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amused.
    Eventually, she wanders back to where I’m working. “Hey,” she says.
    She pauses, tugging at a curl.
    I smile. “How you?” I ask. I don’t want to admit that I’ve been staying up past one A . M . reading and rereading her magazines, but I do want to convey that I remember that she brought them.
    “Okay, I guess,” she says, wavering a little. I imagine that, with a job like hers, she’s always depressed, at least a little. In Vietnam, we didn’t mix with funeral people. They kept to themselves, which seemed like the price they paid for earning their livelihood off burying our dead.
    Her eyes skim the contents of my shelves as if she’s glancing through the headlines in the morning paper. “I need something good to cook for
    dinner,” she muses. She’s tall and sturdy, pretty in a healthy, thoughtless way. Today, she wears a silky peacock-colored dress, the kind of thing another woman might flounce in, but she seems indifferent to it. The truth is, a stranger wouldn’t notice the dress. Not when she’s got that hair. Would she need a mirror, often, just to marvel at it? Would she consider it an asset or a burden, or both? I can’t even imagine how you’d comb it. My father used to say that the heavens give each person one spectacular gift. Marcy has the body. My mother got her fine gray eyes. My father got his voice. Shelley has that hair. And me? I don’t know yet.
    She picks up a bright yellow packet of Knorr tamarind soup base, looks at the picture on the front. “Do people eat this in Vietnam?”
    “Tamarind, yeah. But I don’t know they have that soup base. You can use it for canh chua . Sour soup.”
    “Sour soup?” She grimaces.
    I nod my head encouragingly. “It’s good. When I’m little, my mother make it for me like a special treat.” Somehow, it seems important that she believe me. It’s good .
    She laughs. She seems so at ease. “My mother used to make me TV dinners,” she says. “You probably don’t even know about TV dinners.”
    “I learn a lot on cable,” I tell her. I want her to know that I am fully integrated into American society.
    She leans against the shelf, watching me stuff another bag of basil. “Swanson’s did an entire turkey dinner. It was gross and gooey but my sister and I loved it. If my mother was going out, we got to eat Swanson’s and watch horse racing on TV.”
    She talks as if we’re exchanging vital information here. Then her face turns serious. “I don’t want you to think that’s all my mother fed us.”
    I look at her, surprised that she would care. “I don’t,” I mumble.
    This response seems to satisfy her. “She makes an unimaginably delicious quiche, but I wouldn’t rave about her pies.”
    I can’t help myself. I laugh. She says, “I’ll give you the recipe for the quiche. And you tell me how to make sour soup.” Now we’re back to sour soup?
    I look down at my basil, stuff another bag. “Okay,” I tell her, with
    a sense that I’m trying something different here. It doesn’t feel danger-ous, though. It feels more interesting than normal. What could it mean to exchange recipes with a stranger?
    Shelley pulls over Marcy’s little stool and perches on it, then slaps her hands against her knees to signal that she’s ready. “Let me tie the knots,” she suggests. I can always use an extra hand. I give her a bag. She holds it open for a moment, inhales the scent of the herb, and then, apparently satisfied, expertly knots it. “Okay,” she says. “Sour soup.”
    It takes me a moment to start. The truth is, I’m embarrassed about my English. I can understand every word I hear on TV, and I can read anything I want, but I don’t converse much, and I know that when I do, I sound like an idiot. Now I feel a sudden urge to say to Shelley, “I’m smarter than you think.” But that just sounds more stupid.
    Sour soup. I pull a handful of basil from the box. “You eat it when the weather get hot,” I begin. “It