64. Sweetness
Sweetness
Natalia
Rithy leaves to collect the cake from what he calls the only bakery in Seattle worthy of Mrs. Chhim’s birthday.
According to him, it’s a masterpiece. Pandan chiffon layered with coconut cream, palm-sugar caramel and enough hand-painted sugar flowers to make the price offensive.
According to Kiri, it’s cake.
Mrs. Chhim said they should’ve bought one from the grocery store because spending that much money on something designed to disappear is stupid. She asked what it cost four times. Neither of them answered.
The moment Rithy’s car pulls away, Mrs. Chhim brings out the photo albums. There are six.
Thick, heavy things with fabric covers and plastic pages that crackle beneath her fingers.
She stacks them on the coffee table with the joy of a woman who has waited thirty-six years to embarrass her son in front of someone. Kiri stares at the pile.
“Ma. No.”
“You don’t know what I show.”
“I know exactly what you’re going to show.”
She opens the first album. A naked baby lies facedown on a blue blanket, his round little butt pointed directly at the camera. I slap both hands over my mouth.
“Oh my God.”
Kiri closes his eyes.
“Fantastic.”
Ma taps the photograph proudly.
“Very fat baby. Healthy. Such strong legs.”
I lean closer. He’s tiny with dark hair sticking straight up, one fist shoved into his mouth and rolls everywhere.
“You look like the most adorable steamed bun I've ever seen.”
Ma laughs so hard she has to steady the album. Kiri points at me.
“You’re enjoying this way too much.”
“This might be the best day of my life.”
“That’s insulting on several levels.”
She turns the page before he can stop her.
There are pictures of both boys in matching sweaters.
Rithy grinning with his front teeth missing while Kiri stands beside him looking suspicious of whoever is holding the camera.
Halloween costumes made from cardboard and fabric.
Rithy dressed as some kind of glittering wizard.
Kiri in a black cape with plastic fangs, already scowling.
Mrs. Chhim flips to Christmas morning. Both boys are kneeling beside a tree drowning in colored lights and silver tinsel. Kiri holds up a toy truck. Rithy wears torn wrapping paper over his head like a crown. Their smiles are enormous.
You'd never know. That’s the thing about pictures.
You can stage them, choose the perfect angle.
You can wait until everyone is smiling and preserve that one moment as if it represents an entire life.
The next minute, the world could be on fire outside the frame. No one looking later would ever know.
I did the same thing. I learned how to hold my face, find the light and post myself like I was someone grief couldn’t touch. Someone who didn’t wake up overwhelmed by the loss of all the small things Piotr used to do without being asked.
Oil changes. Picking up a bag of my favorite Polish sweets when he stopped at the shop while I was working, then leaving them on my bed for me to find when I got home.
Sending me songs he’d heard on the radio while fixing cars because he knew they were exactly my style, then calling them garbage and saying only I would like something that terrible. Every joke had love wrapped around it.
After he was gone, none of those things felt small anymore. My photographs became armor. Proof that I was still beautiful and busy, living a life no one needed to worry about.
These pictures are armor too. Bright little moments preserved so carefully that no one looking later would ever guess what the people inside them had survived.
There are school concerts. Birthdays. Another of Rithy asleep with an inflatable plastic guitar hugged against his chest. Mrs. Chhim is in nearly every photograph.
Always touching them. Always a hand resting on Kiri’s shoulder or her face buried in his hair.
Rithy tucked beneath her arm. Kisses caught against their cheeks while they squirm and laugh.
Then I notice the man behind them. He stands at the edge of a photograph taken at what looks like a backyard birthday party.
She has Kiri on one hip and her mouth pressed to his cheek.
He can’t be more than three. Rithy sits in front of them wearing a paper crown that's too big for his tiny head.
The man in the background is imposing. He holds a beer bottle loosely at his side, staring toward the camera with a neutral expression.
Something about him makes my skin prickle.
“Is that your husband?” I ask.
Mrs. Chhim follows my gaze.
“Yes. James,” she says. “Their father. Isn’t he handsome? Just like both boys.” She reaches for another album. “I get the wedding pictures.”
Kiri rolls his eyes.
Ma finds a smaller white album and opens it across her lap. A few pages in, she stops at their wedding photograph.
She stands outside what looks like a courthouse in a simple white dress that falls below her knees.
Only a small bouquet clutched in both hands and white flowers pinned into her dark hair.
Her smile is brilliant, but she looks so young.
School-picture young. James stands beside her in a dark suit, one arm secured around her waist. Two other men flank them, both older, with close-cut hair and the rigid posture of men who spent years in uniform.
One raises a bottle toward the camera. The other has a hand planted on the groom’s shoulder.
There’s no one standing on Mrs. Chhim’s side in any of the photographs. No mother fixing her hair or father beside her. No siblings crowding into the frame.
“You look so young,” I say.
Mrs. Chhim runs her fingertips over the plastic covering the photograph.
“Ah, I was young. Eighteen here.”
My gaze moves back to the man holding her. Kiri goes still beside me. Knowing who James is from his stories changes the picture. Mr. Drysdale’s smile no longer looks proud, and the arm around her waist doesn’t feel protective.
It feels possessive.
“He looks very distinguished,” I say carefully. “How old was he?”
“Thirty-nine.”
The number lands heavily. I study Mrs. Chhim’s small body tucked against his side.
“The other men are friends from military,” she says. “They served together.”
She points to each of them and gives me names I know I won’t remember. There’s fondness in her voice, softened by the ache of memories that belong to another lifetime.
“How did you meet?”
Kiri’s jaw tightens. Mrs. Chhim looks down at the photograph.
“He was stationed in Thailand when Americans had bases there. He liked it, so after he retired from military, he came back for work. Private company. He was contractor.”
Her fingertip settles over James’s face.
“After Khmer Rouge, many Cambodian people came to the border. He worked near camps on Thailand side. That is where we meet, two years before. Wedding like ours takes time, papers.”
Two years before?
Suddenly, what Kiri said on the rooftop about the gap between us means something different.
I thought he was only afraid of what was happening between us.
Meaningless sex is one thing, a relationship is something else.
Now I understand there were other fears tangled inside it and one of them wore his father’s face.
I look at the wedding photograph again. At the simple white dress, his military friends and the much older man holding her firmly against him. At the empty space where her family should have been.
A car door slams outside and the front door opens.
Both Kiri and Mrs. Chhim jump at exactly the same time.
Her shoulders jerk toward her ears. Kiri’s hand clamps around mine hard enough to hurt before loosening immediately.
His entire body turns toward the hallway, every muscle braced.
Neither of them seems to realize they’ve done it.
My heart drops. Then Rithy’s voice carries through the house.
“Good news, the party has arrived.” A pause. “Also, the cake.”
Kiri exhales beside me. Mrs. Chhim presses one hand to her chest.
“You make so much noise!”
Rithy appears in the doorway carrying an enormous white bakery box tied with a black ribbon. He takes in the three of us sitting rigidly around the open albums. His smile falters briefly, then it comes back brighter.
“I risked my life in Seattle traffic and somehow this delicious work of art survived intact.”
Mrs. Chhim gets to her feet.
“How much is this?”
“No idea. I blacked out at the register.”
She marches toward him, already reaching for the box. He lifts it above her head.
“No arguing, just eating or I'm taking it home.”
“It is my cake.”
Kiri relaxes beside me with each breath.
Rithy catches his eye over Mrs. Chhim’s head.
Something passes between them, a silent confirmation that it wasn’t him.
Not this time. I lace my fingers more tightly through Kiri’s while Mrs. Chhim orders Rithy into the kitchen and threatens him playfully with a knife if he doesn’t surrender it willingly.
The house fills with noise again. Laughter and arguing. Mrs. Chhim calling both her sons stubborn while smiling too widely to make the insult convincing. The photographs remain open across the coffee table. A family history told only through its happiest memories.
Proof that even inside a house built around fear, they still, sometimes, found reasons to smile.
Rithy gets the cake out of the box while all four of us are standing around the kitchen island like he’s unveiling a religious artifact.
Pale green layers sit beneath a smooth yellow frosting topped with tiny white flowers beside shards of spun sugar so delicate I’m afraid breathing too close might destroy them.
Mrs. Chhim presses both hands to her cheeks.
“Oh, too beautiful.”