All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher Page A

workings and/or implications of a matriarchal culture as well as trying to feel what it might have been like for her father if he had, in fact, served in Vietnam. She’d never even learned how to make sour rice soup or how to dry a gourd to hold the soup. She sucked at weaving cotton. The only thing she’d been good at was swaddling the baby to her chest and taking her for long walks—the fourth generation in the longhouse was, as the matriarch had wished, a girl—and Ru missed the smell of that baby’s head.
    So, after being of little use in the M’nong village for the last eight months, she suddenly felt like a doctor on a cruise ship volunteering to deliver a baby on the lido deck or, more appropriately, as she put it to Teddy, “It’s like you’ve had a heart attack while trapped on a plane—but it’s okay because you’re seated next to one of the best heart specialists in the nation.”
    “Are you making me an offer?”
    “I’m an award-winning win-back writer and you need a win-back.”
    He rubbed the back of his neck. “But it has to be from me. It has to represent how I really feel.”
    “Yep. I can do that.”
    He nodded slowly, saying yes while still thinking it through. “Okay, okay. It’s like the universe is speaking pretty clearly. Not even a lisp or a stutter. I’m sitting next to an award-winning win-back writer who owes me. Okay.” His head snapped up. “Let’s give it a shot.”
    For the next half hour, Ru raked him for details, moments. And he ran through everything he could, sometimes closing his eyes tight and leaning his head back against the headrest, trying to remember it all, just right.
    At a certain point, Teddy said, “God, I miss the way she looked at me. That look—it just could knock everything down. That look—it could strip everything away. And then it was just me and her. I’ve been missing that look ever since I left. I can’t spend my whole life missing it.”
    Ru stopped writing. She looked out the small window again, the clouds sailing past the old lady’s elegant profile. Ru felt breathless. She thought of Cliff, somewhere down there. Had he looked at her and felt everything stripped away? Had she felt that way when she looked at him? Had she
ever
felt that way? Maybe it just wasn’t part of her genetic makeup.
    “Can we put that in?” Teddy asked.
    She tapped her eraser on the tray table. “It might be a little too earnest and borderline cloying,” she told him. “But not bad. You could go with that. Or…” She raised her hand and told him. “I’ve got this.”
    And then for another hour or so, she wrote Amanda—this stranger, engaged to someone who was not the love of her life (according to Teddy Whistler)—a love letter.
    When she was done, she handed the letter to him.
    He read it slowly, sat back in his seat. “You’re good at what you do.” He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket.
    They settled into quiet for the rest of the flight, but Ru still felt jittery and, well, very, very alive. The most alive she’d felt in a very long time—even more alive than she’d been watching a live birth. She was rocketing back to her childhood home, her family, the past. It was like Teddy knew it and had shown up to confirm that her life wasn’t just characters and plots and ideas for books she couldn’t write. It was real—undeniably real—and by extension, Ru was real too.
    She’d run away and escaped her own life for a while, but Teddy Whistler—of all people!—had made her remember she was supposed to be living her life.
    After landing, Teddy said, “Norman Rockwell. He painted sentimentally, right? Whistler was against sentimentality. He loved art for art’s sake.”
    “Actually Rockwell’s first wife wanted an open marriage and divorced him to marry a war hero. She killed herself and his second wife had a lot of mental issues, addictions. They went to the famous therapist Erik Erikson. Stages of psychosocial development? Did you