1

LAST NIGHT WHEN I tried again to speak to you, and all I could hear was the silence at the end of your line, your mother took the phone from you and told me that perhaps I needed to give you some more time.

“Because time,” I said, “is exactly what I’ve plenty of.”

She wasn’t irked at my sarcasm. “I know it must be frustrating,” she said. “But considering the circumstances, maybe you should be thankful he doesn’t just hang up, that he’s still listening. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I don’t know that I wanted anything from him,” I said. “I just want to tell him a good story. Something he could maybe use in his career, or that might make his editors proud. Who knows, he could even make a name for himself.”

I heard her laugh. She said, “That’s not a few wants.”

Your mother is a finer person than I am, in almost all respects. Even her English is much better, and I can detect the slightest tinge of the American in her voice, from having lived there with you for so long. She denies it, of course. She’ll do everything in her power not to become one of those people who leaves the homeland only to come back years later a foreigner. I can only picture what she looks like now. I’ve seen movies, you know, seen those wide green lawns of yours with sprinklers that pop up like mushrooms. I imagine your mother carrying copious bags of groceries from the car. She’s become bigger. Her hair is as white now as the milk that flows so freely in your land. And even if she tries to dye her hair and to jog around the streets every so often, she can’t help herself. You become the landscape you live in, they say.

“Why don’t you write to him instead?” she said. “I’ve always thought of you more as a writer than a speaker.”

I told her it would be the same thing, if not worse, since I don’t expect you’d write back.