All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher Read Free Book Online Page A

viral. She’d won a Win-Back Award for her leading man’s famous speech to win back the woman he loved. Her cult following had inched over into a short-term mainstream popularity. For a short time, it became a kind of flash-mob thing—to videotape someone in a mall, for example, start to give the Teddy Wilmer win-back speech to a clerk, only to be joined by all of these other people previously arranged to join in. There were thousands of Teddy Wilmer win-back variations on YouTube; one performed by a four-year-old in Teddy’s famous baby-blue tracksuit had over seven million views.
    But what she’d really mastered in her career was the art of taking meetings in offices, fiddling with water bottle caps while pitching story lines, and sucking on pot lollipops—Jolly-Lollies kept her calm, an eccentricity she’d become known for.
    Why in the hell had she decided to chuck it all—including the Jolly-Lollies—for something
more serious
?
    Desperation, that’s why. Her second novel was three years overdue. They’d amended the contract so many times to push back the due date that Ru had lost count. Her editor, Hanby Popper, had acquired Ru’s first novel when she was a very new assistant editor for a low six-figure bid. Hanby had quickly scaled the ranks. The movie-tie-in editions sold gangbusters. The second book was likely to grow a bigger audience still. Ru’s book played mysteriously well in ex-communist countries.
    But Ru had no more whimsy, romance, or comedy in her tank. She’d decided to turn her sights on nonfiction—in particular the inner workings of this matriarchal society. Maybe she could borrow authenticity. Wasn’t that what nonfiction was? Borrowed authenticity?
    Now she was here waiting out the rainy season, constant drumming on the thatched roof. With her eidetic memory, Ru would have learned the language the way she had many others—with tapes and subtitled films. But that wasn’t possible with M’nong. They’d only created a M’nong alphabet for the first time in 2008, along with a twenty-five-thousand-word dictionary that translated to Vietnamese.
    She’d learned Vietnamese before she came so she could use the damn dictionary.
    That morning—while Ru’s oldest sister Esme kept calling her errant husband on his Skype account, to no avail, and Liv was scaring her acupuncturist by sticking her upper body out of a window in a hurricane, and her mother watched waves reach across Asbury Avenue and splash into the downstairs of the old family home—Ru dictated her notes into a mini tape recorder in the far corner of the longhouse, eating crickets.
    Light peeks in through the woven walls.
    The matriarch says she wants the new baby to be a girl. This is a typical desire of the M’nong’s matriarchal bias. Daughters are preferred to sons.
    She thought of the matriarchal household of her own childhood. It felt imbalanced by a weighty invisible presence, the old absent spy. A girl among girls, she was the only daughter who still harbored him. At sixteen, she started researching Vietnam because a spy her father’s age would have surely been involved in the war somehow, right? Her father was a secret secondary reason why she’d picked this place to write about.
    Fathers were hard, she’d heard from all of the men she’d dated. Even Cliff. Sometimes, lying in bed, she’d put her head on his chest and listen to him talk about his father’s heavy expectations—a drum of a voice talking about his father drum.
    Hadn’t her fatherless childhood been a good thing?
    One of her main female characters once said, “Marriage is billed as an end to loneliness, but each of us is alone in this world. The only unit is the self.” Of course a quirky young man—handsome, damaged, and tinged with some intangible lovability quotient—would change her mind.
    In some ways that character, Marta Prine, was based on Ru’s mother, Augusta Rockwell, and sometimes Marta was Ru herself, and sometimes Marta was Liv