An accident was an odd way to refer to it, though in the months that followed, I’d often find myself referring to it that way as well, as if subconsciously we didn’t want to acknowledge it for what it was. Peter had been attacked. Adam stood and showed me the photo. He was sitting upright in a hospital bed, his paper gown open in the front, a number of sticky circles adhered to his chest. His face was unrecognizably deformed, the upper left quadrant purple and lopsided.

The night before, Peter and his friend Sean had been walking home late from a party. They turned down the alley that led to Peter’s apartment and as they reached the front door someone called out from behind, asking to bum a cigarette. When they turned their heads to oblige, his accomplice swung a brick, knocking them both unconscious. By the time they came to, the attackers had fled. Sean’s teeth were missing and he began searching for them in the dark alley. Peter’s orbital bone, the socket that houses the eye, was crushed. Nothing had even been stolen. Peter’s roommate found them bloodied on the stairwell and took them to the hospital. They were keeping him at Hahnemann for a few days to monitor the bleeding in his brain from the impact.

That night, as I ran up and down serving both floors of the restaurant alone, I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter. What could have happened if that brick had been swung with a flick more force, if the bone had traveled half a fingernail further into his brain. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I really did love him. The next morning, I stuffed my backpack full of the most impressive books on my shelf, bought a bouquet of sunflowers and two miniature pumpkins, and rode my bike to the hospital.

Peter was there with his parents, whom I’d met once before at the restaurant. He looked even worse in person, groggy and full of drugs, but I was relieved that he still managed to laugh when the nurse brought out a catheter drainage bottle to hold my flowers.

When he got out of the hospital, Peter went back to his parents’ house in Bucks County for a few weeks to recover. When he finally came back to work, I figured things would be different, that he might be rattled and skittish, afraid to walk alone at night. I couldn’t imagine he’d want to come out to the bars with us after work. But it seemed that the only thing that had really changed about him were his feelings for me. From then on, the running joke was that I’d paid the two guys to knock some sense into him.

* * *

—

THE PROSPECT of the wedding worked its magic. With the exception of a minor feud with TSA over a heating pad, my mother’s medical evacuation went smoothly. The insurance company paid for us to fly business-class and our registered nurse even turned a blind eye to let my mom have a couple of sips of champagne to celebrate. After another week of recovery at Riverbend, my mother was finally able to return home.

It felt like we’d thrown open a shade and the room was filled with new light. My mother had something to fight for, and we used her desire as leverage to get her to move and eat. Suddenly she was in her reading glasses, scrolling through her phone, searching for an engagement ring she remembered seeing at Costco. She held up the screen for me to see. A simple silver band of small diamonds. “Tell Peter to buy you this one,” she said.

I sent Peter the link. On the phone we arranged travel plans around his work schedule. He’d fly in one weekend to propose and visit the rental outlet the wedding planner had suggested. Two weeks later he’d return with his family for the real thing.

“We can always get divorced if things go sour,” I said to him on the phone. “We can be, like, hip young divorced people.”

“We’re not going to get a divorce,” Peter said.

“I know but if we did, don’t you think ‘my first husband’ would make me sound so full of maturity and mystique?”

* * *

—

WHEN THE TIME CAME I picked him up from the Portland airport. It’d been nearly a month since we’d seen each other, and even though I had basically forced him to propose and even picked the ring, I felt giddy around him in a new way. We drove into the city and parked the car. On the walk to a restaurant, on a random street in the Pearl District, he got down on one knee.

The next day the two of us drove to the wedding outlet and took photos of various chairs and linens to send to my mother. We figured the easiest and most affordable option was to throw a small wedding in my parents’ backyard. We had space for a hundred people, and if my mother felt unwell, she could retire to her bedroom without difficulty.

Back on the East Coast, Peter drafted invitations and sent them out express. He made up place cards with all the guests’ names and imagined heraldic mottoes to add his own touch. “Kunst, Macht, Kunst,” “Art, Power, Art,” read one, below an emblem he’d made with our initials that resembled a coat of arms. “Cervus Non Servus,” “The Stag Is Not Enslaved,” read another.

I ordered the cake at a grocery store, bringing back samples first for my mother to try. I asked my friends in And And And if they’d be the house band and found a bartender, a photographer, an officiant. My mother and I lay in bed together and discussed the guest list and arranged the seating chart. I thought of how we could have run circles around our wedding planner if only my mom had been in the right state of mind, if we had the time, if she wasn’t squinting to see through the occlusions of OxyContin and Fentanyl.

* * *

—

THERE WERE OTHER MATTERS to attend to that weren’t so pleasant. My father scheduled a meeting with hospice. Assisted suicide was a legal option in Oregon, but the doctor insisted it was his job to ensure she wasn’t in any pain.

As soon as Peter left, Kye returned from Georgia and lobbied a group of Korean church women to gather in my mother’s bedroom and have her properly convert to Christianity. I peered shyly through the bedroom door. They were singing Korean hymns and fanning their Bibles while my mother vaguely participated, nodding in and out.

I knew my mom appreciated Kye’s generosity and was giving in to the charade to make her happy, but I’d always been proud of her resistance to spiritual conformity and I was sorry to see it surrendered. My mother had never practiced religion, even when it separated her from an already meager Korean community in a small town, even when her sister asked her to on her deathbed. I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.

“Did you accept Jesus into your heart?” I asked.

“Ya, I guess so,” she said.

* * *

—

I CROSSED THE ROOM and made my way toward her bedside, but before I crawled in beside her, she asked me to bring her jewelry box. It was a small cherrywood chest with two drawers that slid open from the bottom and a compartment with a mirror that opened from the top. Inside it was lined in dark blue velvet, each drawer divided into nine compartments. None of the jewelry was particularly old. My mother hadn’t inherited anything. The pieces were all bought within her lifetime, most of them gifts she’d given herself that were precious to her simply because of her ability to do so.

“I’m going to give away some of my jewelry this week,” she said. “But I want you to pick what you want first.”