Chapter 32

Bo Mei stood on the sidewalk wondering whether to go up the front walk like a guest or go to the side door off the kitchen as she had when she was a servant. Her hand hesitated on the garden gate as she gazed up at the foreboding home. It wasn’t nearly as large as the Braxton manor she and her sister had been at together these last few months, but in its own way, it was intimidating. There was something dark and slightly sinister about the upstairs windows. Perhaps it was the curtains, but something always seemed wrong about the house from this angle. As though it were looking down on her, and judging her.

The front door burst open and the boy-girl stepped on the porch like an excited child, waving her arms. She gestured for the servant to come through the gate, and so she did, stepping across the threshold meaningfully.

“Good morning,” she said with a pleasant smile when they neared each other on the path.

“Good morning!” Mila responded enthusiastically. “Oh, Mei! You have no idea how happy I am to see you!”

She looked as though she might hug, but decided against it at the last moment. After an awkward pause, Bo said, “Why don’t we go inside?”

“Yes. Yes, okay,” Mila agreed quickly. She led the way into the stately home, holding the door open for the older woman.

“So…” Bo said as she unbuttoned her coat and laid her things aside on the arm of the couch. They both sat down and once again, the elder woman was forced to steer the conversation. “You want me to come back and do my old job again?”

“Yes. Sort of. Maybe I need more… or not more… but different,” Mila said, her face flushed.

“You look different,” Bo confessed heavily, peering carefully at her new employer.

“I… I know,” Mila said. “It’s just… I didn’t have my medication for a long time. And I don’t really understand why… what happened. I was… am… still very confused. My mother didn’t leave a lot in the way of explanations, but…”

She stopped, chewing her lip indecisively and Bo Mei knew that the child was weighing her options. She prodded gently, “But?”

“There was a letter…”

She pulled a crumpled envelope from her dirty jeans pocket and held it out.

“No, no, my English… I can’t read it so well,” the woman said by way of apology.

“Oh,” Mila said, taking it back. “Well, it was about my brother. Apparently before my mother died… she was looking… she was looking for his child.”

“I don’t understand… I thought your brother died when he was a teenager?”

“Yes, when he was eighteen,” Mila said. “Um… according to this correspondence, my brother had an affair with a prostitute… Marylin. Um… Anyway, my mother found out that Marylin put up a baby for adoption…ah, um… about six months after my brother’s death.”

“What makes her think that the baby was his?”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling this was part of a longer discussion, if that makes sense.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Mila took a deep breath. “Well, everything. I need you to cook and clean, but also to help me, to teach me to cook and clean. I want to learn all about the world, all about the things that my mother didn’t want me to know. Especially things about Michael… but in order to do that, I have to be self-sufficient. I have to… I have to figure out how to make myself normal, like other people.”

She trembled slightly when she spoke, as though she was afraid of something. Bo nodded her head in understanding; it was exactly the way she had felt on first coming to this country. She had to learn everything about how to get along, how to fit in. Yes, she could understand this completely. Even though their circumstances were significantly different, Bo Mei knew she could teach this child many things.

“Come,” she urged Mila. “We have much work to do.”

Mila smiled in gratitude. “Will you stay here with me?”

“Move in here?”

“Yes, I would like it. I hate being alone in the house. It feels so cold…”

The woman hesitated, unsure whether she wanted to sleep in this frigid place.

“I will double your salary,” the child offered.

The woman smiled, too, then, and said, “We will get to that, but first things first. Let us air out the house and put fresh linens on the beds.”

“Okay,” Mila said, taking a deep breath. She was ready to get on with her life.