Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

their chaperone, working the long sculling oar, bearing them on the river past the Citadel, past the coconut palms and the frangipani, toward Ngu Binh Mountain. Robert and Lien met only a few weeks ago in her cousin’s tailor shop, where she works. He came again and again as if to consider a tailor-made suit until finally she said,
I am happy Robert never choose
, and she invited him to float with her upon her river in this season thatgives it its name. And indeed the water all around them fills him with a ravishing sweetness possible only on the cusp of rottenness. The blossoms of fruit orchards upriver—litchi and guava, breadfruit and pomegranate—have fallen into the water and decayed in their passage to the South China Sea. The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her and she turns her face to his and they hold each other in this gaze, before they have ever kissed, ever embraced, weeks before they will make love, and the perfume of this river fills them both, and she says to him,
Mr. Robert, your eyes are the color of water drop on lotus leaf
, and he says,
Miss Lien, your name means “lotus
,
” yes?
and she turns away from him, glances over her shoulder toward her uncle, to make sure he cannot see. Then she looks at Robert again with her eyes the color of a black cat turned auburn in sunlight, and she leans to him, and they kiss.
    He has not had this memory—has feared and resisted this memory—for years. He knows how to let go of it. He reinhabits this: Lien offers him the French .32-caliber pistol that belonged to her father, and he takes it and he turns and he heads out her door and down the stairs and into the war. This is a memory he can put aside without needing his willpower.
    He closes his eyes.
    He smells the coffee he has brewed.
    He opens his eyes.
    Once again he takes up the carafe. He pours his Ethiopian in small circles, listening intently to the purl of it, leaning in, flaring his nose to its smell, isolating the notes of peach and blueberry and cocoa. He thinks, reflexively, to carry the cupto the living room, as he often does, to sit in the reading chair that faces the French doors to the veranda. But the oak tree is framed in those doors.
    He sits instead on a counter chair at the kitchen island. He puts his back to the casement window looking out to the veranda. This will be only about the coffee. He puts his hand to the mug handle.
    The telephone rings.
    He straightens sharply, inclined not to answer, short of its being Darla on her cellphone, in distress out in the woods. The answering machine is within earshot, in the hallway between kitchen and living room. At the second ring the machine’s synthesized woman’s voice says, “Peggy Quinlan.”
    His mother, on her cellphone.
    Robert looks at the clock over the kitchen sink.
    Barely past seven.
    She has insomnia. She has unreasonable worries about Dad. She has reasonable irritations with him. She gets lonely, even with him always around. She never thinks what time it is.
    Another ring and the answering machine announces her name again.
    The coffee is hot.
    Robert will let the machine answer. He can call her in a quarter of an hour.
    He puts both hands around the mug, warms them there. He will take his first sip when things are quiet again.
    Shortly the machine answers and his mother’s voice, strained and short of breath, says from the hallway, “Robert,pick up if you’re there. Your father has fallen. We’re at the hospital. He’s broken his hip.”
    Robert releases his cup of coffee, rises.
    He crosses the kitchen, feeling he’s moving too slowly. He’s adjusting to this thing. His father turned eighty-nine in November. He’s had trouble with his heart. A broken hip is bad.
    His mother has gone silent.
    He reaches the kitchen door, and just before the machine cuts her off, his mother says, “Okay. Call me as soon as you get this. I need you, Robert.”
    His parents are less than an hour away, forty miles north,