“Of course not. It smelled like the water in an upscale spa. Very refreshing. You didn’t tell me if you want tea.”
“No, thanks.”
She puts down two full cups. “Tell me your news.”
I take a breath. “Mom.” Then I stop, unable to put it in words. The thing I’ve wanted the most for years is here—to be able to tell her I’m not a failure. Yet I can’t find the properwords.
“Sit down, Luling.” She waits until I obey. “You always worry too much about the right way to do things. Everything has to be flawless. Just tell me.”
“I have good news and bad news.”
“Bad first.”
“There’s an issue with Kelsey. One I caused with my perfume samples.”
Her face doesn’t change. “All right. We can talk about that after you tell me the good news.”
In response, I reach into my bag and pull out a perfume bottle. She looks at it curiously. “You have a fragrance for me?” she asks eventually, the bags under her eyes puffing as she frowns. “Why did you bother to fly across the country for this? What a waste of money and time.”
This spurs me on. “No. I came to tell you this is a moli fragrance. Mine.”
It takes a moment for my mother to understand, but when she does, her eyes widen. I wait for the little dig, theAre you sure?Thatdoubt she’s always had in me, that inability to believe in me, and her endless and debilitating need to test and question.
Mom says nothing.
To my shock, she comes over and hugs me, clutching me close and then closer as her arms tighten. I stiffen. This wasn’t what I expected, and I want to pull away but I can’t. All she does is repeat my name into my hair, and I give up on trying not to cry. Crying in front of my mom is usually a no-go zone because I can’t handle showing that much vulnerability in front of her. Here, in this moment, it’s like all our history has been filtered out, leaving only the two of us and what we used to have.
It lasts seconds before she moves back, hands on my shoulders, her elbows stiff. “Tell me everything, Luling. Everything. Now.”
It takes a while, but to Mom’s credit, she doesn’t say a word as I stumble my way through the story. Then she asks if I brought the register with me.
This is more normal, and it calms me down. I pull the book out of my bag and hand it to her. “I’ve been reading but haven’t found anything.”
She flips through as she mumbles under her breath. Finally, she stops, fingers spreading over and down the page as if to smooth out the words.
“Your grandmother wondered if this could be the same for you,” she says.
I read the entry. “I don’t get it,” I say. It’s a straightforward account of a woman’s moli ceremony. A successful one at that.
Mom jabs a finger at the dates, and I resign myself to doing some mental math. Okay, Jiali was born in 1670 and then found her moli in 1696. So?
I frown. So. That’s not twenty years—that’s twenty-six. “She was older, but I’m not sure how that matches me.”
“There was another note, a small one.” My mother takes the register and finds the page she wants. It’s a woman from the Ming dynasty, which I’d barely glanced over because most of it waslong-winded descriptions of the landscape that would only interest a geoarchaeologist.
My daughter is ten now, the entry reads. It’s after a lovingly in-depth overview of their new pigs.She is young, but ready to learn about her moli. Some girls are ready to be trained earlier. All girls are different, I told her, the way all our power is different.
“You think I’m a late bloomer?” I ask.
Mom shuts the book. “I don’t know. We thought if some girls could be trained earlier, it was possible for others to only access their moli later. Twenty might have simply been the age set out by Aiai because that was the age her own daughter’s gift appeared.”
“It could have been a calendar error,” I say. “Also, why are you only telling me this now? Didn’t it seem like important information for me to have?”
“I did tell you,” she says. “You didn’t listen, and every time I brought it up, you changed the conversation. I decided you were capable of reading the register yourself when you were ready.”
“I don’t remember this.” Did she tell me? It’s possible I did shut her down, but shouldn’t she have kept trying?
Mom doesn’t say anything but shifts her gaze to the door that leads to the lab. I know what she’s thinking, the way I’ve always known what she’s thinking. If I’m a late bloomer, then I should be able to access my moli now. I should be able to go to her perfumer’s organ, mix a fragrance, slap on a huo symbol, and do my thing, the same as I did in my own lab.
