David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“How about some of these, Mom?” said Leila, holding a couple of alternatives above the rowboat-size shopping cart. Two crew necks, brown and light blue.

Mariam did not disguise her disdain for her daughter’s suggestion. She made a waving motion with her hand at the idea. In the back of her throat, Leila could feel a fight coming on.

“You think if you came home with shirts other than those broken-man shirts, he would somehow not be all right with it, right?” said Leila, a little too loudly. “You’re going to imply that he’s the one who has trouble with change. But that’s you, Ma. Just let the man try a blue shirt.” Leila thought she saw the surprise in her mom’s face; she thought she saw her almost engage on the point. Things had been brittle between them in the three days since Leila had returned. Her family was like the American Midwest — storms brewed for days before cracking open. But the middle of a Costco aisle was not the place, in Mariam’s view.

“Leila. Show a little respect.” She cast her own eyes down quickly, as if to teach her daughter how submission was properly expressed.

“Mom,” said Leila, trying a deep breath, “I do show you respect. But I’m a grown-up. Let’s try a little co-respect, can we?”

Mariam rolled her eyes in a brief and minuscule fashion. “Leila,” she said, “I really don’t know what you want from me. Your father likes these shirts. I should ignore what I know to be true? You say I make him into a broken man. Why would a daughter say that? It is not respectful. Your father needs routine right now. Those shirts you would bring to him…” She stopped and silently contemplated the medical risk posed by the T-shirts that Leila had chosen.

“They would cause his death. I know, Mom. That’s why I want to get them for him,” said Leila, fuming.

Mariam poked her chin high to avoid crying, and then she started crying and wheeled the cart away from her daughter. It was a grand wheeling-away, swift and dramatic. Leila looked like the asshole who had made her mom cry. She had swung too wildly, using that word death. What is it with the brutal lights in these hangar stores? she thought. It’s like living under a different sun.

A fat man in a Lakers jersey and cap, munching a sample burrito, stopped to stare.

“Fuck off, clown,” Leila said to him.

Leila bought the two T-shirts and met her mother at the car. Silently, they co-loaded the groceries into the Camry.

Only when they were both sitting in the still car did Leila say, “Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you in there.”

Mariam was in the passenger seat; her eyes were smudgy with run makeup. But her voice was soft when she said, “Yes, you did, Leila. You are so good at it. But you should refrain from doing that, at least in public. There were people in there watching us.”

Leila pounced. “What do you mean?”

Her mother caught the pounce. “People. People who know your father, who are probably looking at us for some sign. What people did you think I meant?”

Leila ignored the question. “Mom, you’ve been totally oppositional since I got back. You’re finding every fault in me.”

Mariam came right back. “You are always mocking me. The others don’t make fun of me or of how I’ve spent my life. Then you get home and I am the big joke.”

There was some truth in that — Leila was the lead plaintiff in the family. “Yeah. Maybe a little. I’m sorry. But you know what, Mom? You can’t very well tell me I’m letting down the side by causing a scene in Costco when you’re out whoring around with Peggy Pilkerson every night.” Mariam pretended to be offended by the verb. “Oh, come on. You know what I mean. Gallivanting. Whatever.”

“For years now you have been saying I should loosen up and get my own life. Now I should stop having a little fun in the midst of a dark time. Which is it?”

“How about you can take up gambling and gin but only after Dad’s out of these woods?”

“So we’re negotiating now? How long are you home for this time?”

“That’s not what we’re talking about here.”

“Certainly not. We’re never allowed to talk about that.”

Deep breath. “Mom, it’s not that we’re not allowed to talk about it. It’s just that that’s not what we’re talking about right now .”

“Then what are we talking about right now?”

That could have been a rhetorical maneuver — put the agenda-making on the other guy’s shoulders — but here it seemed a sincere offer of armistice, like when you admit that you are adrift on the sea of your argument. Leila tried to see her mom in full. Not just as her mom but as all the things she was: a woman who had given up a career, an exile who had never stopped missing home.

“I guess we’re talking about why we’ve been so mad at each other since I got back. I think our sniping at each other is making it harder for everyone else, you know?” Leila started the car and eased out of the spot.

“Okay,” said Mariam. “I’ll tell you why I’m mad. You always treat your father more kindly than you treat me.” That was all she said, and she even said it without rancor.

Leila was pierced with contrition. Of course, now, with his being laid up in that bed, marooned in the den, Leila was being extra kind to him. But her mom was right: Leila had always been a little nicer to her dad. That’s just the thing she had with him: more distance, more kindness. “I’m sorry,” she said. They were waiting to take a right.

“Now, you go,” said her mom.

“What?”

“Why you’re mad.”

Fine. “Because I’m doing what you told me to do. You said I should be independent. You gave me all those lady-doctor coloring books and you said study study study. I am really good at my job,” Leila said. She didn’t want to go into the situation with Helping Hand, about how maybe she hadn’t been as good at that job. Point was that she was accomplished and well thought of in her field. “You never ever say anything about that. And now you just want me to make babies.” She joined a slow chute of traffic and was looking to get three lanes left in a block and a half.

“Leila, you will want children. Please don’t wait too late. The study study study was just so that you would have your pick of men. I wanted you to have the smartest and kindest and handsomest.”

Of course. Mariam was mad at the NGO sector for making her marriageable daughter into a global houseguest, willing to live in a second-tier megalopolis for eight months in aid of toilets or something, but unwilling to do the work that leads to a family. Now Leila had waited too long, turned down too many good men; she would end an unclaimed treasure, a clog-shod saddo, a terminated branch of the Majnoun tree.

But for Leila, her mom’s endorsement of marriage and children had come too late. Mariam had done a fine job raising her children, but she’d looked mildly aggrieved throughout. Little Dylan once asked her, “Mommy, are your shoes too tight?” It was not recorded as a funny family anecdote.

“Well, also so that you would be smart,” Mariam hastened to add. “So that no one would be able to fool you. But it was not so that you could be alone, giving all your youth to these…bureaucracies.”

How Leila wished to refute the charge. But lately it did feel as though her impressive career was adding up to nothing behind her. Allie, her best friend growing up, had two children and a successful bakery business, with a fleet of vans and a twenty-foot-wide oven. Leila had lots of good stories, and was prized at dinner parties. But the stories people wanted to hear were not the ones she wanted to tell. She still carried school debt and still had cardboard boxes in her parents’ tiny attic.