You could always find Linh by the smell of the fryer — she spent that summer working the funnel-cake stand on the Santa Cruz pier, and by August her hair held oil and sugar like a second perfume. I was the boy who fixed the ice machine two stalls down. I broke it three extra times so I'd have reasons to walk past.
She taught me the trick to the machine and the trick to her: both ran best when you didn't force them. We ate the misshapen cakes, the ones too ugly to sell, sitting on the seawall with our feet hung over the water. She'd point at the horizon and name the countries her family had almost moved to instead of here. France. Australia. A version of her life where we'd never have met, offered up so casually, like she didn't know she was breaking something.
That last week, the fog came in early every evening. She said in Vietnamese that the ocean was breathing out. I said I didn't want the summer to exhale. She pressed her thumb, still gritty with sugar, to the corner of my mouth, and I have spent four years unable to eat anything sweet without looking for her in it.
She moved in September — not France, just Oregon, but far enough. We wrote for a while. Then we didn't. Last month a package came with no note, just a small jar of coarse salt from a beach I didn't recognize, and one ugly, broken piece of funnel cake sealed in wax paper, gone hard as a shell.
I keep the salt on the windowsill. Some evenings, when the fog reaches this far inland, I taste the air and swear it's still breathing out.