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

and occasionally Esme. Ru only knew what she knew.
    Did Ru believe in love and marriage? She was engaged to Clifford Wells. That was proof of something.
    After
Trust Teddy Wilmer
was a hit and Clifford Wells proposed to her and she accepted—a knee-jerk reaction—she realized that she’d actually never lived in a family bound by marriage. She had no idea what she was committing to.
    The elephants were lowing in the distance. She read into her recorder,
The domesticated elephants are having conversations. They have inner lives. They understand love more than human beings do. I’m sure of it.
    Maybe the elephants would be the key to her book. She was getting used to their different kinds of calls.
    She said:
Note to self: More elephants?
    Just then, a man in a government uniform walked up the steps to the longhouse and pointed at her. He spoke to the matriarch, who looked at Ru. The man was asking permission. The matriarch was giving it.
    The man pointed again and said in Vietnamese, not M’nong, “Letters for you.” He held out a bundle bound by a rubber band.
    Ru walked around the family members huddled by the fire and took the bundle. “Thank you,” she said, but he held on to the bundle.
    “You are still not a missionary?” he asked Ru in Vietnamese. The region suffered human rights violations due to religious persecution. She hadn’t really researched this enough.
    “I’m still not a missionary. I’m here to research love.”
    “Love?”
    “Like marriage.”
    The man laughed, showing his blunt dark teeth, and let go of the package. “Like marriage!” he said and walked out of the longhouse back the way he’d come.
    She returned to her corner spot, squatting as the other women often did, flat-footed, knees to her chest. The children gathered around her, and one petted her hair. Ru was getting used to this.
    The letters were all from Cliff. She opened the sealed envelopes and sorted them by date.
    And as she read, she responded in a letter—in the order of the questions asked.
    Cliff had written,
How long are you planning to stay?
    She wrote,
I haven’t seen a ritualistic teeth filing.
    She already realized that she probably wouldn’t see this. Only the M’nong elderly had filed teeth and elongated earlobes. The tradition had waned. It made her think of a future time when piercings, gauges, and certain tattoos would be a sign of having outlived a tradition.
    She went on…
or the crying for the bull ceremony.
If he looked this up—and he would—he’d know that this was tied to New Year’s, two months away.
    No one’s died yet so I haven’t seen them banging the drums beside the coffin.
She added this hesitantly, not wanting to sound like she wished this on anyone in order to fulfill her mission.
    And most of all, I haven’t seen anyone get married, which is key. I’ll have to stay on a good while longer.
    He’d written in the next letter,
I’m worried that you left so quickly and right after we got engaged. Are you happy about the engagement? Do you feel pressured? I didn’t mean to pressure you. I’m so sorry but my mother insisted on sending the news into the
NY Times
engagement announcements and they’re running a notice.
    She wrote:
No need to apologize. It’s a public fact. It’s a ritual that is recognized. It’s the truth.
A Statement of Personal Honesty, she thought.
    Reading the mounting anxiety in Cliff’s letters, she wondered if she was just running away.
    She’d run away many times before. The first time was when she was just sixteen.
    She ran away from college twice to live off the land. That was where she’d started indulging in pot for its calming effects. She was otherwise too high-strung and her memory was too sharp—always sending her backward into the past instead of forward.
    She ran away from a graduate program in archaeology to become a novelist, and ran away from writing her second novel to be a screenwriter, albeit one who only adapted her own work.
    She’d