4.

I dragged myself to the dining nook in my studio apartment and leaned against the table.

It was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, and for the past couple of months, I had fallen into a routine with my friend Lexie. I headed to my internship in the suburbs, where I worked for the third summer in a row with a cable company’s communications department as part of a scholarship program. Lexie huddled at her desk in the school paper’s newsroom, where she was an editor. After work, we sat in a coffee shop and tapped out freelance assignments. From there, we hung in my apartment watching Hallmark movies or old rom-coms until the early morning hours, passing between us a jug of Carlo Rossi that we’d bought months earlier to make sangria and had since become acrid. Most nights, before the movie ended, I crawled to the air mattress that I’d slept on for the past year and fell asleep. Lexie dozed on my couch, rousing in the early morning to walk the half block to her place.

But that night, after Lexie left, I woke and was unable to fall back asleep. Still woozy and flushed from wine, I thumbed numbers into my phone. As if a compulsion, I dialed my mother’s old work line. 860-636-XXXX.

I still remembered this number from all of my childhood afternoons. If I was home from school, bored and missing her, I’d call her at work under the guise of wanting to know what time she’d leave the office or what was for dinner. Never mind that she came home at six p.m. most nights and that dinner was whatever we had in the refrigerator, stir-fried a little, with rice, or a potato she diced and steamed in the microwave and covered with shredded cheese, salt, black pepper, and paprika.

Each time I called, she answered: DBA Florence.

DBA was her title; she was a database administrator. I loved hearing her say her own name—the delicateness of the syllables and how elegant it seemed coming from her mouth. Floor-rinse. Floor-rinse. FLOOOOOOR-rinse.

Maybe when she lived in Hong Kong and attended one of those British schools, her instructors called her that. Or, when immigrating to the states, she thought it’d be easier to take on an English name. My theory is that she chose Florence because she’d admired Florence Nightingale. There might have been something about Nightingale being a famous nurse—a caretaker—who was also known for her contributions to mathematics and medicine, that appealed to my mother. Groundbreaking and could not be swayed by what women did or didn’t do in that era. Nobody in my family called my mother Florence, though. She was Mui Mui to her siblings; Mommy to Steph, Caroline, and me; and Ah Mo to our father. It took me until adulthood to ask after her first name in Cantonese, or to learn the Chinese characters: 余 寶梅. I already had the vocabulary to describe her, so why did I need more? Why would I bother looking outside myself for the words that she might have identified most as her own?

  

I had Daddy teach me, years after your death, to pronounce your name.

  

Bo Mui, your husband said.

Bow Moy, I said. We repeated this for a couple of minutes, and the whole time I was sure I was saying it wrong. After all, I couldn’t get my own name right.

Ngo giu Gah Lee, I’d say at family parties when I was a kid, prompted by Kau Fu because he was tickled by my pronunciation.

You’re called ‘curry’? Kau Fu teased, laughing into my face and pinching my elbow while I spat out my name over and over, flustered, trying to will a sense of self into place. After my mother died, I tried to convince my father to speak to me only in Cantonese. But he often had to supply both sides of our dialogues, the expansiveness of these conversations unnatural and overwhelming. Soon, my vocabulary exhausted itself, his patience also depleted, and we slipped back into the hard sounds of English.

  

In my apartment in Seattle, I listened to the thrum of the phone’s rings. It forwarded me to an answering machine of some employee, perhaps the one who had replaced my mother years ago. I hung up. I wondered if this person had heard of my mother, or if anyone on her team still thought about her. I was afraid of what thinking too much of her might bring. I guzzled another glass of wine before falling back into bed, the air mattress buckling under me and compressing my sides in a makeshift swaddle.

  

I pictured calling you again. You’d pick up this time.

DBA Chow Bo Mui, you’d say, forgoing your last name for our family’s.

Hi, Mommy, I’d say, relieved and ecstatic that you had been here all this time. Had you aged in the afterlife? Would your hair still, in this imagined world, be wavy? Had it grayed, like Daddy’s?

Wei, you’d say. Lei sik jor fan mei ah?

The rest of our conversation played out in Cantonese. In this alternate universe, I was fluent and we discussed everything I’d eaten that day: popcorn chicken at the bubble tea spot I always studied at with my friend Colin; half a sandwich; three cups of coffee. I’d ask the same to you, and over the phone, you’d demur.

Oh, just this and that, you’d say.

I wasn’t sure if this meant that dead ghost-you didn’t eat, had no need for calories, or if nobody had recently left out offerings.

Here, I could not conjure more of the conversation. Too much guilt. Too much worry. I pushed these thoughts aside and fell asleep.