“I think you, given your familiarity with the town and your influence with friends and neighbors, can find her something without shaming her in the process. I’d be willing to try but I already offered her space and she didn’t go for it.”

“And I offered to enlist the help of friends in looking around for her and she put me off,” Scott said.

Blake leveled a stare on him. “Do it, anyway.”

* * *

Charlie rested comfortably but Lin Su didn’t. Her heart was heavy and her mind troubled. She had devised the plan to keep him home from Winnie’s and the beach as a punishment for not following her rules. She could justify it, of course—he was coughing and he shouldn’t be around Winnie. But she knew it was manageable, not likely to be a virus and she thought it might cause him to be more careful in the future.

What had Blake meant when he said he knew more about being poor than she would ever learn? Did he have some twisted hope of comforting her by admitting he had come from modest roots? All that statement really meant to her was that he had taken note of their impoverished living conditions. He must certainly wonder—nurses, especially home health care nurses, were well paid. The problem was that Lin Su wasn’t able to work twelve months a year. When she was finished with one patient it might be weeks or months until she had another full-time charge. And in those periods in between, the hospitals weren’t always hiring.

At the end of the day she still did better in home health care than in a clinic or hospital, but it wasn’t enough to pay all the bills and create a family home for herself and Charlie. Charlie had stopped having daytime babysitters only three years ago; babysitting and day care were mighty expensive. She was nearly finished with her college loans and the five-year-old car would be paid for in another year—those two items would add significant cash flow. And the fact that Winnie was providing her a premium health care package worth eight hundred dollars a month was a godsend. Otherwise, Charlie’s one night in the hospital would cost her the earth! The best insurance Lin Su could afford had a high deductible and poor coverage.

In short, no matter how you looked at her finances, money was tight. Yet she made too much money to qualify for assistance. County or state assistance was a double-edged sword—it made her feel ashamed to accept it and deprived when she no longer qualified.

It was on nights like this that she spent wakeful hours thinking about the strange journey her life had taken.

Lin Su’s adoptive parents insisted it was not possible for her to remember her early childhood, but that was merely their denial. She remembered some things vividly. She lived with her mother and several other Vietnamese immigrants in the Bronx in an apartment that was so small they literally slept on top of one another. Lin Su’s mother was born in 1965, the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American GI, that’s how she managed entry into the United States when she immigrated. A church sponsored many refugees, Lin Su’s mother among them. Lin Su was born in America, her American father unknown. Lin Su’s mother, Nhuong Ng, moved from a refugee camp to New York. And after three years of that, her health failing, she gave Lin Su into adoption.

But Lin Su remembered her mother. At least snippets of her—young, beautiful, sweet. She remembered playing with other children in their small rooms. She remembered her mother’s singing and crying. There was a swatch of cloth—six inches by nine inches—embroidered with silk thread that Lin Su had clung to, her adoptive parents unable to sneak it away from her. Lotus in spring, her mother called it. Eventually she hid it because she knew they wanted to cut her off from her past. She remembered the day she was taken by the man in the suit to a building and given to her parents. Her new mother, Marilyn, brought a dress for her to leave the building in and shoes that hurt her feet. She remembered crying loudly and her new mother yelling at her to stop, and her voice was so brittle and harsh that not only did she stop crying, she stopped talking altogether for a long time. She remembered she spoke a little English and expanding on it came hard but her new family hired a teacher who visited her—they repeated words, read, wrote, cyphered. She was not allowed to speak Vietnamese. They began to call her Lin Su, though her name was actually Huang Chao. For many years she did not understand—they wanted her to have an Asian name but not Huang. Marilyn said it sounded like a grunt, not a pretty name.

They took her identity. She became Lin Su Simmons.

Then one day she was with her new mother in a store and two old Vietnamese women were whispering about her with her white parents, called her a derogatory name indicating she was an orphan no one would take and her parents had adopted her for status, not for her worth. She thought she was about seven at the time. And without thinking or planning, Lin Su had shot back at them in Vietnamese, My mother is a queen and my father is American, you ugly hag!

The women ducked and ran. Marilyn Simmons was mortified and one of her older sisters, a blonde and biological Simmons daughter, laughed hysterically at their mother’s outrage.

Her birth mother had told her, My father is American and your father is American and these men have failed us. Her heritage was lost, but for the scrap of embroidered cloth and two faux-gold coins given to Nhuong by her father.

Lin Su had two sisters—Leigh was ten years older and Karyn was fourteen years older. Since Lin Su was three when she joined that family in their rich Boston home, that made her sisters thirteen and seventeen. They attended boarding school and from the time Lin Su arrived until she departed at the age of eighteen her sisters were merely visitors. Later, Lin Su would attend the same boarding school, a prestigious academy located in the Adirondacks. There were family holidays together, Karyn’s wedding after her graduation from Bryn Mawr, some trips they all took together. But there were also holidays that her parents were abroad or in the islands and Lin Su stayed at school, one of very few students abandoned while most others spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with their families.

She never bonded with her sisters, unsurprisingly. She had liked them, however. She looked up to them and envied their blond hair and amazing style. Lin Su had friends at school—she was quite popular and very smart. But her older sisters were chic and had fabulous taste. They were also complete opposites. Karyn married a man from a rich banking family, divorced him when she was thirty and married a richer man from a more elite family. She had two children she mothered in much the same way Marilyn had mothered—with a nanny. Leigh had not yet married by the time Lin Su left the family, but she had graduated college, done a tour with the Peace Corps and traveled quite a bit. Lin Su often wondered if either of them ever came home to Boston and said, “What? What do you mean she’s pregnant and gone?” But then why would they? They had given no indication they loved her.