Chapter 3 — Unnamed Perfume Shop

That night, after closing the shop and putting her mother to bed early, Bao Nghi did not go upstairs immediately but sat alone under the warm yellow table lamp, pulling out an old wooden box from the bottom of the cupboard. It was the box that Anh Nguyet's grandmother left behind, locked with a small, rusty butterfly-shaped padlock, the key was kept in an empty glass jar on the top shelf - the only place in the shop where, according to her mother many years ago, "no one thought to look". Inside the box were five worn leather-bound notebooks, each containing recipes from a different phase of her grandmother's career, and an oil-paper envelope containing several loose sheets of paper, some with singed corners, in her characteristic slanted handwriting.

She had read through these notebooks countless times, but tonight, after her mother's unfinished words that afternoon — "you haven't yet..." — she felt the need to read them again, more slowly, more carefully, as if searching for something she had missed before. The last notebook, with a dark brown almost black leather cover, was the one she flipped through the least, because most of its pages were stained with yellow-brown stains — traces of a small fire that had broken out in the corner of the workshop behind the shop, more than twenty years ago, just a few months before her grandmother passed away.

Bao Nghi flipped through each page carefully, her fingers trembling slightly not because of the cold but because of an almost sacred feeling every time she touched old paper with the smell of long-lasting smoke - in her mind, that smell always appeared as a dark brown halo with a black border, like a burn that had healed but still left a scar. Most of the recipes in this notebook are still legible—complex mixtures of ylang-ylang, agarwood, vetiver, meticulous notes about proportions, about incubation times, about how my grandmother adjusted a recipe seven or eight times before she was satisfied. But on the last page, everything suddenly stopped. One corner of the page was charred and curled, leaving only a small patch at the bottom with a few broken lines of text, and right in the middle of the page, two words were written much larger than the other lines, the pen stroke was shaky but underlined twice like an urgent reminder: Hoai Huong.

Beneath those two words are a few lines that can still be read, as fragmented as fragments of a broken mirror: "...the smell of young mud after a flood... is not a bad smell, it is the smell of the soil waiting to grow again... dried honey grass on the old roof... there must be a little bit of something burning, like the last night's fire..." Then the last line, scrawled as if scribbled in an emotional moment: "Please remember for me, if you don't have time..." The unfinished sentence was interrupted by a streak of fire, the rest. What's left of the page is just ash.

Bao Nghi has been reading these words since she was fifteen years old, when her mother first allowed her to open the wooden box, but every time she reads them again, she still feels a lump rising in her throat. "Please remember for me" - those words, she always believed, were written by her grandmother to her mother, Mrs. Bich Van, not to her, because Bao Nghi was not yet born. But now, when the person asked to "remember" is also gradually losing her own memory, that message seems to have automatically been transferred to her, the only grandchild still awake enough to shoulder it.

She took a blank piece of paper and began to write down what she read, trying to arrange the pieces into a meaningful order: the smell of young mud after the flood, dried honey grass, a bit of burning like a stove. It's not a complete recipe — there are no proportions, no specific flavor names, just images and feelings that my grandmother tried to express in ordinary people's language, instead of the professional language of an artisan. That made Bao Nghi both confused and emotional — it seemed that her grandmother, in the last minutes of writing these lines, was no longer thinking like a bartender, but simply a girl trying to remember the scent of her hometown.

Her mother once told her, on a rare night when she was completely lucid about three years ago, before her illness got worse, that Anh Nguyet's grandmother was not born in Lam Kieu town. She grew up in a riverside countryside more than a hundred kilometers away, where every flood season brought anxiety to the whole village. When she was sixteen years old, a huge flood suddenly struck in the middle of the night, washing away nearly half of the village, and in that chaotic night, she lost her mother - a woman whom she later only remembered through a few fragmentary memories: a worn brown shirt, the smell of hair drying by the fire, and a lullaby that was never sung completely because it was always interrupted by the crowing of a rooster. Ms. Anh Nguyet was brought to Lam Kieu town by a group of evacuees, lived with distant relatives, then grew up, learned the profession of mixing from a traditional herbal medicine store and selling aromatic oils near the market, and finally, with her hands and natural nose, built this small perfume shop on Hang Diep street.

"Your grandmother never talked much about it," her mother said, her voice low. "But mom remembers, there were nights when it rained heavily, she often sat alone on the porch, not saying anything, just looking out at the rain. When she was nearly sixty years old, she started telling her mom that she wanted to make a scent just for her mother - the person she never had a chance to say goodbye to properly, no grave, no incense, just a void in her memory that for decades she tried to fill with work. She called that scent 'Hoai Huong' - not really I miss my hometown, but I remember my mother who merged with the land, the water, and the homeland itself."

Bao Nghi sat quietly in the middle of the dark shop, the table lamp casting long shadows on the tiled floor, still holding the piece of paper in her hand that recorded the fragments of a formula that was never completed. She understood, now more than ever, that "Hoai Huong" was not simply a beautiful scent to sell, but a daughter's belated farewell to her mother who had not yet had time to say goodbye - and that the small fire had taken away the rest of that formula, as if fate deliberately repeated that loss again, more cruelly, because this time even the last words were burned.

The ringing of the landline phone on the counter suddenly rang, interrupting her thoughts. It was almost nine o'clock in the evening, rarely anyone called at this hour unless it was urgent. Bao Nghi quickly put the paper in a drawer and stood up to pick up the phone. "Hello, perfume shop."

On the other end of the line was a middle-aged man's voice, slow and somewhat polite. "Hello, may I ask if this is the number of Ms. Bich Van, the owner of house number 14, Hang Diep street?"

"Yes, this is Ms. Bich Van's daughter. She can't answer the phone right now. Sorry, who's calling?"

"Ah, I am Duong Vinh Khang, the landlord who has been renting apartment number 14 for a long time. You probably know that the old contract between my family and Ms. Anh Nguyet in the past did not have a specific time limit, it was just a verbal agreement that lasted for many years. I called to inform you in advance. In the near future, I need to review some real estate documents, and may need to meet Ms. Bich Van or you in person to discuss a few things. There is nothing urgent, but I want to inform you. soon so that both sides can prepare."

His voice was polite, even a bit overly cautious, but it was that caution that made Bao Nghi feel more uneasy than a straightforward announcement. "Yes, just let me know the date and time, I will arrange to meet you," she replied, trying to keep her voice calm even though her heart began to beat faster.

"Okay, thank you. I'll have someone contact you specifically in a few days." He hung up, briefly, without leaving any other information.

Bao Nghi put down the stethoscope and stood still for a moment in the middle of the dark shop, clearly hearing her heart beating in her chest. "Review real estate documents" — that phrase sounded harmless, but the instincts of someone who had lived in this house all her life told her that there was something much bigger behind it. She remembered what Nha Truc told her that morning, about the construction site with tarpaulins at the beginning of the street, and about the "very Western-named" cosmetics chain that was about to open nearby. Two seemingly disparate pieces of information suddenly seemed to begin to come together in her head, forming a vague but disturbing shape.

She returned to the table, opened the drawer, took out the unfinished recipe paper, placed it next to the new paper - where she had just scribbled the name "Yongkang Tang" and his words. Two pieces of paper, two worries, now lying next to each other on the same wooden table that has been polished over three generations of users. A race against time to save mother's memories. Another race, perhaps even tougher, to preserve the only place that can preserve those memories. Bao Nghi turned off the table lamp, sat for a moment longer in the dim darkness coming in from the streetlights outside, took a deep breath, let the smell of old wood, the smell of stained paper, and the smell of smoke blend together into a single mass in her mind, then told herself, almost like a vow: no matter what, she would not let both of those things slip out of her hands.