Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,17

Gulf and never returned, their fates in the hands of cruel Arab employers, their portraits gathering dust on the wall, not even a headstone to hold their places in heaven.

While my father was trapped in the Gulf, my mother wrote on his behalf to consulates, embassies, connections of all kinds until, one day, she received a letter from him that she wouldn’t read aloud, not even to her sisters. They stayed up late with her in well-guarded talk, all of them in their mother’s enormous barge of a bed, which was actually two beds pushed together and draped with a quilt to hide the crack where I sometimes got wedged in the middle of the night. That night, I didn’t belong in the bed or anywhere near it. I could glean only this much: my father was not coming back. No one mentioned him for months. My mother grew hard in some buried way, gained weight. I never saw her eating, but sometimes she would come home with a sweet, sticky hunk of aluva wrapped in waxed paper, and not three days later, I would find the waxed paper in the trash.

By year’s end, my mother had received a visa to the States, to work as a nurse at a veterans hospital in Baltimore. We moved into a small apartment with rough orange carpeting that had likely seen legions of feet. I had my own room but slept in my mother’s bed.

During the days, she left me with the elderly lady down the hall, who insisted that I call her by her first name. We settled on Harriet Auntie. She stunned me with her generosity—a gold tin of chocolates, an Easter basket, a baby doll that drank water through one hole and made water through another. When I showed my mother the doll, she said that if I liked cleaning up pee so much, I could have her job.

Early in the following year, we received a phone call from my father. “He’s coming,” my mother said, carefully placing the phone in its cradle. I waited for her to weep or laugh or smile, but she kept her hand on the phone, staring at it as if it might spring to life. I knew better than to ask her for specifics, but I imagined a heroic and mysterious escape that included hot words of confrontation, a raised fist, a blackened eye, and a passport produced from the dark tunnel of The Sheikh’s sleeve.

•

The man we collected from the airport, the man sitting in the living room, is not the heroic type. He is thinner than in the photos, with coffee-glazed teeth and shoulders that slope like a worn wire hanger. His shirts are lined with a burnt odor that my mother can’t get out, no matter how many times she pulls the trigger of her OxiClean.

Aside from the first time he saw me and kissed the top of my head, he hasn’t once moved to hug me, as other fathers do. He almost seems afraid of touching my mother, who has stopped with the heels and the blush. Once, we all ate dinner while watching a white family eat dinner on television. Those white people had so much to talk about that the food never even arrived at their mouths. The mother said things like How was your day? and Want seconds? My father took seconds from a bottle of Jameson.

But this evening, I have caught him alone in the living room, his slippered feet on the coffee table. His eyes are closed, furrows across his forehead, a glass of whiskey in his fist.

I go closer. His fingernails appear recently trimmed, maybe bitten away in that far-off country where he welded metals by day and worried by night. I can just make out the faint freckles across his nose, like a handful of birdseed, the same freckles that appear across my nose every summer.

His eyelashes all of a sudden flutter open. His lips part, releasing a gust of whiskey.

“You’re breathing on me,” he rasps.

I stop breathing altogether.

His lips widen into a smile I’ve never seen from him. “I’m just playing, molay. Were you afraid?”

“No.”

“You’re too uptight.” He extends his glass to me. “Here, have a little sip.”

I take the glass with one hand and drink from the opposite side of where his lips have left a mark. The sip goes flaming down my throat, and my belly shudders and shrinks, offended by what I’ve poured into it.

He chuckles. “You want more?”

I