That’s when we asked her to tell us a story.
Jean and I both knew Mom was getting impatient with us about starting families of our own. She was particularly frustrated with Jean, who had just ended her engagement to a physicist at Cornell. Mom hadn’t heard of Cornell before meeting Patrick, but after the breakup, she couldn’t help bringing up the school every time she heard something intelligent. As for me, I had time. An Armenian man — even a halfie like me — could claim his mother as his girl for as long as he wanted.
“Tell us a story,” my sister and I said, afraid silence would lead into another eulogy of Patrick.
“First, put on socks,” said my mom, turning from the countertop with two miniature cups of coffee. “On this cold floor? Go put on socks.”
When we got back to the kitchen, my mom had our coffee cups on the table. She said she didn’t have any stories to tell. “Ask Daley,” she said, gesturing to me. “He’s the writer.”
“I’m a blogger,” I said. Then, to improve my self-esteem: “And a freelance journalist.”
Jean said, “Emphasis on ‘free.’”
“Story,” my mom muttered to herself, fetching her own cup of coffee. “Story.” Then she took a seat at the table and started talking.
* * *
When my mom was a girl in Armenia, she’d eat apples until she grew sick. She and her older brother Gaspar practically lived in the apple tree outside their farmhouse in Kirovakan. The other brothers and sisters would leave them up there all day, until Raffy, the eldest, went out after sunset to talk them down. My mom blamed all her current dental trouble on those early days eating apple after apple after apple in the twilight.
She moved to New York at twenty-three, the first of her immediate family to emigrate. Nights she took English courses in Brooklyn. She feared the people in the subway, clutching the railings like weapons, until one day she didn’t. Nothing happened to signify the change — only time. Time replaced her fear with an immense loneliness. She missed her family and her country. In the Big Apple she missed her apple tree, and on the subway she cried and cried.
Eventually the rest of her family came to America, and she moved with them to Glendale, California. She worked in retail at the local mall. The mall security guard, a Midwestern transplant hoping to break into the movies, asked her to meet him for coffee. Jean and I knew this part of the story well. Our dad — the security guard with a head shot folded up in his back pocket.
While my mom and dad started dating, there was another man involved. An Armenian, a friend of Uncle Gaspar’s, named Armen. This was the first time Jean and I had heard about this other man. My mom said Armen definitely sold and probably used inordinate amounts of drugs. “Which drugs?” we asked. “Just drugs,” she said. “The bad kind.”
In any case, Armen — even though he’d never spoken to her, had seen her on only a handful of occasions — kept telling my uncle Gaspar how badly he wanted to marry my mom, how it was destined, how he’d do anything, anything, anything for her. My uncle, being of a certain generation of Armenian men, obliged. He told my mom to stop dating the white security guard so he could introduce her to his friend. It’s destined, he said, and it’s better that he’s one of us.
A few years earlier, my mom would have buckled. But remember: she’d lived in New York for two years by herself. She was not the same person she’d been before she left home. She wasn’t the girl her brother remembered, lounging in the limbs of an apple tree.
No, she said. I love Ed — my dad’s name — and I don’t want to meet anyone else.
My uncle must have hated her for making him return to his friend, tail between his legs, with a no. What kind of man lets his younger sister tell him what’s what? But they were in America now. The rules were different. What could he do?
On that topic, Armen — dealer of unspecified drugs — had an idea. Late one night, he drove to the apartment my mom shared with her parents. He brought a shotgun. Probably it rode in the empty passenger seat like a child. He was so high, it was a wonder he’d driven the whole way, but when he arrived, he removed the gun from the car and walked along the gravel parking lot to my mom’s first-floor apartment window.
My sister and I had a hard time swallowing the next part of the story. According to my mom, two angels appeared in her dream and told her to leave her bedroom — which faced the parking lot — and head into her parents’ bedroom, where she’d be safe. So she did. Less than a minute later, the blasts from the shotgun shattered her bedroom window, glass and buckshot splattering the walls like water from a shook, wet hand.
The next day, my uncle made an anonymous phone call to the LAPD, and his friend Armen was arrested for possession with intent to sell. He was deported to the Soviet Union, and even after that log of a country broke into its splintered parts, my mom never heard from him again.
* * *
We drank the last of our coffee. My mom kept saying, “Are you sure I haven’t told you this before? I’m sure I’ve told you this before.”
“We’re sure,” Jean said, and I agreed. “We’d remember the time you were visited by angels and almost murdered.”
“Oh, well,” my mom said. “That’s it, really. Not a story. Not really. More like an anecdote. Nothing changed because of it. I would have married your dad even if this crazy man never existed.”
We all fell quiet. We had nothing to say about her story. I was amazed at learning something new about her, amazed at the fact of a person’s unknowability, but this was a feeling more than a statement to proclaim. Eventually the silence was broken when Jean asked Mom to read our fortunes in our coffee grounds.
As millions of Armenian women had done before her, my mom set each cup upside down over its saucer with care and with grace. Then she crossed herself. For Mom, the possible contradictions between a soothsaying tradition and a devout faith in the Bible were nonexistent. I’d heard her say many times that Armenians were the first Christians. “For us,” she would explain, “there is no difference between religion and culture.” I’d argued with her on that point in the past, but now was different. Now I just stared at the gold-rimmed bottom of my overturned cup, half-seriously willing my future to read a certain way. I felt nervous, to be honest, and restless. I was sweating.
“Patience is the biggest thing,” she said, noticing. She reminded us not to peek until the sludge had dried on the inside of the cup. A few minutes passed, and we were all so curious as to our futures that no one dared start a conversation. At one point, Jean giggled, and I laughed at her for enjoying this so childishly. My mom said there was nothing wrong with enjoying this like a child, because no matter how old you were, you were always a child when people talked about your future.
Jean said, “Please don’t say anything about Patrick. Promise?”
“I can’t promise anything,” my mom said. “His face might appear in the coffee, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”
She turned over my sister’s cup first. Jean and I were rationalists. We knew how silly we were being, how superstitious. Still, we also knew this might be the last time, so we studied our mother’s face as she inspected the patterns against the porcelain walls of the cup. As she read the lines and waves and peaks and dips of the coffee grounds, we read the crannies along her forehead and the cracks in her painted lips, the bluing, beautiful pouches beneath her eyes, flanking the bridge of her long, arched nose.
“Interesting,” my mom said, and Jean couldn’t help scooting forward on her seat. “Very interesting.”
“What does it say?”
“Do you see these?” My mom tipped the cup toward Jean to point out a number of circular blots near the lip. “These are very rare.”