Page 218 of The Encore’s Crown

Someone says my name in the background.

“Tell them hello from me and Ma.”

Kiri pulls the phone away. “Nat and Ma say hello.”

A chorus comes back through the speaker. Ronan shouts something about mailing him real food. Rafe asks whether Ma is behaving. Rithy yells that he expects photographic proof she’s using the cane. Kiri laughs at the chaos, the sound deep and warm in my ear.

I miss him.

The rented house felt strange at first. Every piece of furniture had been chosen for no one. Beige couch, rugs and walls. The kind of place that looked like it came fully assembled with a bowl of decorative wooden balls no human being had ever wanted. It didn’t take us long to fix that.

My first mission was introducing Ma to every terrible reality show James Drysdale would never have allowed her to watch. Dating shows. Housewives. Cooking competitions where fully grown adults cried over undercooked pastry. By the end of the first week, she had strong opinions about strangers’ marriages and had started referring to one particularly awful contestant as “snake woman.”

My second mission was making her feel pretty. She had lost weight in the hospital. Her bruises were fading, but some mornings she still looked at herself like she didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror. So I spread towels across the kitchen table, lined up every polish I owned, and made her choose.

She liked pinks and yellows. Soft pink first. Then a bright yellow that made her laugh when she saw it on her toes. I’m not a nail artist. Half the polish ended up on her skin, and one thumbnail had to be redone three times. But I told her it was important to feel girly and pretty during recovery, especially when your body had spent weeks making you feel like it belonged to everyone else. She looked at her hands for the rest of the day.

When I go home, Mama and Tata try to interrogate me about Kiri. Mama worries about the age difference in increasingly creative ways.

“What will happen when you are forty and he is fifty-three?”

“He’ll still be hot.”

“Natalia.”

“What? You asked.”

Tata has questions about Kiri’s intentions that he tries to disguise as casual conversation.

What kind of man keeps a relationship secret? Does he plan to stay in Seattle? Does he understand I'm not some girl he can pick up after a concert?

Aga is less restrained. She finds a concert picture of Kiri from Japan and stares at it with her mouth hanging open.

“That's him?”

“Give me that.” I try to snatch her phone but miss.

“He looks like that?”

“Stop looking at him.”

Dominik coughs into his fist and suddenly becomes very interested in the refrigerator.

Aga zooms in.

“Oh, Natalia.”

“I hate this family.”

The crisis, and Kasia running interference, keeps the worst of the questioning away for now. I avoid answering any of them properly, but they still send me back with enough pierogi to feed the entire population of Seattle. Ma takes one bite and closes her eyes.

“When I am better, I'll make food for your Mama. Many food.”

“She’ll take that as a declaration of war and cook twice as much.”

“Good. We fight.”

At the rented house, Ma decides it’s her responsibility to educate me in the music she loved as a teenager. We discover YouTube is an endless treasure chest of Cambodian pop and rock, old television performances, grainy concert footage, and songs she hasn’t heard in decades. She remembers more words than she expects. Sometimes she sings quietly from the sofa, her voice still rough but growing stronger every week.