"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought that he should have run away before having his first wet dream at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later, to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of anything really.
This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly? How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember, as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.
At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth. "I'm here. I know it has been five years--you needing to help raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention during this time--grandkids or not, it doesn't matter... I'm not blaming you--but finally you relented and we're here together, and I am glad...glad to be here with you." It was there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as he believed that she would only despise him were he to release the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far north."