April came faster than I was ready for.
But then again, I had spent twenty-eight years getting ready.
I woke to the sound of the Pacific Ocean on the morning of the wedding. James had left the guest suite before dawn — tradition, he’d said, even though neither of us was particularly traditional. The bed was empty on his side.
On the nightstand, where my phone usually sat, there were two things.
My T-square. Six inches of steel, slightly bent at one corner from the night it hit the drywall. James had pulled it out of the wall that morning, spackled the hole without comment, and kept it in his camera bag for weeks.
And a note in his loose, crooked handwriting: Something borrowed. Something steel.
I held it against my chest, then set it on the dresser next to my vows and went to get married.
Mrs. Park arrived at eight sharp. Nina came with a curling iron and a YouTube tutorial she had watched three times. The first attempt at my hair was structurally unsound — lopsided in a way that defied her master’s degree.
Mrs. Park observed from across the room without mercy.
The hair does not agree with your degree.
Real laughter, from the belly, the kind that makes your eyes water.
Nina recurled the left side. It was still slightly uneven.
I didn’t care. Real things are never perfectly symmetrical.
When the dress was on, Mrs. Park reached into her purse and pulled out a silk pouch. Inside, a silver hairpin shaped like a crane with wings extended.
My mother gave this to me at Incheon Airport the day I left Korea. She had said I was dead to her. But she pressed this into my hand at the last moment and said, come back.
She looked at me.
I want you to wear it today.
I bent my head. She slid the pin into my hair above my left ear, her fingers lingering, adjusting, making sure it was secure the way a mother checks that everything is in place before she lets go.
There.
Then, in a voice that almost cracked but did not, because she was Eunice Park:
Not yet. Mascara.
At ten-thirty, I stood at the far end of a stone path along the cliff’s edge.
A wooden arch wrapped in Oklahoma wildflowers — Indian blanket, black-eyed Susan, coneflower. The flowers I used to pick on the side of the county road when I was eight, walking home from the bus stop because nobody was coming to get me. I had wanted them because they were mine. Not Lorraine’s, not Shelby’s, not Bartlesville’s. Mine.
