He waves his hand and I’m forced to look at him, really look at him.

  “What’s with you?”

  I might have spoken in sentence fragments. Or rambled on and on. Or shouted. Not so sure, but Việt listens the whole time. Today our teacher’s routine lateness is to our advantage, and our classmates are clumped together to one side, watching a YouTube video or something that makes them snicker now and again.

  “Do you think she means it?” I ask.

  Việt chews his gum slowly. He plays with the corner of his worksheet, which was filled out—reminding me that I left mine at home. Great.

  It’s not like I haven’t been rejected before. It’s not like I haven’t disappointed my parents in some ways—and will continue to do so—for a lifetime. But I guess it fucking sucks when I hear it from Linh.

  I thought she saw something in me. And I wanted to believe in whatever she saw. I thought we would figure out the truth of us together.

  Mr. Lynch enters the room, hungover by the looks of his mussed hair and wrinkled polo. He yawns a “Good morning” while the other students snicker knowingly. I don’t care about that.

  I put my head down, feeling just exhausted.

  I don’t care about anything.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO LINH

  Doing as I was told, I skip work and head home, lying in bed, facedown, pillow over my head. I try to drown out my thoughts, my worries, scenes from last night and today pounding inside my mind. I would have tried to take a nap, but my phone rings. Someone’s calling on Viber.

  “Oh, Linh,” Dì Vàng says when the visual stabilizes, sounding like I was the one to call. She’s at an airport, sitting in a packed waiting area. Beside her is a nosy grandmother who stares suspiciously at my aunt, then looks away. “Five more hours until I land in Cali!”

  I summon all of my energy into a smile and tell her how excited I am to finally see her. I must look like something’s wrong because the next moment she leans in, squinting, and asks, “What’s wrong? Were you crying?”

  What a way to welcome my aunt to the States after seven years.

  Before I know it, I’m telling her everything that’s happened in the past few months. It pours out of me. Maybe a screen separating us makes it easier for me to speak freely. Or maybe because Dì Vàng looks a bit like my mom now, and I wish I could explain this all to her. I start from the beginning—and for me, the real beginning was when Bảo crossed the street because he saw I needed comfort. I start with him, not mentioning him as the son of my parents’ nemeses or as the nephew of her former fiancé, but the boy who offered to help when he didn’t have to. I tell her about him and his writing and my painting—how our relationship had formed and blossomed along with the art I’m finally making.

  I tell my aunt about our meetups, and then our dates. About that happiness that came in revealing my mural—that initial silence, then uproarious applause from strangers who loved what I’d put out there. And then I tell her about the moment things went wrong with my parents, everything that I had hidden from them coming out and me having no real way to explain myself.

  I should have known where I would end up. I knew that lying was wrong, but I’d thought it was the only way to do the things that I wanted. Wasn’t it? I finish my story with that question
, one that my aunt needs to look away to ponder.

  Then she sighs and sips her coffee, which she got from Auntie Anne’s. “This doesn’t sound good, Linh.”

  “I know,” I say miserably.

  “It’s a lot to take apart, but I think it’s the act of lying that hurt my sister the most. She loves you, Linh. And I don’t think she feels great about being left out of your life.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Oh, I know you didn’t,” she says sympathetically.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you right before you even land here.”

  “I can think about it on the plane ride over.” She leans back in her seat. “So this boy,” she says almost wistfully. “I remember being your age—what that was like.” She smiles quickly before it disappears. “From what it sounds like, this boy seems very đàng hoàng.”

  I inhale. I’m on the precipice here, and once I say this, once I hear her reaction, I really can’t go back. “That’s something else I need to tell you. You know Bảo, kind of. Because you know his parents, or his mother. And his uncle. The one who died.”

  Her lips part, the sun from the far-left window, facing the planes, touches her face, obscuring her expression from me. “Trời ơi.”

  She knows. She remembers.

  The kiosk attendant starts calling people to board.

  “Dì Vàng—” I start to apologize, knowing that this thought will occupy her mind over the plane ride, and there won’t be anything she can do to stop it.

  So in shock, she only manages a goodbye before telling me she needs to step in line. “It’s been so long. But I guess we all have to face this, once and for all. I will see you soon.”

  * * *

  The drive is excruciating. A song plays in the background, the kind to lull me and Evie asleep during rare road trips. This was before Mẹ and Ba opened the restaurant, when their work hours were slightly more forgivable. We’d drive within California—to a park or to visit a relative. In intermittent moments, my mom would reach her hand back and my sister or I, giggling, would put our hand in, asking her to guess whose it was.

  “Tay của ai vậy?”

  Mẹ would pretend to think, squeezing the hand, fingers, guessing whose hand she’s holding. Of course, my mom had the rearview mirror and could easily see who, but I thought it was just a superpower she had because she was a mom.

  In the arrivals wing, my parents and I sit with three seats in between us. Every few minutes, Ba gets up to stretch his legs, then stand by the window, hands clasped, to observe the planes taking off. The area is alive with vibrant clothing and languages mingling and flying right over my head. The walls are wide and white, and tired passengers flow from the customs gate, their dull faces turning into laughter, surprise, eagerness as they reunite with their families. Then the most colorful person emerges—a woman with her hair piled atop her head, for convenience, rather than looks. Her neck scarf, blouse, and pants show a bizarre spectrum of shades of green, pink, and yellow, though they all seem to mesh. She’s here.

  My aunt shrieks, causing the other off-loading passengers to look back at her, some with shock, some with amusement. Leaving her bag there momentarily—a woven bag that’s seen better days—she and my mom, who’s suddenly come to life, embrace. Her hug is strong and tight. I feel it myself.

  “You look so skinny!” my aunt exclaims, squeezing my mom’s cheeks, shoulders, hips, but she bats her hands away.

  “What are you wearing?” my mom asks dubiously, in the same way my sister asks when something doesn’t compute with her right away.

  “The latest Vietnamese fashion,” she retorts pompously. “I bought you the same scarf.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Fine. I’ll give it to Linh.” She turns to me, opens up her arms. “Look at you, all grown up! You’re so beautiful.” I stay there for a moment and I hear Mẹ tell Ba to pick up the bag Dì Vàng left behind.

  I don’t know why, but I start crying. Maybe I was exhausted by this energy in the house, by what I did to get us here, or that I didn’t expect my aunt to hold me for this long. Or that it would make me miss the way Mẹ used to hug me. My aunt’s arms tighten around me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE BẢO

  I’m glad that Việt is not someone to press me. He knows what’s happening with Linh, but he doesn’t force me to explain. Doesn’t tell me to stop moping. Just lets me deal with this my own way. At work, he keeps chattering on about his TV shows, not caring that I’m not listening to half the words. At school, in Forensic Science, he does most of the work, telling me to write this and that down.

  But one morning, I think he may have had enough. He’s calling my name as I’m zoning out, and when I don’t answer him right away, he punches me in the shoulder—the pain jerking me awake from my daze.

  “Look. Someone screenshotted these Yelp reviews.”

  I pull his laptop closer. It turns out Jared, the guy who accused my mom of scamming him, had been making rounds, based on these online Yelp profiles all under different names. He was hitting several businesses with the same message:

  Fucking FOBS—if they’re going to open businesses here, they should speak in English, since they can’t even do that, they should go back to where they belong.

  I click on my parents’ restaurant. Similar message.

  My first thought? Run-on sentence. Then I hear Jared’s self-righteous voice. It may or may not be him, but since he was the most recent person to say things like this, my mind uses him as the person sitting in front of a PC, trolling because he doesn’t have better things to do with his life. I see his wife hovering over his shoulder in their home somewhere, pleading for him not to hit that Post button, then walking away, shaking her head, when he fully ignores her.

  Go back where? Where else would Linh’s parents go? My parents? By now, half of their lives have been spent here. The country they remember is not the one that exists today. So why should they go when they so clearly belong here?

  This guy doesn’t know shit.

  “He’s everywhere,” Việt says. He clicks through other names from our neighborhood shops. Nail salons, bánh mì places. Jared, or whoever it is, has really been hitting up every prominent Vietnamese place nearby.

  “Do you think a lot of people have seen this?”

  Việt just shrugs. “For this douche’s sake, let’s hope not.”

  * * *

  The community did see it. Not through electronic means, but something more reliable for our parents: word of mouth. And who hears it first? Mẹ’s group. Her circle, including Nhi Trưng, convened in their booth, bickering quietly among themselves, printed pages of those reviews spread out across the table. Mẹ examines one of them, her glasses at the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t look happy.

  “So you guys saw it too?”

  “Bảo?”

  “The reviews.”

  Mẹ purses her lips, answering my question. “They’re ridiculous. Racists.”

  Leaving the group, she strides to the back where Eddie, Trần, and others are goofing around again. I don’t see Ba, until I realize he’s in the restaurant too, with the husbands. They’ve come here about the review as well. In the kitchen, one of the line cooks wordlessly slides down a tin of Café du Monde and Mẹ receives it smoothly, spooning it into a single-cup filter.

  “Con muốn cà phê không?” she asks breezily, and starts making one for me before I can answer. I realize that this is the first real one-on-one since our argument a few weeks ago about Linh. We’re exactly where we were before. This time, I round the prep table, try to reason with her.

  “Are we going to do anything about the review?”

  My mom doesn’t answer me right away. Instead, she busies herself with the filter, fiddling with the dripper, twisting it so that the drips run at the right pace.

  “Do what?”

  My parents have never been the type to make a fuss. They save their comments for the
kitchen after hours or the safety of our home. If their opinions are to be shared, they do it with others like them—Vietnamese who’ve fled home for the same reasons, who read the same newspapers about the home they once knew. I wonder if it’s because of what they’ve gone through; how easily they could have been punished for speaking a word against the communist government. How they saw their friends and families punished for doing exactly that.

  It could all be that. But it’s not like they’ll ever tell me.

  I try again. “This review is ridiculous.”

  “So?”

  “It’s basically talking shit about every business in our community! We need to do something.”

  “Why do you keep bothering? What can we do? Hm?”

  Her anger rises like a quick flame, knocking me off guard. And also because I don’t have an answer. How can we fight someone who’s anonymous? Or the lies that they spread online about us?

  “What is it that Americans say? It’s not your battle.”

  I shake my head. An antithesis to basically everything she’s said to me my whole life. It’s always about us. Not one person—us. Together. And I’m not going to let her start saying things like that now.

  “These words,” I slowly say. “They have consequences. Yeah, sometimes, you don’t think they will do much, especially when they’re said among friends—within the safety of one place.” Her face shifts; she remembers our argument. “But some words, like this, sometimes they win. We can’t let that happen. We can’t let anyone just see these words on our page and not defend ourselves.”

  Now my mom just looks tired, decades older than she really is.

  “I’m not going to let this person get away with saying things like that. I’m not.”

  I’m tired.

  Of all of it. Of all this useless gossip that never dies, only comes back in different forms. Causes people to hide certain things, then when it comes out it hurts all of us at once.