and my father didn’t know how to fix it, my mother said, “Oh, I bet Randy Travis knows how to do that.” And then there was the time she said out loud over dinner, “I bet Randy Travis would like to have dinner with me.” She’d stare outside the window at the sky, the moon, the sun, or a cloud and say, “Randy Travis could be looking at the very same thing I’m looking at right now. Wherever he is.”
It was inevitable that my father got tired of hearing about Randy Travis, and he finally said to her, sadly, that the man was famous and that our lives would never cross his. “He doesn’t even know we exist. We’re not even a single glitter of light to him,” he said. Then he brought his hand to his face, formed a circle around his eye with his fingers, and closed the space inside until there was nothing left except a tight fist. But you could not talk her out of her Randy Travis love. It was a shadow that covered her up, and all you could do was wait for some light to come through. She even started dressing up like Dolly Parton, thinking this was the kind of woman he’d want. She dyed her hair blond, teased its strands, and tied it in an upsweep. She played his music and sat by the window, waiting and gazing out onto the street below, as if he was going to drive up and take her away.
Hoping for some of this Randy Travis love to brush off on him, my father started wearing these cowboy boots my mother got for him at a garage sale. Pretty soon, he was wearing jeans and flannel tops, and standing like Randy Travis. He’d hook a thumb into the belt loop of his jeans and stand there with one leg straight and the other loose at the knee so it jutted forward. It made my mother happy to see him change in this way. But then when my mother asked him to sing, he failed spectacularly.
He did not know how to pronounce the words.
Her broad and hopeful smile vanished from her face, but my father only tried harder, belting out the chorus louder, holding on to the vowels, trying to produce a southern twang. He was no star. He was no leading man. He packed store furniture into cardboard boxes for a living. No one would pay to see him sing, but he didn’t care. He was only trying to be what my mother wanted.
ONE DAY, MY father told me we were going to a Randy Travis concert. He said, “It’s what your mother wants. We have to do this for her.” He rented a car and we drove down south. In those days, there was no such thing as buying things online. You had to walk up to a concert venue and buy a ticket right there at the box office.
My mother was so thrilled, she made the kinds of food my father liked to eat. She spent the three days before we set out soaking sticky rice, and when it was done cooking, she put it in a thip khao and bundled that in a blanket so it would keep its warmth. She made papaya salad and crushed tiny dry shrimps into it, and fried up two quails and wrapped them up in aluminum foil. I hadn’t noticed how beautiful Lao food was before. After the bland yellows and browns of those TV dinners, it felt like a homecoming. Arranged together, the colours were so bold and bright, the flavours popped and sharpened. Every meal tasted like a special occasion. It was a reminder of where she came from and her love. I could now see why my father insisted on eating nothing but this.
I do not remember much about the drive there except seeing a blue-and-red sign with the number 75 on it. We followed it for many days. I couldn’t see much out the window. I only saw black wires like underlines in the blue of the sky and then the dark and my own little face staring back at me.
At the concert, we were so high up on the outer ring of the audience I could not tell if it really was Randy Travis onstage. His face was the size of a pin. I closed my left eye and measured him with my thumb and index finger from where we were. He