In a series of deep oceanic blue windows along a grayish apartment, one window lifted up toward the sky and anchored itself with long, steel legs against the Vietnamese Bolero tirade of the household within. Through an interstice of the window, a seamstress works tirelessly at a thrifted table. 

            “We’re gonna get another noise complaint, Mom.” Huong’s voice echoed from her room and out of sight. Her mother, Cam, leaned back in a small dinky office chair she found off the side of the road—a terrible red color with new stains appearing on it by the second—and glanced at the closed door of her daughter’s room. On the outside, Huong’s door was adorned with pictures of her youth, her mother, her constantly working father, and the door frame itself bore nineteen notches of growing heights. 

            “Không sao!” Cam called back. Not a problem. No worries. It’s fine. 

            “Mom, they’re gonna charge us again.” Once more, from inside the door. 

            “Come out, con gái.” Come out, my dear, my daughter. You. Cam licked the tip of her finger, preparing to flip another page of the customer's order—one white áo dài embroidered with small pearls. How beautiful it could be on her daughter’s body for her college graduation. 

            But, of course, one must not be so rash that she’d jinx the future. “I need you to try this on.” 

            “I’m doing homework.” 

            “Con. Come here.” Cam heard a grunt from within the room. She watched as the lights

peeking through the crack at the bottom of the door changed from blue to black and the door opened. 

            There, Huong stood. Huong, or Haley as her school friends called her, used to be a bright, rosy-cheeked, sprightly young girl. The corners of her mouth used to turn upright at the edges and they had done that from birth, refusing to even allow her face to droop into a frown when relaxed. She used to dress in all trendy things, creating make-up looks for herself and her mother that made Cam feel twenty years younger and thirty-nine years older at the same time. Now she wore her father’s clothes which hung on her body like a giant sheet. Her face used to be hiền. A word so untranslatable for Cam that she could never quite explain the sort of kind heartedness the word truly meant. It was the sort of kindness that was imbued into a human at the start of their creation—the slow and sudden development of morality the moment a child gained consciousness, humanity’s intrinsic goodness, or perhaps it was the naivety of innocence. But the last time she saw it had been a year ago, Cam realized. 

            “What is it?” Huong said. Huong used to run to her mother the moment an áo dài was completed—eager to walk up and down the apartment hallway with her father waiting at the end with rough hands and a tired smile. 

            “Try this on. Uncle Quang ordered it for his daughter’s graduation.” 

            Huong wrinkled her nose. “It looks like a wedding dress.” 

            “Con, you know better than that. We’re not American. Put this on.” She took a moment to imagine the day Huong walked down the aisle in a red áo dài, surely one of her own designs. Huong rolled her eyes. 

            “Ugh. Fine.” She took the dress from her mother, about five steps away, and walked back

to her room. 

            “Where are you going?” Cam trailed after Huong. 

            “The window’s open.” Huong pushed the door behind her, consequently bumping it into her mother’s body. 

            “What is this attitude, Haley? Why are you closing the door?” 

            “I don’t want you to watch me change.” 

            “Why not? You never did this before.” 

            “Mom.” 

            “Let me in. With the weight you have gained, you probably need help fastening the zipper anyway.” Cam forced the door open which launched Huong backward. “Mom!” 

            “I’m just trying to make sure you’re healthy. Uncle Quang’s daughter—Ha—still fits this size.” 

            “Get out!” Huong’s voice raised levels that would cost them another noise complaint. Vietnamese music still blared from the kitchen/makeshift workspace Cam created. Some old pop ballad about how a man’s loneliness could never be rivaled in love, how he would never stop pursuing her, the things he would do for her—to her. She huffed as her fist balled up the áo dài whose fabric was so intricately thin and silky that wrinkles formed immediately. 

            “You are ruining the dress.” Cam’s lower lip quivered. “I understand you are a teenager, but you do not talk to your mom like that.” 

            “Get out.” 

            “No.” Cam looked up at her daughter whose eyes reflected her stubborn face. Same eye bags, different reasons. “Why are you being so difficult?”

            “I’m not being difficult—you’re just not understanding.” Huong’s eyes stung with dryness, something she never imagined they could do when her whole body felt like heaving forward and back with sobs. She didn’t want anyone to see her body. 

            “I am such an easy-going mom. You know Ha can only go out once every two weeks? She has to get all As if she wants to eat dinner.” Cam reached for Huong’s baggy shirt. Huong slapped her mother’s hand away and, with her voice shapeshifting from a warble to a screech, she yelled, “And I’m grateful, but I need to be alone!” 

            “What’s going on?” Cam pleaded. Vietnamese girls should not be shouting like this. “Is someone bullying you at school?” 

            “It’s nothing—just leave. I don’t need your help.” 

            “So, you want to live on the street?” 

            “I didn’t mean it like that. Just please stop. Get out of my room.” She held the dress even closer to her body, shielding her chest from view. 

            “This is my roof, my rules! When did you get so disrespectful? You are ruining the áo dài.” Cam grabbed the hem of the dress. She tugged at it, but her daughter’s grip remained so unyielding that even when her body lurched forward she yanked back. A tearing sound reverberated throughout the room. 

            Huong’s face dropped. She watched as small beads spilled out from the front portion of the áo dài. The small beads mimicked the trails of tears pouring down her mother’s face as her hard work—her intricate embroidery—tore apart. Huong felt as if she was swallowing everything in her dirtiness. She let go and it spilled onto the floor between them. 

            “Mom—”

            “Just tell me what’s going on,” Cam cried. “Who did this to you?” 

            “No one—you did! Forget it. Why can’t you—” Huong shut her mouth as she gazed into the eyes that bore a thousand worlds. The eyes that could see down to her clenching heart. The eyes that—if she stared too long, talked too long—could tear her open from the inside and all her grossness would begin spilling out like stuffing from a doll. Like what had happened to her, when she tried to say no, would stab a hole in the ground and devour both of them up. 

            Her voice carried from her mouth to her mother’s ears with a gentleness that only a daughter could share with her mother. “I’m sorry.” 

            “I have done nothing but give you everything. You are my flower.” Cam’s voice cracked with the weight of Huong’s name pulling her back into the hospital the day she and her husband named the girl. How lucky, she had said, that she had born a daughter whose face mirrored her own with everything that could possibly be hiền within it. The nurse who granted them an extra blanket, the doctor who explained everything slowly, the way her husband carried Huong into the apartment afterward, the man who held the door open for them, her mother who sponsored her American citizenship, the absolute joy of watching her beautiful, hiền daughter grow up. Not Haley, but Huong. “I will leave you alone.” 

            She shut the door, her back pressed against the blue, and held her breath so as to not cry. The door, thin and cold, held a boundless eternity within it. She traced over the fabric she had spent hours choosing in her friend’s house and began to copy the shape of the dress. Cam followed the lines she marked, and when the front portion was finished, she switched to her precious hand-stitching kit, a homemade box by Huong years ago painted over in acrylics and featuring flowers all around. She once more imagined her em gái, her baby girl, in the dress that she sewed.

            Late into the night, as the sun set and the moon’s rabbit began creating his potion once more, Huong emerged from her room. She found her mother still laboring in that red chair five steps away from her door. She spared a quiet glance but Cam did not look up. Huong made her way to the sink and in a series of little incisions, of little peeks through the flesh, she peeled an orange. She cut the fruit with tempered hands made strong by the guidance of her mother’s sowing. She breathed through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. She felt her hands on the kitchen sink, the orange ready by her side. The sting of tears pricked at the back of her eyes. For the love of mothers. For the love of her mother She’d cry but not now. As she placed the plate of oranges on the rickety table covered more than halfway by the sewing machine, they shared the slices together until Huong’s father came back from work.

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