“I call because I worry about you,” she says with a hand palm up, like this is obvious. “I am your mother.”
“What about giving me the register?” I have her here.
“That was different.” I can see her mouth harden in a way that, in my childhood, would send Eric and I scattering.
“Right,” I mutter.
“Don’t be angry at me for your choices,” Mom says. It’s her tone, so matter-of-fact, that stops whatever I was going to say next.
Instead, I accept I’m not going to win this fight and look at the vial. “How does it work?”
“Through scent, as usual.”
I push aside my hurt at being excluded from a fairly juicy family secret because I’m not worthy, and it occurs to me Kelsey might have felt the same way. “What does it smell like?”
Mom takes her tweezers and pulls out the incense, a dark ball about the size of a blueberry, and hands it to me. It’s subtle, almost a floral, but then not. I sniff it again before something occurs to me. “Won’t this have an effect on us?”
She shakes her head. “It’s the same as any other moli. No impact on Hua women.”
I sniff again, then hand it to Mom. “Maybe magnolia?” She tries it and a line forms between her eyebrows as she thinks. It’s usually not so hard for me to identify a note, but the scent is strangely mutable.
“Lighter, though, like plum blossom?” She sniffs. “With a breath of Japanese cypress?”
“That’s it.” As usual, there’s a momentary sense of satisfaction as we identify the scent. “It’s nice.”
“It would make a good body lotion.” She puts the incense in a vial of oil and caps it. “Interesting. I’m not sure how they would have made that scent back then. I thought plum blossom was too fragile for the techniques they used to render scent.”
“Kelsey said ten of the women were requesting new bags,” I say.
“We should assume all the women smelled it.”
“There were twenty altogether. Do you think Kelsey smelled it?”
Mom is rummaging through her perfumer’s organ and putting aside a few bottles of notes to mix with the ghost scent.
“I don’t know. She must have, as quality control for her luxury gift bags.”
God, we’re all saying that phrase now. “That’s twenty-one.”
“Mix the oil with this,” says Mom, holding out a bottle. I take a sniff. It’s light and charming, with notes of freesia and apple, and would suit almost anyone on a spring day. “Tell Kelsey this is a special batch to congratulate her clients,” Mom adds. “Don’t tell her what it’s for.”
“I can’t do that. That’s wrong.”
“We need to protect the family,” she says.
I laugh. “There’s no way she’s going to believe these are only perfume samples. Not after last night.”
“We have an unopened sample of scent that makes people more trusting,” she points out.
“From the Song dynasty, and they were cautious about who they sold it to,” I say, remembering the register. “She refused the prospective client who wanted to trick her daughter into marrying a different man than the original betrothed, who she loved. We’re going to do this the right way.”
“Kelsey can’t be trusted.”
“She has no choice,” I say. “At least in this. What’s she going to tell her company? That she gave their clients the equivalent of a love potion? That’s not going to look great for her.”
Mom glares at me. “It is not a love potion. We are Huas, not street hucksters.”
“I’m ninety percent sure her boss will be more versed in the Western tradition of fairy tales. In any case, she’s as stuck as we are.”
