Page 10 of Things You Save in a Fire

She called back the next day while I was folding laundry, but I let it go to voicemail.

She called again while I was out on a run. Then again while I was at the grocery store.

Honestly, at some point, it got a little stalkerish.

“What do you need?” I asked, when she finally had me.

She took a breath. “I need to ask a really, really big favor of you.”

I braced myself for the question. Whatever it was, the answer was no.

“It’s going to sound very abrupt,” she went on, “but that’s partly because it’s hard to get ahold of you and I’m afraid you’re going to hang up any second.”

She was right. I might hang up any second.

She took a breath. Then, in a burst: “I need you to come to Massachusetts and live with me.”

I blinked.

“Just for a while,” she added. “Not forever! A year at the most.”

“A year?”

“At the most.”

I was stunned by the question. Stunned that she had even asked it—or thought to ask it. We were not estranged, exactly, but we sure as hell weren’t close. It was such a ridiculous, never-gonna-happen thing to propose, I couldn’t believe she’d even said the words. “I’m not moving to Massachusetts, Diana. That’s bananas.”

I hadn’t called her “Mom” in years. Ten years, to be exact. Not since the day she’d walked out on me and my dad. The same day I’d started calling my father “Ted.”

At first, it was just to annoy them, to say that if they wanted to be treated like parents, they’d have to act like parents and stay miserably together. But the longer they stayed apart, the more it became a way of turning them into adults of no special significance that I just happened to know.

By this point, they were just Diana and Ted to me. I could barely imagine that they’d ever been anyone else.

“I’m serious,” Diana said.

“You can’t be.”

“Don’t give me your answer right away,” she said. “Take some—”

“No,” I said.

She hesitated.

“No,” I said again, with more emphasis, as if she’d tried to argue.

“You haven’t even heard the rest of the idea.”

“The rest of the idea doesn’t matter.”

“One year”—now she was bargaining, like she had any kind of a chance—“and then you go back to Texas like it never happened.”

“That’s not how it works. I’d have to stay there several years and earn a promotion before I could find a new position.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means if I did what you’re asking, I’d give up my whole life. Everything.”

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very appealing,” Diana said.

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