She looks up when I arrive. “We need to understand what happened with your moli.”
“Good morning to you as well.”
“Luling.”
“Don’t you think we need to talk about last night?” My question is pro forma, because I don’t want to either.
“No. We need to prioritize.”
“Shouldn’t you be working? Since you’re here at work?”Stop stalling, Lucy. Mom is right.Yet I don’t want to be tested.
“Don’t worry about what I should be doing. Right now, I am doing this.”
She gets up and comes around the counter, where she fixes the sign to say CLOSED and gestures me toward the door. “We need to go to the lab.”
I follow without arguing and stand blinking in the bright-white light. It looks the same as it did when I was back for Waipo’s funeral.
“The most important thing is to fix this mess you’ve made.” She walks to the back of the lab and taps in the code to access the archive vault.
It’s true, I have made a mess, but her tone gets my back up. Naturally, having my moli isn’t enough for her. She always has to focus on the negative. That it’s a huge and worrisome negative isn’t the point. “You said the priority is to figure out what happened with me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
I’m so flabbergasted I almost leap forward. “Yes, you did! It wasthree minutes ago. You said we didn’t need to talk about last night and we needed to understand what happened.” As usual, my mother is able to light me incandescent with injustice. I know what she said. She said it. She does this all the time, insisting she’s right to the point that I suspect reality has been warped in her head.
“No, Luling.”
“Is this even a big deal? Finding your true love is a good thing.”
Mom takes the register back into her hands to page through, the lines bracketing her mouth deepening as she pauses to read one of the more recent chapters. Then she looks up. “Finding your true love is a good thing,” she says. “This is not.”
“Why not?” I knew she would ruin this for me.
“Because that perfume is out in the wild and being used by people who don’t know what they’re dealing with. Our clients have always treated our work with the respect it’s due and, moreover, knew what to expect.”
“So?”
She thrusts the register in front of me. “Remember Miaoyu.”
“Miaoyu?” I echo, looking down. It takes only a few seconds of reading to recall the story of my ancestor from a hundred years ago. Miaoyu’s moli had been to create deep sadness, and her chapter was so filled with frantic religious exhortations it was uncomfortable to read. “What about her? She never made any. She wasn’t allowed to.” My family might like money, but they were also united in this one thing: that their moli never be used for evil.
She points to a line. “Here.”
“‘The gift is a curse and I was cursed by God, though I wielded it for His glory,’” I read aloud. Then I read it again. “Wait, she made some?”
“She was a follower of the Taipings and made one bottle for the commander, who told her it would end the siege of Nanjing and stop suffering. They decanted it without smelling and spread it around,causing the Manchu troops to fall and the slaughter of innocents to commence.”
It’s hard for me to not feel defensive that she’s likening my actions to this horror. “True love is not the same as a war or sadness.”
“People who sought their true love were prepared for it. What if you were in a relationship with someone you thought was your true love, but then a new love came along? How many lives could be ruined? Families destroyed? Hearts broken?”
“We don’t know that,” I say immediately. “Plus, that was always a risk for the person being summoned. They might have been in a relationship.”
She made a face as if that was a negligible point, and I move on. “These people wanted true love. It was a gift bag for singles.”
“They might have given the samples away as gifts. They might simply have wanted the bag and seen the love aspect as a marketing gambit. We don’t know. We don’t even know if the reason your moli was delayed was because there was something wrong. What if this time the scent doesn’t call true love? Or it works on everyone who comes in contact with it?”
She doesn’t wait for me to reply. “Even if the moli was perfect, we don’t bestow our gifts willy-nilly,” she says. “We are cautious about who we sell to, so they respect the power in those bottles. These women don’t. We don’t know the strength of your moli or the damage it can do.”
