Free The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith

money”—she paused to wipe the blade of her knife with a checkered cloth, and when she spoke again, Thuy imagined she was smiling beneath the yellow kerchief—“just your story. Why don’t you come back tomorrow at the same time? I’ll make you a bánh mì even tastier than the one you had today, and you will tell me more.”
    Thuy nodded before she realized what she was doing. The woman continued to clean her knife slowly and deliberately, and Thuy left the alley and began retracing her steps.
    When she reached the balcony, Kieu was still asleep, onehand clinging to the leg of the empty cot. Thuy lay back down, then wriggled her hand into her sister’s. The fingers squeezed hers, and a few minutes later, Kieu began to stir. She woke, looked down, saw that she was holding Thuy’s hand, and then smiled. Thuy was too full to feel guilty.
    H ER DAYS WERE MEASURED in bánh mì now. The taste of them haunted her every hour of the day, a thousand times worse than any imagined sandwich she had concocted in her head. After spending the lunch hour rearranging the rice in her bowl with her chopsticks, Thuy would retire to the balcony with Kieu, feigning sleepiness while her stomach gurgled in anticipation. She would lie back with her eyes closed, listening as her sister’s breathing slowed. Then, when she was certain that Kieu was asleep, she would free herself and disappear into the winding Saigon alleyways, her feet and her empty stomach leading her to where the sandwich vendor was always waiting. Kieu noted with dismay that Thuy’s pants had gone back to fitting her snugly. “I just don’t understand,” she would murmur, pinching the roll of flesh at Thuy’s waist. The daily bánh mì were making their presence known on Thuy’s waistline, and Thuy knew it; she could feel herself bloating, growing round and bulbous like the dragonfruit she still swallowed halfheartedly at breakfast every morning.
    If Grandma Tran suspected anything, she never let on. Thuy thought it should feel wrong, sneaking away as she did every day instead of staying with her grandmother—she suspectedthat the old woman’s days were numbered, and that this was the last time they would see each other. But, Thuy reasoned to herself, wasn’t it a good thing that she had found something in this country that she loved? Something new to her; something that felt uniquely her own? Wasn’t it a good thing that she had a friend here? Even if she didn’t know what she looked like?
    It was true: Thuy had never seen the bánh mì vendor’s face. She had spilled out her life story to this woman with every sandwich she gulped down, but she still didn’t know what lay beneath the kerchief.
    T HEIR TIME IN V IETNAM passed quickly, stealthily, quietly. On the second to last afternoon, as she lay on the balcony waiting for her sister to fall asleep, Thuy suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought about her home in America in a very long while. And that she didn’t want to go back.
    Once more she slipped out of Kieu’s grasp and down the stairs to freedom. But just as her hand touched the front doorknob, she suddenly paused, sniffing warily. It was odd, she could have sworn that for a moment she had smelled a—
    She turned and looked down the hallway that led to the kitchen and suppressed a shriek: Watching her through the kitchen window, dark against the violently pink flowers of the bougainvillea, was the face of her grandmother.
    For several long moments, the old woman held her gaze. Then, slowly, she raised one hand—one thin, brown handwith white scars around the knuckles—and beckoned to Thuy with it. Thuy shook her head frantically, groped for the doorknob behind her, then turned and fled down the street.
    “H OW WILL YOU BE ABLE to live without this in America?” said the sandwich vendor with a teasing edge in her voice as she handed Thuy her second bánh mì.
    Thuy could not shake from her mind the image of her grandmother’s face in the