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it?"
    "Depends."
    "Am I being intrusive again? Is that the problem?"
    "What is it you want to tell me?"
    "She's moving to St. Louis."
    My mother paused, listening for a reaction.
    "What do you mean she's moving to St. Louis?"
    "She's there as we speak, on a one-year program at SLU Hospital." I heard the strike of a match, her deep inhale. "It's something they do before medical school."
    "Really?" I tried not to sound interested.
    "Yes, really. She called last night."
    "Why St. Louis?" I sat up and turned the scanner off.
    "Don't ask me, Gordie. She certainly had a choice. With her record, she could have gone anywhere."
    I stretched the phone cord to the bathroom, a few steps away in my tiny apartment, and leaned over the sink to check my reaction up close in the bathroom mirror. Small wrinkles had formed between my eyebrows.
    "She still cares," my mother said.
    "What does it matter?" I asked.
    "Trust me," she said. "She hasn't given up on you."

    Thea was born Thuy Linh, one of the few
but dot,
children of a Vietnamese mother and an American GI, whose father returned to Saigon to claim her. She was four years old when the plane touched down at Columbia Regional Airport. Her father, Daniel Pierson, had used an old Army officer connection to doctor her birth certificate and change her age to two. He figured Thea could use the extra couple of years. She'd start school late, catch up with the language.
    Daniel Pierson was a single man, a third-year doctoral student in public policy, and he must have been lonely when he picked up the phone and dialed an old friend at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He said he had a daughter by a Vietnamese woman, and what would it take to gain custody? Depends on the woman, his old friend said.
    Unlike many new immigrants growing up in America, Thea had no access to her culture and no contact with the country of her birth. The nearest Vietnamese community was on South Grand in St. Louis, an hour and a half away. She said she didn't know about South Grand until she moved there many years later. In Columbia,
bui doi
was just another foreign term.
    Not until the sixth grade did she begin to take note of herself. She put pictures on the mirror of other girls in her class—goldilocks, freckle face, and button nose—class pictures with marbled blue backgrounds. She looked at them and back at her reflection, trying to will her stubborn face to do what it couldn't do.
    On the Fourth of July, 1979, she returned from the town parade and started a letter to her mother. "My name is Thea Pierson," it began. "You knew me when I was a little girl, and now I would like to know you."
    She wrote of friends, school, American things; marching bands and colorful floats, Shriners doing figure eights in mini antique cars; her house, a cat named Ringo who got in through the basement and stayed. It was a long letter that grew by the day, written at school in the margins of books, copied over before bed on a wide-ruled notepad as she lay on her stomach with her feet in the air. It never occurred to her that her mother might not read English.
    In the mornings she went to the county library and ripped out pictures of boat people from
Life
magazine, sneaked them into a book, and stapled them to her letter in the girls' room. She read about the Vietnamese living in New Orleans, East Texas, the Mississippi Delta, where it was hot and wet like Vietnam, where shrimp and rice were farmed, wrote about them as if she had been there. By early August, her letter nearly filled the notepad.
    Then, a week before Labor Day, around dinnertime, in the middle of another late summer thundershower, her father received a phone call from the same friend at the INS who had originally helped with the papers. Thea's mother had died several months before.
    "It was my fault," she told me later. "How could it not be? I started the letter too late."
    "But you couldn't have known," I said.
    "She was my mother. We had that connection.