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By Root 613 0

for Papa to find another job, every Sunday afternoon my uncle, Bob and I would walk to a calling center near the fabric shop where my uncle worked, and the three of us would squeeze into a narrow telephone booth with cardboard-thin walls and try to talk with my parents. The conversations were always the same. My uncle would scribble a few notes on the small notepad he kept in his shirt pocket: instant letters that in a few sentences updated our parents on the state of our health, our schoolwork, our grades, the latest on our immigration application. I would carefully repeat my uncle’s scrawled phrases, watching his lips for modifications as I went on. It was hot and cramped with the three of us in there and every once in a while my uncle would have to change places with us on the narrow bench as we passed the phone around. My parents would interrupt me now and then to make a comment or ask a question and I’d have to stop and wait for my uncle to respond before speaking again. The remaining time was for our parents to speak directly to us.

“Now tell me how you are,” my mother would ask me.

“Byen,” I’d answer. Fine.

On another extension, my father asked, “You’re being a good girl, aren’t you?”

“Wi papa,” I’d answer, feeling that I had already spoken to them enough, using my uncle’s words.

“I’ve found a job,” my father announced one Sunday afternoon.

“Bravo!” my uncle wrote.

“Bravo,” I repeated.

I could almost imagine the look on my father’s face, a broad smile that showed how proud he too was of himself.

A few weeks later, a letter arrived at the house in Bel Air announcing that we had an appointment at the American consulate in a few days.

At the center of so many families’ lives, the focus of so many thoughts and prayers, le consul, in the flesh, was just a very tanned, nearly bronzed white man with what seemed like bottle green eyes. Was he the consul himself or just one of the many employees that formed the pastiche of that identity? I didn’t know then and don’t know now. However, the man we appeared before that day was wearing a thin white shirt with no undershirt. His fingernails were brownish red, with what looked like terra-cotta underneath.

As I sat with my brother and uncle, separated from the green-eyed man by a polished wooden desk, he looked through our papers, a thick file accumulated over the last five years, the blood tests to prove my father’s paternity, the TB diagnosis and treatments, even the X-rays of our lungs, both before and after treatment, and later I would learn, character references from my parents’ friends, employers and pastor, my parents’ pay stubs, bank statements, tax returns, a summary version of who they had to be in order to be allowed to live in the same country as all their children.

“Ta maman, ton papa te manquent?” Do you miss your mother and father? The man leaned across the desk to ask me, then my brother.

Hanging on the wall behind him was a large American flag, the stars literally bursting from the corner square, their spiky edges merging into the wall. Sensing that it was the right thing to do, we both nodded, as if bowing to the flag that our grandfather had once fought against, that our mother and father had now embraced for nearly ten years, that we were about to make our own. As my head bobbed up and down, I felt my old life quickly slipping away. I was surrendering myself, not just to a country and a flag, but to a family I’d never really been part of.

“I’m going to make you very happy.” The man picked up a stamp and dangled it in the air in front of us before lowering it on the top sheet in each of our files.

“You’re both approved,” he said in what must have been official singsong. “You’re now free to be with your parents. For better or for worse.”

Pour le meilleur et pour le pire, he’d said. Why? I wondered if he knew something we didn’t. Besides, what could be worse than waiting most of our lives to spend five minutes with a person who would say something like that?

That evening, we returned to the call center to share the news with my parents.

My