Chapter 15 Miz
15
MIZ
When I drop in on Mom after work on Tuesday, she is on a call in her bedroom, so I go to the kitchen to scrounge retirement party leftovers from the freezer. I’m running hot water over a container when I overhear something that makes me freeze.
Our daughter .
Forehead wrinkling, ears twitching, I shut off the faucet. Only two people in my life have any business using our daughter in a conversation, and that’s my mother and father.
Which means…my parents are on the phone? With each other?
I race to Mom’s bedroom and stand at the foot of her bed, staring at her curled up like a teenager talking to her boo. My parents. On the phone. With each other. My parents who, as far as I know (and I know ), had not spoken a word to each other from when I was two until I was fourteen. Even then, as I learned later, Mom had waited until I was already in the air to give Dad a heads-up that his daughter was on the way for an extended corrective stay. That was the first conversation my parents had had in twelve years. And after that, they communicated only through me to arrange my subsequent visits.
So how come they are parleying on the phone right now, as if—
Mom holds the phone out to me. “Talk to your father,” she says nonchalantly.
Those words yank me back twenty-two years to the weeks of screaming matches between Mom and me. Mom demanding that I stop seeing “that boy.” Me reverse-demanding a logical reason why. Mom finally yelling at me that I’d left her no choice but to send me to my father.
Fast-forward to now. I feel caught out again. Have they found out about Kal? But nothing’s happened; we just got a marriage licence and an appointment for the ceremony this morning. I swallow hard. Of course they don’t know anything. I reluctantly take the phone from Mom.
My chit-chat with Dad is the usual, an almost scripted routine that can sometimes be maddening. But considering my mind is working double time, squealing that my parents were just talking to each other, I couldn’t be more relieved to cover how I’m doing, how he’s doing, the weather, and how I’m overdue for a visit.
“Oh!” I say, remembering something new. “I am thinking of coming around Christmas, I mean, Gena ,” I say, switching to the Amharic word before he reminds me to. “With—” I almost say with Kal but catch myself just in time because Mom is right there. Kal and I have agreed to coordinate our travel so that I’ll go back home with him for the party. It will look good for our case. “Will that be okay?”
“Yes, of course!” Dad’s excitement is contagious. “Miz, I’m so happy you’re coming!”
“Me too, Dad,” I say. “Listen, I’ll let you know when everything is booked.” I eye my mom on the bed. I’m itching to give the phone back to her—I feel newly invested in their relationship, and I so badly want to keep them talking.
Then Mom scoots off the bed. Oh no. I know another chance like this may never come. I put the phone on speaker. “You’re on speaker now. Maybe Mom will come with me this time. She’s the most overdue of anyone. Right, Mom?” I beam at her, ignoring the look she’s giving me. “It’s about time! It’s a good time, right, Dad? Everyone is saying how the situation there has been great lately, and she really should visit now when everyone else is going back home!”
Without saying anything, Mom heads to the kitchen, and I quickly follow her. When she sees that I’ve already started running water over the frozen leftovers, she turns the tap on and continues. “Dad, did she tell you she’s taken early retirement? Does that exist in Ethiopia?”
“That is why I called,” Dad says. “To congratulate her on a long-deserved rest. Though in my personal opinion, Genet,” he says, “you are too vibrant with youth to enter the seniors’ category!”
Uh, is he…flirting? “Here, Mom, take the phone,” I almost shout.
But Mom, calmly breaking apart the semi-thawed food in the container with a fork, answers before I can pass the phone back to her. “Better you help me search for where my youth is gone.”
“ Lijinetachininma abren new yatefanew ,” Dad says.
Speak English, people! Literally. I hold the phone out to her. “Do you want the phone, Mom?”
“Thank you for calling, Gashaw,” she says, putting the container in the microwave instead.
I guess that’s a no then.
“Wishing you all the best for your next chapter,” Dad says politely.
Boring. I take the phone off speaker and wander off to say bye to Dad, but he goes into a time-slowing exposition on the subject of the labour laws of Ethiopia. Maybe it’s to make up for lost time or because of the certain distance between us that will never close, but anytime I show the tiniest interest in something, Dad does an instant deep dive, and tonight I’ve walked right into this one. But if I’m being honest, this is something about Dad I’ve learned to just let be, even grown to love about him.
When I was fourteen, I landed in Addis full of attitude and battle-scarred from weeks of emotional combat with Mom, ready to beat Dad to the punch by showing up mad at him. Thirteen hours in flight was plenty of time to dig up questions about his absence and his and Mom’s estrangement, many of them questions I’d given up asking Mom by the time I was six. But all that pent-up ammo fell away the moment we met. I loved him instantly. Maybe because he wasn’t mad about the boyfriend situation. He barely acknowledged it, almost as though I really was there just for a reunion. He only said that knowing someone for two semesters, which had been my core argument, did not mean much. That was it. Boy topic closed ever since. My parents’ origin story though—he wouldn’t shut up about it (not that I wanted him to). He even took me on a tour of the spots where he and Mom used to have their secret rendezvous, long before he sent elders to her family for her hand. Between the two of them, I pieced together my guiding principles on relationships: keep your dating life to yourself, and never get married because that’s when things go off the rails.
After we say goodbye, I return to the kitchen and cut open the fresh packet of injera I’ve brought, trying to wrangle my daydreaming thoughts. One phone call between my parents and a whole movie of them getting back together has flared up like a dormant virus. But can you blame me? These are my parents, hello. They’re the poster couple for being married only on paper and for keeping their actual relationship comatose for decades. And apparently, they’re both perfectly content to let that be.
But still, it would be nice to go home with Mom, for once, especially for Gena. “So, Mom, what do you say? You and me to the motherland?” I put the injera on a plate and look at her expectantly.
Mom doesn’t take her eyes off the microwave timer. “We’ll see,” she says wearily, as if I’ve asked her a thousand times.