I hoped Priya would return from taking Skye home before her friend arrived. I didn’t want to have to spend time alone with him. I stood in our bedroom at the foot of the bed looking around the room. Had she, while she was in here, heard my conversation with Skye?

Clothing, hers and mine, was jumbled on an armchair in the bay window. Her pajamas lay across the bed, and on her bedside table were her e-book and a pile of regular books, the same ones that have been there, unread, for the last year or so. On my side of the bed, I sat on the rumpled sheets and contemplated how the day would unfold. I picked up Priya’s pillow and set it on my lap. From it rose a scent I’d fallen in love with years ago. I brought the pillow to my face and breathed in the familiar alluring aroma. I hugged the pillow tight.

Things that had once intrigued me about my lover of the last six years now confound me. I used to be able to take it in stride that I couldn’t guess Priya’s next move. It frustrates me now.

I saw early on what she was like; there shouldn’t have been any surprises. Take, for instance, the time just after we met and began seeing each other. Before she moved in with me, we shuffled from her apartment to my house, spending hardly a night apart. But after any period of wonderful intensity, she would always pull far away. If we were at my house, she’d suddenly get up and run, as if she’d just remembered a pot on the fire at her apartment. When eventually we spoke on the phone, she’d say she just needed a little space, that she felt claustrophobic and thought we shouldn’t see one another for a few days. It used to distress me; I believed we were on the verge of breaking up. Then, later that same day, she’d call, sheepish. She missed me; she couldn’t bear to be away a second longer, so let’s forget that nonsense about space and meet up right away. And a night of fierce lovemaking would ensue, fueled for me by the torture of uncertainty and then relief. Such a push and pull, but I went along, knowing, or rather hoping, that on her own she’d eventually come around. I used to wish I could pin her down, hold and calm her. I thought at the time that that was my job. My task. Waiting, the act itself, was my way of saying to her, I’m here. You’re safe with me. I won’t run. It is why I said yes when she proposed marriage. I thought that would reassure her that I was here to stay. To this day she insists—in jest, I think—that she did not actually propose, but rather simply suggested we get married. She sees some meaningful distinction in this. I don’t. To me it was her way of proposing. Her usual obtuse way. I expected that with time she’d have become more open with me. I look back and see that not much changed—even when she professed love, I intuited a certain distance.

Time came and went, and if anything changed it was my heart. It toughened. An enormous amount of energy is required for a heart to toughen, and in the end it’s draining.

* * *

I quickly pulled the bed together and went into the main part of the house, fluffing the pillows in the living room, tidying a bit. In the kitchen I washed the cups we’d used when Skye was here and began to gather the ingredients for the pasta and sauce I said I’d make for dinner. As I did so, I contemplated how Priya was capable of being as kind and magnanimous as possible, and then, without cause it sometimes seemed, cool and hurtful. She wasn’t mean, but her self-protectiveness made her almost cruel.

That said, the attention she is capable of paying seems like a contradiction. I will never forget my first birthday with her: I awoke to a streamer strung across the door to the kitchen of my old house in Toronto, and little silly presents hidden in places she knew I’d look throughout the day. Then, at dinner at that restaurant she’d made reservations at, she presented me with a particular out-of-print book I’d wanted and couldn’t find locally but which she’d managed to track down through a British secondhand bookseller. I’d had no idea she was doing any of this. And it’s been the same, more or less, every year, no matter what is happening between us at the time. I can contort myself wondering if such magnanimous gestures were really about her love for me, her desire to make the day a truly special one for me, or if they were a project that allowed her to see for herself what a good partner she could be. But what’s the point of trying to figure any of this out now?

I hadn’t realized it before, but difference as an attraction only lasts while it’s new. A life with someone is different than a courtship.

* * *

After Priya announced this man would spend a night in our house, I naturally asked about him, about the nature of their friendship. Not because I was jealous—I was not. At least, not at first. I simply wanted to know who this visitor was, this person she said she was once close with. It was a way of finding out more about the person I was living with. But her defensiveness and skittishness made me wary. I began to wonder what she was hiding. Unable to extract answers from her, I took the opportunity several days ago, the instant she left the house for a haircut in town, to take a peek in her studio for a photo album she’d long ago shown me. The studio was pristine, everything in its place. I usually enjoyed going in, but only did so when she was there. I did not want to turn on the long fluorescent tube lights in case she returned to get something she might have forgotten, so I moved through her space keeping my ears peeled to the driveway. Large canvases dwarfed the room. There was enough light from the large windows on one side so I could clearly see images of shimmering lake water, reflections in them of holiday cottages, white pines and birds, canoeists and water-skiers—all northern landscapes and activities but painted in her vibrant, carnival-like tropical palette. She is a good painter. A room comes alive, dances with her palette. I can admire that honestly, despite how we’ve drifted apart.

There were a few labeled boxes on shelves—Ends, Reviews, Sequins/Ribbon/Fabric Paint—and an unlabeled one under the table in the studio. It had been pushed so far to the back that I was naturally drawn to it. But I’d have had to untape it, an act that might eventually have been discovered. I began my search, then, in the office area, a room at the back of the studio. My hands shook as I rifled among books on a shelf. I was disappointed not to find the album I had come for. I quickly scanned through her filing cabinet and a cupboard in which she kept printer paper and office supplies. Then I noticed a large suitcase-like cardboard box atop the cupboard. I pulled up a chair and took down the dusty box, behind which was a row of shoeboxes. I brought those down too. None were taped, and in them were albums and what must have been hundreds of loose photos of people and places I did not recognize. If you’re going to snoop, I thought, you better be prepared to come across something you’d rather not have found. Something which you will not be able to pretend to not have found. My heart thundered. My limbs were ticklish with guilt. I calculated that she was likely at that time just having her hair washed before the cut.

I didn’t think Priya was a liar exactly, but rather that she was secretive, and I wanted, this late in our relationship, to know what those secrets were. What I saw were old discolored photos of her parents—at least, I thought that was who they were, for the young woman resembled Priya—and photos of their marriage, then ones of each of them with groups of people who might have been relatives or close friends. They appeared to be fun-loving people. Groups of them in front of landmarks I didn’t recognize, at house parties, in gardens. So many group photos. And several of an older couple. In one of them that couple is standing on the front step of a house, waving to a young woman as she is about to get into a car. Was the couple her grandparents, the woman her mother? It seemed terribly unfair that I was seeing these without Priya there to tell me who was who, and how she was related. Why wouldn’t she have shared her family photos with me? I wondered. Did she not trust me? Or did she simply not think I might be interested? There was lots of smiling for the camera; you could almost hear the laughter of the people sitting around food and drink, and in the frothy, frilly water’s edges of what I imagined were Caribbean beaches. Jealousy that she’d so guarded these photos made me want to scatter them all across the floor of her office and later confront her. But, of course, considering how I learned of them, I wouldn’t have done that. There were a handful of her as a baby—her name scribbled in a flowery hand on the back—her as a toddler, and then in her various school uniforms. I wanted to stay with each and examine them all, but there wasn’t time. Sharing the contents of those boxes could have been a kind of gift given to me by her, a glimpse into parts of her life or her mind. My sense that she kept things from me was validated. This was the real problem—not that she had an old friend coming to visit, but that she kept things from me.

I shuffled the photos as I continued to search, and then in one of the boxes was the album she’d shown me once, years before. I looked through it quickly, stopping at one photo I recalled of a table-tennis team she’d belonged to. There was her first love, a woman named Fiona, and there, in that same photo, was Prakash. There were no more of him or Fiona. But in an envelope at the back of the album I found a stack of loose pictures, all of which were of Prakash, some of Priya with him. I could not help but note that this stack did not include any other people, and it was this—this isolated but specific grouping—that weighed on my mind. What did it mean that she’d gathered these together? There’s madness in such scrutiny and questioning. I knew this, but I couldn’t help myself.

He was an unremarkable presence. He was thin, and there was in almost all the photos what I remembered Priya calling years ago “the trademark V sign” made with his fingers. The photos were likely taken by her; I recognized her signature in the manner of framing the subject. If I am correct that it was she who took these photos, they must have traveled together to various places across the province and perhaps even across Canada—I recognized landmarks in Toronto: the zoo, the islands, Kensington Market, as well as the landscape of Tobermory—and there were photos of him posing on large rocks at the seashore, and from the vegetation and color of the rocks I guessed the location was the east coast. There were two photos, both taken on the same occasion, of the two of them standing side by side. A body of water was behind them, an ocean or perhaps it was a lake, with no sign of land save for the bare rock on which they stood, both of them thin and young, and though their feet were planted wide apart to steady them, they looked as if they would topple forward. They seemed happy, laughing or with large smiles spread on their faces, but there appeared to be no obvious closeness between them, and it might even be said the distance between them had been intentional. I wouldn’t know whose intention that was, but given that he was supposed to have been enamored of her, I would say it was likely she who initiated the apartness. There was an odd resemblance between them—not their Indian appearance, but perhaps the shyness, the hesitation in their stance, both seeming unsure of themselves, each other, the world in which they were caught.

I found nothing that day to suggest she and Prakash had been involved in an intimate relationship. An envelope of photos of no one else but him and her proved nothing. But since then I’ve wanted to tell her that I found evidence of something graver—of how closed off she was with me. But I would have had to admit I’d searched through her office. Secrecy and snooping seemed like different sides of a single coin.

* * *

Priya had not yet returned when, from the kitchen, I heard an unfamiliar car pull into the driveway. I went to the front of the house and pulled down a slat of the blinds to have a look. He’d arrived in a gray convertible BMW with a blue soft top.

I suppose I had expected a simply ordinary person to arrive at our door, perhaps fattened by age and of no remarkable uniqueness. So I was quite surprised to find a medium-build man, fairer in color than I’d imagined. He was a year younger than Priya, but he looked older than her. He had the kind of almost-handsome face that is cast in Bollywood films as the good-natured supporting character. Too soft, too fleshy for the hero, but sensible enough looking to be confided in.

It wasn’t as awkward as I’d expected. I explained that Priya had had to run an errand and would be back in no time. He was unfazed by her absence and immediately talkative: “I’ve been down this way before, you know. Just for the day. Just once. The dunes, we spent the day there, me and some guys from work.” In the foyer, as he slowly removed his shoes, he said, “I’ll never forget, at sundown just before we left the beach, we heard what we thought was a pack of dogs yipping as if they’d just been let loose from a cage, but they weren’t dogs.”

“Coyotes,” I said.

He nodded. “Yep. Three of them, but they sounded like they were half a dozen or so. At the edge of the water, tugging at the carcass of a large animal. I remember the vultures silently circling overhead.” He’d taken pictures using a telephoto lens, he said, but couldn’t bear to look at the photos once they were developed.

It took him an eternity to stuff a plaid scarf into the sleeve of his gray-green coat before he handed it to me. He had an immediate kindness about him and a credible effervescence, and I had the impression he must have grown up pampered by his mother, sisters, aunts, and female cousins. His hair was gray and cut close to his head. From the coat emanated the hot scent of leather and lime.

I said something inane, along the lines of there’s neither kindness nor malice in nature, and he chuckled as if what I’d said was terribly funny or astute. I was not immune to the flattery in such a response, but as intrigued as I’d instantly become by his appearance and manner, and this talkativeness I hadn’t expected, I still didn’t want to have to entertain him on my own for any length of time.

I took him up to the guest room, where he plunked down his overnight bag, and suggested he could rest or freshen up if he wanted, but he followed me back down the stairs. Intending to excuse myself and return to the kitchen, where before he arrived I’d been chopping onions, garlic, and herbs for a marinara sauce for their dinner, I thought I’d set him up in the living room with a magazine or two to browse while we awaited Priya’s return. But he herded me through the living room, and we both ended up in the kitchen. I put on the kettle for a pot of tea for him and tried not to look at the clock. He wasn’t short of chatter—I asked questions, he asked me nothing, and he answered at length. We could just as well have been strangers seated next to one another for hours on a flight, our bodies pinched into our seats to minimize the impossibility of not encroaching on the other’s space, our immediate fates bound inextricably, and yet, like horses wearing blinders, our eyes locked straight ahead, not a neigh between us until just before landing, when one of us thought it too weird not to know a thing about who it was she’d sat next to so almost-intimately for endless unstable hours, and, with only minutes left before the end of the journey, decided it was imperative—and finally safe—to utter a word or two to the other: Are you going home or on holiday? Oh, business. What kind of work do you do? Your first visit here/there? But in this case, it was me asking the questions. How was the drive? From where was he coming? How long was it?

The drive was fine. He enjoyed cross-country driving. He’d once driven to Vancouver and once to San Diego to a friend’s wedding, so the drive here was nothing at all. He has lived in the same house for almost twenty-five years. His was the first built in what had previously been a barren area, about an hour northwest of Toronto, he told me. Today it’s a city with its own mayor. There’s a mall with a Winners, a Starbucks, a food court, and behind it a Cineplex. There are numerous arcades, one of which one of his sons frequents—plenty to do in his neck of the woods, he said.

He might have asked what it was like to live down here, on an island, in the countryside, or in a tourist town, but he didn’t, and I didn’t bother to offer an opening for such an exchange. He hadn’t been to Uganda in more than four decades, I learned, but was planning a trip there soon. He wasn’t worried all that much about flying and planes exploding in midair—what is to be will be—there was so much to be afraid of in the world, he said, that you couldn’t live your life in fear, otherwise you wouldn’t ever leave your house or open your windows or doors.

Nothing personal.

Then, as if seizing on an opportunity he had been looking for, he said, “When Priya left her island in the Caribbean, it was a peaceful place, but it’s become like Uganda. Daily murders that by the end of a year make up mass-murder kinds of totals. Aren’t we all glad to be living here?” It was rhetorical, and elicited from him laughter. I didn’t know if he was serious or being ironic. “You know, I’ve known her almost as long as I’ve been in this country. But it’s been years since we’ve seen each other. Is she still painting these days?” I pointed to two paintings on a far wall in answer. He glanced over at them. From where we were, he would not have seen the details, the surface of green lake water, fanciful weeds waving beneath, all rendered in thick paint with knives. I suggested he go and have a closer look. He said, “There’s time. I’ll see them later,” and he turned back to me.

“You lost touch with her?” I asked. “When was the last time you saw each other?”

“Oh, maybe six years ago. But then she just kind of disappeared. She’s always been hard to pin down.” I might have agreed, but I wasn’t about to let him in on the private details of my relationship with Priya. He looked around the kitchen and said, “But finally she’s found a home. Looks like a lovely home too.”

“What made you decide, after all these years, to come down?” I asked. They’d last seen each other “maybe” six years ago. She and I had met and begun living together six years ago. Was it during that time, then, when he and she last saw one another? If so, she never mentioned it.

“I saw she was active on Twitter and I wrote and told her to write me at once. I wasn’t going to let her disappear from me again. That’s how we reconnected.”

He laughed at everything he said.

Trying to sound as casual as possible, I said, “And you decided to come down and, well, here you are. Let me get you a drink.” I didn’t want to press. It seemed too obvious that I was fishing.

But then he offered, “So, yes, when she invited me, how could I not jump at the chance? Priya was my closest friend, but, you know, she used to come and go—appear and disappear—but never had there been such a long period of silence between us. And, of course, I accepted the invitation because I also wanted to meet the new partner with whom she was so happy that she’d forgotten all about her old friend.” At this last he opened his palm to take me in, and I smiled, and again he laughed heartily.

So she did invite him. I turned away so he wouldn’t see my lips purse and wiped the granite counter with the edge of my hand. This crossed a line, because this very thing, how he came to be visiting us, had been contentious from the start. Everything, it seems, always comes out one way or the other in the wash.

Other than that, I didn’t ask questions or comment more than a nod to indicate I was still with him. I let him speak, which he was clearly happy to do.

He said she was the first friend he’d made in this country. The reiteration wasn’t lost on me. She’d known him before he’d properly learned to use a knife and fork, he told me with what seemed oddly like pride, and he remembered her smacking his hand once when he used the fork incorrectly. This was, I imagine, meant to be evidence of something—trust, perhaps, or intimacy—and I could have added, Ah, yes, so she’s always been particular, has she? and confided that this trait of always wanting to get things “right” had been the frequent cause of arguments between us, but I kept quiet.

He persisted, though. He opened his arms and lifted his palms out in front of him as if to hold or behold all that was before him, and said, rather paternalistically, “So she’s landed on her feet. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this.”

I did not want to know what he meant. Any substantive response would have been to discuss her life as he once knew it and as I know it today, and such scrutiny behind her back and with someone I was only just meeting seemed unfair, regardless of what was transpiring between her and me. You can, I know, feel alienated from your lover and still not want to disrespect her.

As he spoke, I continued with my task, dunking tomatoes into a pot of boiling water and scooping them up a minute or so later. I dropped them in a bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. When he saw no response was forthcoming, he added, “When you’re young, it’s inconceivable you’d ever reach your parents’ age, and when you do arrive at the age at which they had once seemed so ancient, the world has changed so much and you realize they were not role models for the changed world you’re living in. There’s triumph and disappointment at once. It’s a miracle we survived our youth and evolved in the ways we have.”

If I were younger, more tarted up, would he have been more curious about me? I could have told him my parents did not live to the age I currently am—I have, in fact, survived well beyond the ages to which they’d lived, dying one soon after the other, when I was in my early thirties—so sometimes I feel as if I am coasting on borrowed time, as the saying goes. They were not role models; I had to figure it all out on my own.

* * *

When finally we heard the front door open, he swiveled to face Priya as she entered the house but remained planted where he was, and from him erupted ebullient laughter. He outstretched his arms and, addressing both of us, exclaimed, “Look at her. Just look at you. Long time no see.” Still he stayed where he was. I gathered he wanted to share the reunion with me, so I leaned against the stove on my side of the counter and watched. Priya didn’t take off her jacket and boots, but came through the house directly to him. The warmth of his greeting was touching—he clearly wanted to hold on to her longer than she wanted. Priya was less effusive. She seemed less delighted than I’d imagined she’d be. I hoped this was not for my benefit.

She said to him, “You’re entirely gray.”

“I’m not gray,” he returned, his voice seeming to feign a peevishness belied by the irrepressible grin he wore. He looked at me—an appeal, it seemed—and I gathered this elaborate show of offense was a way of creating complicity among the three of us. He wore thin, gold wire-rimmed glasses, and behind them his eyes had turned misty. I thought I should turn away, leave them for a while, but I was more curious than ever about some obfuscated truth about their connection and did not want to miss any of this, so I continued with the task of removing skin from the blanched tomatoes as I looked on.

After inane banter about what time had and hadn’t done to them both—Priya commenting that he’d come to resemble his father, at which he beamed—he reached for and held on to both of Priya’s hands and attempted to pull her toward him. That was a bit much, a bit theatrical, I thought. Perhaps she did too, as she stepped in toward him for barely a second, and then, rather oddly, pulled a hand away and, although it seemed—mostly because of the smile she wore—as if it were meant to be playful, gently slapped his cheek. There was an intimacy to that odd gesture that I admit made my heart skip a beat, but I didn’t want to succumb to petty jealousies. I needed, I’d earlier decided, to remain strong and focused.

I couldn’t have known for sure, but I thought hurt flashed on his face—despite the ensuing chortling, which I took to be a manner of defense. Priya removed her jacket and threw it around one of the chair stools at the island counter. She made her way around the counter as I slid the skinned and chopped tomatoes into the skillet with the softened onions. And with more warmth than there had been between us earlier in the day, she wrapped her arms around me and kissed my cheek. She had taken on the scent of his lime-and-leather cologne, and this was like a fist tightening around my heart. To an onlooker there would, I’m sure, have been no hint, in the swift and almost ordinary gesture for two people who live together, of the distress that hung like a heavy curtain between us. It is possible such warmth was an indication, a display, either to him or to me, perhaps to him and to me, of where her allegiance lay. It is possible, too, that in front of a third person, dispensing affection was less complicated, required less of us both, than when we were alone. Her kiss on leaving the house with Skye earlier is a case in point.

I couldn’t bring myself to respond in kind, and she shifted away to inspect the pot on the stove, the awkwardness she felt as a result noticeable only to me, I believe. She stirred the sauce, the sweetness of the onions and garlic, the tartness of the as-yet-uncooked tomatoes rising from the skillet, and under her breath asked if I was sure there was enough for us all. I nudged her aside and told her I knew what I was doing, to let me do my job. It has been a long-standing irritation between us that she is forever telling me what I’ve done wrong or how this or that should be, or should have been done, and so this back and forth between us is rote, and could just then have easily been construed as a kind of usual play.

“It’s your sauce,” she conceded. “Carry on, then. I’m sure it’ll be good.”

Prakash laughed and said he’s just like me, that when he is in the kitchen he doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do.

Being with the two of them in the same room, seeing them together, suddenly had a new effect on me. I felt, for the first time, that it was good that he was here at this particular time. What was to be would be, and his presence here was probably, in the end, all for the good.

Forever conscious of what others are thinking and feeling, Priya announced in a suddenly bold voice that the aroma of the sauce was the most pleasant we’d had in the kitchen in weeks, a preamble to asking her friend if he’d as yet gotten a whiff of the dead mouse. He brushed off the question, saying that while he was not color-blind, he had no sense of smell. On the heels of that, pointing to my pot, he exclaimed, “She’s cooking for me.”

He appeared to be an affectionate man, and when Priya responded, “Fancy that!” she seemed to me, in contrast and despite the attempt to keep smiling, churlish, and I couldn’t tell if this had something to do with him, or if it was about her and me.

He engaged me, saying, “No, really, she said so. She told me she doesn’t usually cook. So this one’s for me, and it’s vegetarian too.”

And I found myself pulled along—against my will or not, I couldn’t tell—or should I say siding?—with him, this man I’d only just met. “Yes, that’s right. It’s for him,” I chimed in.

I had not been able to confidently hold my own earlier when Skye was in the kitchen here with us. I’d felt as if I were struggling to be myself in the face of too many lies, and resorted to speaking at unusual length about Lorenzo Valla’s motives for debunking the veracity of the Donation of Constantine. But—here, now—I was less agitated in front of this man. He was a buffer between Priya and me, slowing our tearing at each other.

Unaware of the role he’d played in our lives these past weeks, and more so now, he followed Priya with his eyes watery, a pleased broad smile on his face.

My reserve irked Priya. I could tell her mind was more on me than on him. She turned her back to us with a hand on each of the handles of the fridge and pulled the doors open. For many seconds she stood there, the interior light brightening her face and torso. Whatever had happened to us? Perhaps it is more common than not that things break down in slow motion rather than with a single grand gesture, and you can get so inured by the slow demise, even as it happens and happens and happens right before your eyes, that you don’t notice the approach of the point of no return.

As if her reason for having gone to the fridge suddenly occurred to her, she asked if either of us needed a drink or something to nibble on, and her friend pointed to the cup of tea on the counter and said, “I’ve already been well taken care of.”

He wouldn’t take his eyes off Priya, nor for a long time did the smile on his lips fade. I can’t say if my reading of him was accurate, but his expression wasn’t simple delight at being in the same room with her. It was more as if he were a parent looking with amazement at what had become of the child he’d brought up. This was ridiculous, of course, because they were only a year apart in age, and I’ve never known Priya to accept being treated by anyone—including her parents—like a child.

Removing her jacket from the stool, she excused herself to go hang it up and change into house shoes. But she was gone for longer than these little tasks would have taken. Prakash was saying something about being a vegetarian, but my mind was on Priya. I wondered how long it would be before she left with him to show him around the area. I needed time alone but I didn’t want to show agitation over not knowing when they’d leave.

“They amaze me,” he said, and I realized he was speaking of his children. “When they were very young—five, six, seven years of age—they knew all their friends from school went to fast-food restaurants at the mall and they used to be invited to other kids’ birthday parties where there’d be hot dogs and that sort of thing. I didn’t have to tell them they couldn’t eat this or that, they just saw what we did and didn’t do, and on their own they put two and two together and acted accordingly. As far as I know, they never gave in to any temptations.”

I nodded, but I had to wonder, what kind of young kid wouldn’t want to try a hot dog—especially if everyone around them was having one and their own parents weren’t watching? Did they really not take even a tiny taste, or was he a doting father, a gullible man who believed his children were infallible when, here and there, now and then, they were in fact nibbling forbidden fruit behind his back? There are probably things about his children he doesn’t know. I was about to put the idea in his head, but quickly thought better of it, as a small incivility could unnecessarily escalate out of control.

There was a bit of a ruckus coming from the front of the house—sounded like Priya was cleaning up the foyer, sorting through shoes and boots—and from the clanging of the hangers in the cupboard, I guessed she was rearranging coats and jackets.

“And then, one day—and I don’t know what precipitated it, but it was out of the blue—they were asking: why do other people eat those kinds of things and we don’t?”

With a finger held up in the air, I interrupted him and called out, asking Priya what she was doing. She said, in a voice I knew well, that she was making room for her jacket and Prakash’s. She was telling me, I suppose, that I could have hung up his jacket instead of throwing it on the couch. I called back to her to leave those things and come and hang out with us—my own wording to suggest to her and to him, in a semiplayful way, that she was not being hospitable. He didn’t seem to notice her admonishing tone or my playful snarkiness; he just carried on.

“I explained to them about different cultures,” he said, “about how a person’s culture makes him or her special. In our culture, I explained, there are things we do and don’t do that make us who we are. They understood at once and have never asked again to go to a burger joint, or for any kind of meat.”

I continued, of course, to be tempted to challenge this noble picture he had of himself and of his children, but I asked instead if he’d ever, even once, succumbed to temptation or pressure to compromise his beliefs. He was only too eager to be asked.

“When I was in high school, just after we arrived in Canada,” he related, “one of the guys in my class invited me along with some other classmates to a formal dinner given by his parents. I didn’t really know these boys, but I was the new kid in town and I appreciated the gesture.”

Priya returned. She pulled out two of the stools on that side of the counter, and after seating herself she offered the other stool to him. He interrupted himself to say he’d been in the car for several hours and was happy to stand, then went on with the same story. Priya nodded, and under her breath said, Yes, yes. He mumbled in response that he knew she’d heard this before, but he wanted to tell me. Priya lifted her palm, a gesture to say, Of course, go ahead.

“The dinner was held in a large banquet hall—long tables formally set, and servers bringing out dishes, pouring drinks. I was in awe of everything then, having only just arrived in this country. Everything was brought and put on your plate for you. Suddenly a plate with a steak was dropped down in front of me. In those days you weren’t asked about dietary restrictions, allergies, or anything like that.”

I broke in, expressing an idea that was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Yes, but nowadays it’s not just vegetarian or not—everybody has some damn thing they can’t or won’t eat. We’re all so fragile and don’t mind imposing on others to show concern for us. The other day we had to cater to someone who, besides being vegan, couldn’t eat fruit or vegetables with red skin.”

As if some affinity between us had been cemented earlier on when we were alone, he broke into laughter. One would have thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. I am shallow; I was flattered.

While I was speaking, Priya looked up at the glass shade that encased the ceiling light in which a plump food moth lazily circled. Her face was blank. So intentionally nonjudgmental did she look that I felt she was in fact critical of my comment. “So? What did you do? Tell her,” she encouraged, still following the erratic movements of the trapped moth.

“So there in front of me was this big, sizzling, glossy slab of meat. I’d never had an experience like that before.”

He was enjoying being the storyteller, unaware that Priya and I were really only half listening. I know her well enough; she wasn’t as rapt as he might have thought. She was, no doubt, dying to get out of the house with him. She had no idea how much I, too, wanted them to leave.

“I’d never eaten meat. I mean, really, I didn’t know what to do,” he said, pausing to sip his tea and no doubt to prolong his moment onstage. “And on top of that, there was all that cutlery surrounding the plate. You see, at home in those days, if we weren’t eating with our hand, Indian-style, we’d most likely use a spoon. It was in my university days that I grew more used to eating with a knife and fork, but even today, I and my family eat using our hands when we are at home. It is more natural for us. The food tastes better this way.” He laughed at his own humor and pointed to the pot on the stove, saying, “Don’t worry, I eat spaghetti with a fork.”

I smiled, and nodded to suggest I was grateful for this.

“Anyway,” he said, “that was the least of my problems. Here was this big pinkish-brown thing lying on my plate, and in that moment it came to me that meat and meat-eating were a kind of emblem of Canada and of Canadianness, and I wanted there and then to be Canadian like the guys at the table cutting so confidently into all parts of their meals, those guys so completely oblivious to what was going on with me. I had to make a decision. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the slab. I kept staring at it and it stared back at me. And we remained like that for an eternity.”

Okay, Prakash, we get the picture, I wanted to say. I wondered if Priya and I would get a chance to chat privately before she left with him for the afternoon. I needed to tell her, at least for a start, that I wasn’t going to eat supper with them. I didn’t look forward to doing that.

“I was thinking: what would it mean if I put even a small piece of that meat in my mouth? It was my first big test in this new country. You know, I felt so much appreciation for my parents and me being able to come to this country, but looking around me I knew, too, I didn’t want to lose my culture. We were despised back home, thrown out of the country for being Indian, but that’s what I was, an Indian. And I couldn’t afford not to be proud of this. I didn’t know what I would become, who I’d be, if I let even a drop of that bloodlike juice pooled on the plate around the slab touch my lips. And so, just like that, contemplating a plate of meat, I made the decision that this was not the way to become Canadian. I didn’t know how I could accomplish that very desirable identity in a single stroke, but I understood that it would have to include who I was at my core.”

Ever since beginning this relationship, this partnership with Priya, I had often been reminded that I had not had to apply for or be granted citizenship to this country. And after living in this predominantly Caucasian countryside for so many years, I was experiencing in our kitchen what Priya experienced constantly among our friends: the revealing fact of difference, this time them—Priya and Prakash—from me. He and she could have passed for each other’s family. But people who didn’t know us as a couple and saw us standing side by side might never have assumed she and I, who were indeed family, were at all so. It is not enough to know you’re family with another person. The relationship takes on true meaning only when outsiders also agree upon and recognize it. Their recognition is an ingredient in the complex medium that gives the relationship a chance to grow and thrive.

Still, I was born here. Priya and Prakash had to declare an oath of loyalty to this country when they became citizens. That fact is enough for them to have more in common with each other than either has with me. Thirtysomething years later, Priya admits to still being moved when she sings the Canadian anthem. I have never had such an experience. Rather, I am critical of it. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to sing it. In fact, I want several of its words changed.

Prakash took his eyes and his attention off Priya and spoke to us both. “You didn’t tell her how we met,” he said.

I wanted to answer that the topic hadn’t come up between him and me, and that his assumption was incorrect. But there was an agenda, I realized, in the statement. I let it play itself out.

“Yes,” Priya responded, looking at me for corroboration and rising from her chair, ready, I thought, to escape with him. “I did. You know we met at university. Don’t you?”

“But did you tell her how we actually met?” he insisted.

Priya said something about table tennis, the club room in the basement of the McKinnon Science Building.

“Yes, yes. Technically that’s true, but how did we start talking?” He sounded impatient. He wanted her, I imagined, to have cherished the memory as he had. “Well, let me tell you. I’ll tell you. Just a sec, you’ll see,” he said.

While we waited, he drained his cup of tea and poured himself another.

“When I arrived at university, I knew no one,” he began. Priya rested her bum on the edge of her stool again. “I wasn’t into drinking and I didn’t have a girlfriend. So I didn’t have anything in common with the other students in my courses. I was staying at the YMCA, and I didn’t like it there. I was lonely. I wanted to meet people. So how do you meet people?”

Apparently, the question wasn’t rhetorical, and he waited expectantly for an answer. I shrugged. Priya shook her head to say she didn’t know—he should get on with his story. Such liberties between them revealed their old closeness. But his eyebrows were raised, and he still waited. The two of them knew how they had met, and although my knowing it wasn’t going to enrich my life in any way, this story was clearly for my benefit.

“How?” I acquiesced.

“No, you tell me,” he said.

Priya rolled her eyes theatrically and motioned with her hands for him to get on with it. And he did.

“Well, you join a club.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“So I thought about it, and, since I used to be one of the top table-tennis players at my high school in Kampala, I decided to join the university’s table-tennis club. I saw you there the first night. Do you remember?” Priya nodded weakly. “And then a few days later I was in the student center, and you were there too. Isn’t that right? You saw me and you came and said hello. That was the very first time we talked. I’d never met a Trinidadian before. I’d always assumed Trinidadians, and all Caribbean people, were black, and I was surprised that an Indian-looking person could be Trinidadian. You asked if I wanted to get something to eat with you, and you pointed in the direction of the cafeteria. I told you I’d accompany you but that I’d been in the cafeteria and it was difficult for me to find things to eat there because I was vegetarian. Do you remember that? You told me to come to your apartment and you’d make dinner for me. That night, you and Fiona—” he paused, looked at me, and clarified, “Priya’s roommate—”

To which I responded, perhaps noticeably defensively, “I know.”

And he carried on, “—made curried potatoes, cauliflower, and rice. I remember that meal to this day. It was the first time you’d cooked for me, but not the last. The three of us became close friends after that night.”

I was not sure what the minutiae of their meeting was supposed to mean to me, but I felt as if the tip of a knife were being pressed against my skin. Was he informing me of how much they had in common, the length of their friendship, that there were people they knew in common who were unknown to me—of the primacy of his place in her life?

I watched, but, truthfully, couldn’t see evidence of even a patina of an old love or fling between them. Why had she been so cagey about him, then? I don’t think I would have minded an ongoing friendship between them. He’s not my type, but he didn’t have to be. A presence like his in her life down here might have eased things for her, and by extension for me, for us. How often over the five years here had I had to bear the brunt of her hurt when a local thinks they’re complimenting her when they assure her they don’t think of her as “of color,” that they think of her as one of them, as white? His presence in her life might have been enough to temper that pattern of behavior she had when we were, say, at a dinner, chatting perhaps about what was on the family Christmas table when we were children. Everyone except Priya would have had what one might call “the usual”—turkey, cranberry sauce, Christmas pudding, parsnips, and turnips. She would remain silent, at least at first, as if waiting to see if anyone would think to ask her what was on her family table, the question being for her their acknowledgment of her difference from us and the possibility of hearing about interesting fare—like the pigeon pea soup, pastelles, ponch-de-crème, and sorrel drink I came to know from being with her—or customs they didn’t know about. It would be unfair to say there wasn’t interest, but her background was so foreign that our friends had trouble imagining it, and with the pace of conversation, everyone wanting to tell their own story, there really wasn’t usually the appetite to have details described and explained, she the star suddenly, being interviewed. What in those times we all wanted was not so much new knowledge as validation through having had common experiences: Yeah, that’s right, you too? No kidding. And what about this or that, wasn’t that hilarious? She was outnumbered. Those gatherings were about our similarities, not about our differences, and often what she interjected was amicably nodded at but not engaged with—poor things, I could see our friends didn’t even know what questions they could have asked of her—and so we’d return to what bonded the rest of us, like our hippie days, most of us having just clipped the end of the era, but enamored of it because nothing had yet replaced it. Those days were a topic we loved, the drugs we experimented with, the so-called free love that was freer in reality for the guys we knew, but not for us women. Some of us took off and went to live for a minute or two in the bush and didn’t shave our legs, and chopped wood and bathed naked in the lakes. And all that awful food we used to eat so righteously—this grain and that lentil. We’d reminisce and howl with laughter, marvel at our inventiveness or resilience, or cringe at our tastes or activities back then. At some point Priya would break in, and knowing full well that her own experience of that time would fall flat at the feet of our friends, she’d still relate what “hippie” meant to a Trinidadian in those days, and I’d admire her for her courage and insistence on being part of the conversation. Hippie life in Trinidad, she’d say, was about what was being worn on Carnaby Street in London—bell-bottom pants, oversized colorful watches, flowered jeans, braided hair and bandannas, bare feet and toe rings, ankle bracelets. It was fashion and consumption. I knew our friends were thinking, Yeah, yeah—really, eh. But that’s not hippie life, and her version, sounding a little naive and thin, would land under the rug, and we’d turn back fast to recalling this sit-in, that love-in, that music festival, that demonstration. I’d feel for her; I’d feel her aloneness, and I’d try to fill in things I knew about her world, try to help her flesh out her stories so they’d understand. But in the end, I’d do it to her too, I’d be right there with them, bonding over what they and I had in common. I did feel for her. It was tiring, though, to have to commiserate with her against our friends once we were back home in our private space. It forced me to acknowledge their failings too, and this was isolating for me. When you live with a person of color, never-ending problems that center on how the world treats one and not the other enter your house, and these differences can alienate you from one another. And your house becomes not a haven in which harmony can be sought, but a refuge in which to hide. It gets unbearable when you’re hiding not together from the world, but from each other.

Suddenly Priya stood. “Come, let me show you my studio,” she said, already walking past him toward the back of the house. He turned to watch her but did not move. He had stretched his hand out along the counter toward her, tapping it as if to call her back. She stopped and said, awkwardly, “Don’t you want to come? I’d like to show you what I’ve been doing.”

He said, again, as he had said to me earlier, when I pointed out her two works in the house, “There’s time.” Priya did not hide her disappointment well, and he quickly added, “We can’t leave her here all by herself slaving at the stove. Later, we’ll go later. There’s lots of time.”

I began to protest. I was fine alone, I said, wishing they would leave, but Priya had quickly started gathering plates from one cupboard, napkins from a drawer, and glasses from another cupboard, with which to set the table for the night’s dinner.

He got up and followed her into the dining room. While they remained in there for some minutes chatting, I noted to myself that while he wanted to regale me with the story of how they met, he didn’t seem in the least curious about how she and I had met.

I often felt guilt that we were here. Countryside on the mainland would have been one thing, but an island is psychologically more isolating. Yet it doesn’t make sense that I felt guilt, for it was she who had been rather more gung-ho about the move to an island. She was born on an island, she’d say, and she planned to die on an island. The idea was that we’d be here forever.

They returned just as I turned the stove off, and I was about to retreat to my office when Prakash addressed me: “I’m a refugee. Did you know that?”

Priya had told me he was sensitive about having come here as a refugee, that he didn’t like talking about it, and that I should be careful about bringing it up. But here he was announcing it. I could not walk away.

“When my family came to this country, it was a very different time than it is today, you know,” he said, and laughed. “People didn’t want us back then. Today everyone wants the Syrians.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Priya said. “There are communities and individuals sponsoring families, but there’re a lot of people, too, who don’t want them here.”

“No one,” he stressed, “wanted the Ugandans.” He took a sip from his drink, hiding the seriousness his face suddenly took on.

“Canada did,” I said.

He didn’t respond.

I asked, “Am I not remembering correctly?”

Still he didn’t answer. I’d clearly gotten something wrong, but I couldn’t imagine what that might have been. I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows to let him know I welcomed being corrected.

“Put it this way,” he said. “No other place wanted us. We didn’t necessarily all want to come to Canada, but this was the only country that would take a handful of us. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“How many of you did Canada let in?” I caught my choice of words only after they’d left my mouth: you, and let in, and was grateful I’d said Canada and not we.

“It depends on who you ask. Some sources say 40,000 Indians were expelled. Some say there were 30,000 of us, others say 90,000. And then every site you consult on the Internet gives a different number of how many Canada let in.” He didn’t look at me to suggest any complicity in those words I regretted using. “Some say under 6,000. Others say precisely 6,675.” His voice had changed; he seemed suddenly crestfallen. I suppose a nerve had been hit.

My instinct was that we should move on from this topic. I picked up my phone, my pack of cigarettes, and my reader from the end of the counter, slapped my hand on the counter in a gesture of finality, and addressed Priya. “Where are you two headed?”

There was more, it turned out, that he wanted to say. He did not let Priya answer my question but cut in to add, “There was a time, before the actual expulsion, when we used to talk about where we’d like to go to live once we left. My mother’s first choice was Britain, where she had family. She was a British citizen, having been born in British India, and after the expulsion she was accepted there, and I, her son too. But not Pa. You see, in 1962, when Uganda got independence from Britain, Pa, in a flurry of national pride, gave up his Indian citizenship to become a citizen of the place he lived in and loved. Pa was like that, you know. But this meant he was no longer British or Indian, and so his application as a refugee was turned down by England.”

Priya and I exclaimed at once, “What?”

He nodded his head to agree with our shock. “And we wouldn’t leave without him, naturally,” he carried on. “And no other country—not even India—would take us. So when Canada opened up, we had no option other than to come here, and here we were accepted as a family. On the flight over, I remember my mother announcing with determination in her voice that she’d made the decision to find happiness in Toronto, where she knew other Ugandans had landed and stayed. But she didn’t see Toronto until decades later. We ended up going instead to a place we’d never heard of: New Brunswick.”

In New Brunswick, they’d been placed in a small town called Salt Island, which wasn’t an island at all, far north of St. John.

“Do you remember Salt Island?” he asked Priya. “Do you remember that long and winding road we took from the airport to my parents’ house? It’s now a highway cutting the length of time it used to take by half.”

I had thought they’d soon leave, but Priya jumped up, reached for and noisily opened a bag of bagels. She asked how his mother was, and while she sliced the bagels and popped them one by one in the toaster, he answered.

She hadn’t ever told me she’d visited him at his parents’ in New Brunswick. I realized the photos I’d dug up in her studio, of the two of them with a body of water behind them and no identifiable landmarks, must have been from that time.

I took my phone and cigarettes, excused myself, and left for the sunroom. The sun was bright, and the room had warmed up. I opened the door to the outside while I smoked my cigarette. A female downy woodpecker, trying desperately to hack at a tiny morsel of fat in the suet cage, took off in fright. I stepped away into the garden, texted Skye, and told her all was well, better than I’d hoped—although everyone was a bit testy because there was a lot of conversation about race, and I was, truth be told, an outsider in this reunion. She texted back that she was on Skype with Liz. I replied I’d be alone in an hour or so and I’d try her again.

Back in the sunroom, I looked up Idi Amin and Canada on my phone’s Internet. One post said 80,000 Asian Ugandans were expelled. One said more than 8,000 Ugandans entered Canada between 1972 and 1974. Ten percent. Asians, one site said, escaped by and large with their lives, but under Amin black Ugandans paid with their lives. Everyone was a loser, it seemed. There were all kinds of things happening in those days. I would have been twenty-one then. I participated in many organized protests on the street, and felt rather good about myself for standing up, waving placards, shouting slogans of protest, my fist held high. But in the light of someone being forced to leave their country of birth and seek refuge from it elsewhere, I couldn’t imagine my version of a proximity to history would interest them.

When I returned to the kitchen, the bagels were set on three plates, and a container of hummus was open, a pâté knife dissecting its swirl. Priya watched me as she asked Prakash, “Were you able to bring anything with you? Your mother must have had gold jewelry. Was she able to get it out?”

“She was lucky. She got most of her jewelry out,” he answered. “We didn’t have time to pack anything. We’d had just a few hours’ notice.” He looked at her, somewhat blankly, I thought, and said, “You know the story. You’ve heard it before.”

Priya jutted her chin at me and said, “Yes, but I don’t remember all the details, and besides, she hasn’t.” I had thought this was a topic that was not to be broached. Had she imagined his story of escape would warm me to him, or had she become so insensitive to his trauma that she thought of it as a way to entertain me?

He jumped at her cue. “Okay, I’ll tell you,” he said, turning to me.

When a person decides to tell the story of the flight for his life, you can’t just walk off. I had to stay and listen.

“Indians had to leave Uganda by November 8,” he started. “People who had means and connections left well before that, but there were many, too, who for various reasons waited until the last minute. My father, and therefore our family, was always going to be among the last to leave because of his job at the bank where he worked. But one day, two weeks before the deadline, my father didn’t come home from work. He’d been arrested. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but that’s how it was in those days. When finally he came home, he said we had to leave right away. We’d always been more or less ready to go at a moment’s notice. So the next morning, we were on a plane full of fleeing Indians. If we hadn’t left right then, he would have been dead in days.”

With that, he’d concluded, it seemed, the story Priya wanted him to relate. It wasn’t much of a story, but some response was needed, so I offered, “I imagine there’s a difference, isn’t there, between how the Asians in Uganda had to leave, and the seemingly endless, daily flow of Syrians out of a land that their ancestors lived in for millennia?”

“Yep. That’s right,” he said, and nothing more.

After some long seconds I was about to say, Well, there’s time for this later, and attempt to shoo them out of the house, when he said, “He’d just confiscated a lorry of goods. He was taking it to the warehouse. That’s when they arrested him.”

I must have looked puzzled, because Priya said, “Alex doesn’t know any of this. You have to explain why he was taking the goods, and where.”

The confident, jovial man of minutes before became pensive. “My father was the bank worker tasked with removing goods from clients’ warehouses,” he said. “He and the driver of the lorry were transporting such goods to the bank’s warehouse. That’s when they took him.” As if to hide his face, he lifted his cup and took a long sip of his tea. In the discomforting quiet, he added, “He came home so late. His clothes were dirty and smelly. He knew we didn’t have a lot of time.”

Priya put her hand on his for a moment and, rubbing it gently, said to him, “Prakash, slow down. I’ve never really understood what happened. You never told me about this. Why did they take him?”

Witnessing her affection toward him brought out a sadness in me. I did not feel jealousy. Just overwhelming regret. It had been a long time since there’d been any such tenderness between us.

Prakash’s eyes glazed. He looked suddenly older. “You know, there are Asian Ugandans here in this country who, so many years later, still won’t befriend other Asian Ugandans? We all went through the same things, but none of us wants to be reminded of what happened. It’s like we’re all ashamed of what was done to our families, to mothers, sisters, wives—to our women. We carry a collective shame, you know? It’s why we work so hard. My generation still feels we must show that there’s worth in us Indian Ugandans. We smile and smile and smile. We’re good people—we want everyone to know this. We won’t allow ourselves, or our children, to show anger about what was done to us in our own country. Anger would be an admission that we’d been wronged, and none of us can bear having been a victim. You know, those of us who came in ’72, we’ve always been quiet. I was fourteen when we arrived here, and I learned from then that we Ugandans don’t make trouble, we keep our heads down, work hard, and just try to get ahead so that people will respect us. Above all, we all learned that we must be respectful of others. We’ve never publicly expressed anger about how we’d been treated—whether that was regarding our expulsion from our own homeland, or by the international community.”

Under all that laughter earlier, that bonhomie, a subterranean hurt, some tempered rage, had just been revealed. He looked away. He’d exposed himself. Priya kept her eyes soft and on him. There was probably more anger in him than even he realized. The more I contemplated it, the more I saw it. This realization had the exact effect I didn’t need right then. I felt myself drawn to him, and into Priya and the unknown parts of her life that at another time in our relationship I would have longed for but couldn’t afford to be seduced by today. I needed to maintain my distance. But I was seeing—rather, she seemed to be making every effort, after all, to show me—who this mystery friend from her past was. Who she was, by extension. And I oscillated between feeling like an outsider and wanting to be drawn into the corners of her life, as I had once hoped would happen.

Despite my discomfort, I actually didn’t mind, at this point, hearing more of what he had to say. I had no investment in him, nor am I attracted to stories of trauma and escape, but he was willing to be open and weak in front of me, and wished, I thought, to be seen as good and brave. He would not be a friend—that didn’t interest me—but he was, as far as I could see from this short time with him, a fragile and frightened man who wanted to be seen to be a good man.

“I’ve wanted to talk about it lately, you know, with the Syrians being in the news, and all of that, but I didn’t know to whom, or how,” he said.

I wanted to go around and stand next to him. To touch his shoulder. Or pour some more tea. But despite these unexpected kinder feelings toward him, I stayed where I was.

He looked at me and said, “I’ll try and explain. You see, my father worked at the bank, but he wasn’t in banking exactly. What I mean is that my father was not a career banker. He’d been a teacher. A math teacher. Well, he was not just a math teacher, but also the principal of one of the best high schools in Kampala. He was well-known, and well-thought-of. Indians and Africans of the higher classes all wanted their children to go to his school.”

As he spoke, Priya pulled the tray that sat on the counter closer. It held onions, garlic, ginger, root vegetables, and fruit, and although she began to clean the dish of old bits of vegetables, dried-up garlic scapes that had been there since last spring, and fragments of hard-curled onion and garlic skins and dust, she did it as quietly as if a sleeping baby were in the room.

“One day,” Prakash said, having caught his breath again, and seeming now to have found his stride, “Idi Amin fired most of the Asian teachers without notice. My father was replaced by a friend of his, an African teacher. Because of my father’s math skills, the father of one of the students in his old school, a bank manager, offered him a job. But Pa didn’t deal with tellers or actually handle money. He was more of an accountant—not a qualified accountant, but it was his job to deal with the unpaid loans of Indian traders ordered to leave the country.”

He looked at us, and from what he said after, it was clear he must have been calculating how much backstory and history he should relate to make this personal tale clear.

“You see,” he said, “the majority of traders in the country were Indians. We hadn’t been given much warning or time to leave. Shops, like almost every business, depended on loans from banks. Almost everyone got the loans they asked for, because business in general was very good, and loans to the Indians were usually paid back on time. When the announcement came, ordering us to leave the country and to take nothing with us, it was clear that business owners would have to abandon their businesses and all those goods that had been bought and paid for with the loans. The banks immediately became concerned. If everyone just left the country owing money to the banks, the banks would fold, the economy of the country would collapse. So my father was one of many bank workers whose job it was to go with a bank lorry to the deportee’s store to confiscate unsold goods. He had to watch and make notes on everything as merchandise was loaded onto the lorry. He had to make sure nothing was left behind, nothing pocketed. Pa would then accompany the lorry and the storekeeper to a warehouse owned by the bank, and he’d supervise the unloading there.

“On the morning of October 25, he was carrying out one of these—these, these”—he couldn’t find the word, so I offered the word repossessions, but Prakash adamantly said, “No, I won’t call them that. That implies that the owners were unable to meet their financial obligations and the bank was taking the goods in lieu of payment, but that’s different than what was happening.” For him there was no word for it.

Priya and I both indicated we understood what he meant, and he continued.

“The lorry had just been packed up at a furniture and household goods store, and Pa, the store owner, and the driver were in it, on the way to the bank’s warehouse, when it was stopped by army hooligans. They made them come down from the lorry and asked for everyone’s ID. But some days earlier, at a roadblock, soldiers had asked for Pa’s ID, and when he gave it to them and they saw he was a Ugandan citizen, they laughed and said that it was not real ID, that no Asians were Ugandans. They made him get out of his car, tore up his ID right there, pushed him about, and ripped his shirt. They told him to walk. They kept the car.”

Priya said, sharp surprise in her voice, “Prakash, you never told me any of this.”

He stopped short, perhaps as confused as I, and for a moment it was as if she were accusing him of telling a lie, of having taken—rather than of having kept—something from her. I thought of the photos in her office and bit my tongue. She was clearly affected by what had happened to his father. I supposed this might have been because she had actually once—perhaps more than once, how would I know?—met him.

In response Prakash said, “It was common. It happened regularly to Asians who’d taken out citizenship after Uganda’s independence. I don’t remember what details I told you and what I didn’t. These days, as I listen to the stories of Syrian refugees, I am piecing together my own. It’s taken me a long time to remember, but I’m remembering more lately.” He took her hand and held it. “Let me tell you now. I’m trying to tell you.”

I walked around the counter to the cupboard with the glasses, took three out, went to the fridge, and poured us all club sodas. The noise caused by my scooping ice from the freezer seemed like an affront, but I carried on, and splashed Angostura bitters on top. I handed one glass to Prakash and one to Priya. He still held her hand. I stood next to her, pressed my body lightly against her, and put my hand on her back. I felt the knots of her spine, and ran my hand down slightly into the curve of her back and rested it there. She took her hand from his and leaned against me. How much easier it was to be affectionate in a third person’s presence. In that brief connection, the desire I once felt so immediately for Priya filled me. I felt ill and a weight descended on me. This was not going to be helpful to either of us in the long run, and so I backed away and returned to my side of the counter.

“I still feel sorry for my father. He had always tried to be a responsible citizen in Uganda, taking part in community events, etcetera. It didn’t matter if the events were for Indians or Africans or for both. But after Amin’s expulsion order, the army went wild and we were on our own. There was no one to look out for Asians.

“So, on that day when the lorry was stopped and he was asked for his identification, he explained that it had been taken from him by other soldiers some days before. But the hooligans”—Prakash’s voice was filled with emotion—“they wouldn’t accept his answer. They began to rough him up. Without ID, my father was considered a stateless person, and stateless persons had no rights. They accused him of smuggling the goods that were in the lorry. He was pushed around, hit, kicked, and taken away by the soldiers in a jitney. They threw him in a prison that was packed with other Indians who, he later told me, had been treated much worse than he. When he didn’t return to work that afternoon, the bank manager did some calling around and heard what had happened. Furious that one of his workers—not to mention the bank’s lorry and all the goods—had been taken, he called the Minister of Defence and implored him to release his worker. The minister said he’d see what he could do. At three the next morning, Pa was released.”

As Prakash spoke, I realized that, forty-three years later, in telling this part of his life, he used words that were of a different time and place. Lorry. Jitney. Traders. Hooligans. Words, I thought, likely exchanged among people here who’d survived the same experiences, those people he’d told us about whose only bond was this singularly profound and defining experience. I asked him if he had been scared.

“Yes, yes. I’m coming to all of that,” he said.

I watched and listened, and it dawned on me that his experience in Uganda itself was not only a story about his family or about the history of Uganda, but it was part of Canada’s history too, as are the conditions in the Middle East that have led to the arrival of the Syrians today.

“I don’t think people ever really cared then, or today, about Uganda,” he said. “But Idi Amin was so bizarre and unpredictable, he was such a clown as a statesman, that it was he who made the news. People in the rest of the world knew more about Amin than they did about the Asians who had to leave, or about the state of Ugandan Africans once we’d left.” Without further prompting, he recounted details, and where he heard them muddled, he stopped himself, gathered his thoughts, and made his way around again. It was interesting to watch him, as he seemed, at least in my opinion, to be figuring out how to create a narrative out of his family’s experience.

“My mother was seriously ill in bed with typhoid,” he said. “Her mind was so confused she couldn’t keep track of time. When I came home from school that day, I did my homework and waited for my father to return from work so we could eat the dinner my ayah had left under a cloth on the table for us. For the last couple of days, Pa had taken my mother her meal and fed her before he and I sat down at the table. When Pa didn’t come home at the usual time, I thought nothing of it, because I knew it was a busy time at the bank, with so many traders leaving the warehousing of their goods until the very last minute before they left the country. But when my mother called out for some food, I realized that Pa was much later than usual. By this time, he would normally have telephoned to explain why he wasn’t home yet and to say when to expect him. I dished out my mother’s food and took it to her room. She had enough presence of mind to ask where he was. I was beginning to worry but didn’t let on about this to my mother. I told her he’d telephoned and said it was busy at work, and he’d come as soon as he could, so not to worry. She accepted this, and I fed her each morsel by hand, like Pa would have done. I helped her to the washroom, and back into bed. I sat in a chair in the room and watched her. I fell asleep, and when I awoke saw it was almost ten at night. I went into the dining room and looked out the window. In the distance I could hear small explosions, but this was usual. Sometimes it was fireworks and sometimes it was gunfire. Everyone had learned soon enough to differentiate between the two. It was known that Indians were being picked up on the streets, or taken from their homes with no explanation given. Ninety percent of such people were not heard from again.”

This man was a stranger to me, but I was being drawn into him by this story he was revealing in minute detail, and a party I’d attended in the late eighties flashed through my mind. There was a man there, I recalled, Ricardo, an exile from Argentina’s “Dirty War.” He was surrounded by women and his shirt was drawn up, his stomach exposed. There was a long wide scar across his chest and ragged, discolored patches of skin on his stomach. He was describing how he’d been tortured by the military. Then, later that night, I came upon him on the back porch of the house, holding the face of one of the women who’d been listening. His mouth was pressed against hers and his tongue was clearly working its way around inside her mouth. She seemed to be a willing receptacle for his trauma, and I guessed he’d expected this would happen with one or the other of the women he’d been regaling. A man came up behind me and laughed. He said, “Ah, Ricardo. Every time. He shows his wounds and never fails to score.”

Prakash kept talking over my thoughts. He was saying that he went into the kitchen and checked that the back door was locked, then walked around the house making sure all the windows, too, were locked. Back in the kitchen he took the rolling pin from a drawer. He held it in the air and swung it.

At this, Priya put her hand to her mouth and barely held back a chuckle. “Are you serious? A rolling pin?” He stopped, and the two of them burst into laughter. I did too.

He said, “I was a skinny fourteen-year-old kid. What was I to do?” Tears welled in his eyes. He took off his glasses, and Priya threw him a kitchen towel. He caught it but reached in his back pocket for a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes, all the while laughing and moaning playfully with the embarrassment of having wielded that particular weapon.

“I turned off all the lights in the house and, with only enough cast weakly from a streetlight across the road to guide me, went back and forth between crouching in the corner of the sofa, a throw pulled over to hide me, and standing at the side of the window peeping at the yard in front. I scanned the neighbors’ yards, trying to see into shadowy areas behind trees and parked cars. Every so often I tiptoed into my mother’s room and checked on her. I grew exhausted with worry, then almost sick with fear. I didn’t want to sleep, but I lay on the couch and dozed, and eventually fell into a deep sleep. Suddenly I awoke: the front door lock was being fiddled with. My heart raced so fast it felt as if it had stopped beating. I glanced at the clock and saw it was four a.m. I pulled the throw over my head and tried to sink into the couch and stop shaking. The door opened quietly, and I heard someone enter. The person was coughing into something that muffled the sound, but in a few seconds I recognized it as my father’s cough. I drew the throw back hesitantly and saw it was indeed him. Pa was barefoot and seemed to limp. He smelled of urine. I eventually stood, shakily, and was about to switch on a side lamp. Pa said, in a calm but quiet and sharp voice, ‘No. Leave it off.’ In the weak light coming in from outside, I saw his shirt was ripped, the buttons missing. There was a cut above one eye, and blood and dirt streaked the rest of his face and his arms. I began to shake and weep. Pa did not hug me but held one of my shoulders with one hand and shook me. ‘Stop it, Prakash. I am fine. No time for any of this.’ He spoke in our Gujarati rather than the Swahili he enjoyed speaking, even at home. He pushed me toward my bedroom and shut the door behind us. In a low, controlled voice, he gave me a five-minute account of the day’s happenings, and said there was a bus hired by the Canadian government leaving one of the hotels for the airport at seven a.m. We had to leave on the very first flight that morning. If we stayed even a day longer, we risked not only his being killed the instant they found him, but my mother and me as well.”

From everything I’d ever read of these kinds of situations, according to documentaries I’d seen, films, newsclips, I knew that an expelled person, or one running from mass persecutions in a country in turmoil, doesn’t simply get on a bus that happens to be going to the airport and then get on a plane and leave. Perhaps, I thought, details that people like Priya and I—people who weren’t there—wanted, and for whom such stories were a history lesson or even entertainment, were irrelevant to him. But he got to them, after breaking off a piece of bagel and putting it in his mouth. He chewed slowly and we waited.

“From the phone in the dark kitchen, Pa made some calls,” he continued. “The first three, he dialed ready to press the switch hook, and the instant he heard the line ringing he cut the call. On the fourth, in Gujarati, he said, ‘It’s me. Cricket match. I’m calling about the cricket match.’ He was quiet as the person on the other end spoke, then he said, ‘Yes. Thank you, my friend.’ That was how we all lived—with codes for the various situations, which someone you could trust would know how to decipher. The man on the phone was a friend who planned to leave the country two days later. He would come and pick us up. It was risky for him, but every day had become risky for Ugandans, regardless of whether they were African or Asian. We kept the lights in the house turned off, and Pa showered and put on clean daytime clothing. Many days before, we had decided what was to be worn out of the country when the time came, so he and I collected and laid out the clothing for the three of us. In time, we woke my mother, and Pa helped her to wash and dress. It would be many hours before she’d understand what had happened to him, learning of it only when he explained to the Canadian officers why he was a special case and had to leave the country that morning. But we’d all been aware that a day like this one could very well come, and so, despite her illness, my mother was prepared, at least mentally, for it. The friend arrived at about six a.m., and without carrying any luggage with us that might alert the soldiers at any roadblocks we were sure to encounter, we drove to the bus-meeting spot.”

Although one might have imagined the answer to her question and therefore not asked it, Priya asked, “What’s a bus-meeting spot?”

He looked at her as if everyone knew what a bus-meeting spot was. Then he said, “Oh, right. That’s what we called it. The bus-meeting spot. The place where people gathered to meet the bus that would take them to the airport. It was in the parking lot of a hotel in which Canada had set up a temporary office to register applicants, process emergency visas, and hand out boarding passes.”

I wanted to ask then about the Canadian government’s involvement. Was it a covert operation? What were the politics of their operating on Ugandan soil? But it didn’t seem like the time for an interrogation of logistics, facts, or details. By way of understanding what was being left out, I thought of the current photos that showed towns and villages in Syria being bombed and destroyed, lifeboats limping through the seas, crammed with people, people on larger ships trying to pull refugees out of the water, pictures of bodies floating in the sea—some alive, some already drowned, and the tragic little boy whose body had been washed ashore from a capsized boat. I tried to recall footage of Ugandans at the time, of the deportees, but I could only remember images from the newspapers and TV of Idi Amin in his military uniform, the red band in his green cap.

“There were hundreds of people there,” Prakash was saying, “all wanting to be handed their boarding passes for the flights that would leave the country that very day. It took what seemed like an eternity, but we were processed and were on the first bus of the day heading for the airport.

“Our bus,” he said, “was stopped eight times. The soldiers combed through, making sure that the very people they wanted out of the country had boarding passes for the flights, and that no one was trying to leave with currency of any kind, including gold. The guards frisked passengers, laughing as they touched women and girls on their private parts, and if they found any gold hidden on anybody, they roughed up that person and then pocketed the jewelry. In the days just before my mother fell ill, she had begun the process of hiding her jewelry. She didn’t have much to begin with, but into the bands and hems of the pants my father and I were to wear out of the country, she had stitched light necklaces, earrings, the stud she wore in her nose, and rings with sapphires and rubies, pearls, emeralds, and zircons, not big or expensive gems but little ones that were of astrological and religious significance, and heirlooms passed down from ancestors, and pieces that might fetch a little money if needed wherever we landed. She had two studs for wearing in her nose: a gold bead and a diamond, both of which she’d stitched into the hem of her sari. They were so light and small they would not give the sari a telltale unevenly weighted hemline. She knew too, however, that if she, an Indian woman clearly of some means, was seen to be wearing no jewelry whatsoever, it would be a sure sign that she was hiding it, and this would invite a search. So she wore a few pieces she’d decided to sacrifice if necessary. When she was told to remove them at the first stop, she remained calm but did so slowly, giving the impression that she was giving up everything she owned. My father wore a watch of no great value that had been given to him some years before for service in education. On that first stop he was made to hand it over.”

My mouth was brimming with the kinds of simplistic questions journalists and anchors on TV ask as their cameraperson closes in on the face of the interviewee to catch the frightened whisper, or the tears the questions—like instructions—are meant to provoke. He seemed moved, a little shaken by all he’d been recalling for us. I wondered if, like the Argentinian at the party, he expected something in return. Not something physical, but sympathy or admiration for having gone through such trauma. I’m not being harsh, just wondering. I was moved, but it’s what researchers do, they look at all angles. I couldn’t hold back. Wasn’t he frightened? Even as I asked, I saw what a silly question it was.

There was a slight tremor in his voice as he said, “You know, the plane we got on was totally packed. Not a seat was empty. Men, women, children. Babies, old people. I can see their faces. If I saw any of them today I would recognize them, as aged as they would be. When the plane filled up with passengers, no one uttered a single word. There was only the sound of people’s clothing brushing against the seats in the aisles, filing into their seats, the clicks of seat belts. You know, it was quiet, it was a kind of silence, yet I still hear it, very clearly. We imagined that at any minute soldiers could enter the cabin and remove any number of us from the flight. My father, for one. It seemed to take forever for us to leave the ground. When the plane finally lifted into the air, still no one spoke. For an entire hour no one seemed to breathe. All you heard was the hum and drone of the plane’s engines and of the air-conditioning. Then the public address system crackled and the pilot’s voice, faint but clear, announced that we had just crossed the Ugandan border and were now in Sudanese airspace. It took us a few seconds to believe what he’d said, and suddenly a loud cheer erupted. People burst into tears and began finally to speak, everyone, all at once. So yes, I was frightened, but I didn’t know it until that moment, until we were properly out of Uganda.”

Some kind of response was needed to break the silence in the kitchen that followed. But what does one say to a man like him? Well, I’m glad you made it out? So sorry you experienced this? Wow, were you ever brave?

I hesitantly offered, “At university I knew an Asian man from Uganda. He’d come as a refugee too. His name was Karim. He was on the student committee with me. He was a real playboy. Once we asked him what he missed most about Uganda. He said his ball boy.”

The two of them looked puzzled, and Prakash said, “Ball boy?”

“He played tennis,” I explained. “The person who fetched the balls around the court.”

Prakash said, “Ah, one of those. Well, there you go. No one was spared.”

Priya caught my eye and I could see her displeasure with my story. Before she could finish the disapproving twisting of her mouth at me, I turned away, not appreciating being policed. With my story I’d intended to hear from Prakash more about the fact that no one, meaning not even those with money to employ ball boys, was spared. His personal story was interesting, yes, but I wanted us to talk too, about the larger situation. Priya’s censure made the room feel small and tight and provincial.

Prakash jumped off his seat and excused himself to go to—as he called it while winking at me—the little boy’s room. Priya pointed in the direction of the washroom.

In a quick conciliatory gesture, I whispered to Priya, “I guess we’ve lived a happily boring existence, eh?”

She didn’t answer. I added that he’s interesting but I seemed not to have made an impression on him. “He tells a good story, but he isn’t even curious about me,” I said. “He hasn’t asked me a single question about myself. He’s not even curious about how you and I met. And he isn’t interested in the larger picture.”

She asked what I meant about the larger picture. I whispered, “The situation in Uganda back then affected every person there; it is interesting along political lines, and geographically and racially, and it would have been interesting to have had—after he’d finished with his own story, of course—some conversation that included us all. Don’t you think? It’s not as if you and I know nothing of Uganda.”

“But the story wasn’t academic. It was real, personal, and traumatic,” she said. “You veered off into the topic of class.”

She was right, of course, but I responded, “Nevertheless, he’s in my house, he could at least have asked me something about myself, or engaged with an angle I took up.” I spoke in what I hoped was a measured tone, but I surprised myself. I’m not the type to be affected by something like this. And in all truth I had been finding him fairly tolerable, yet suddenly, in talking to Priya I was being critical of him. I couldn’t stop myself. “You’d think he’d show some interest. Does he know I’m a writer? Did you tell him?”

She said no, she hadn’t, and reminded me that she hadn’t had any real conversations with him before he arrived. There was no point asking if I was to believe this, as I’d have had to reveal that I knew she had invited him here, and that they had perhaps met with each other after she and I had gotten together. There was no time for such a conversation. Then she said, “But you’re taking it way too personally. It’s not that he’s not interested in you—he doesn’t like prying. He’s always been like that. But I know it comes across as if he’s not interested in anyone but himself.”

Under my breath I said, “You can be so naive,” and began clearing the dishes.

She ignored that and said, “But seriously, that was quite an experience, don’t you think? Can’t you be a little more compassionate?”

I walked back to her and said harshly, “Priya, all that happened over forty years ago. He’s been in Canada ever since. It was a terrible thing he went through, and he took on more than a young boy should have had to. I’m not at all unsympathetic, but it’s not the first or the second or the third time he’s told that story. It was in perfect chronological order. He may not know he’s doing it, but this is how he gets attention.”

“He has earned the right to tell such a story as many times as he likes,” she responded sharply.

She intended to say more, but I cut her off. “Look, he just told us a story of very difficult events, but it’s as if it were just a story. He hasn’t mentioned a thing about how he or his parents fared since. Does he even know how he feels? Being a refugee is no reason for thoughtlessness.”

An odd smile pulled at Priya’s lips. She shook her head at me and said, “I can’t believe this is your response. You can be so cold sometimes. You’re the one being selfish. You just want him to have paid you attention.”

“And what’s wrong with that? As I said, he’s in my house,” I responded coldly. We were fighting.

“It’s my house too. He’s a guest in my house too, and I’ll ask you to please be a little kinder.”

Every interaction, no matter how unrelated, was an opportunity to underline how things were falling apart between us. I cleared the counter and put things away in the fridge. My harshness was not meant for him. I wasn’t being selfish, not entirely. I could see a closeness between her and this man, and it felt like a slap to my face. If she was capable of such closeness, why had she not been so with me? I thought of the envelope of photos of the two of them. I was seeing, and feeling, an intensity between them that predated my appearance in her life. Irrationally, I wanted to blame her, and him, for all that had gone wrong between us.

When he returned, Priya said it was time they headed out to see some of the area, but he’d just received a text about a work project, he said, and needed to go online for a few minutes. I gave him the password for the Internet, and he went up to the guest room.

She asked me to come into our bedroom and speak with her. They were going to leave soon, so I knew this would be short, and I followed her.

She slipped off her shoes and lay on her back on her side of the bed. She patted my side for me to join her. I lay down. She said nothing, and I wondered why she’d asked me in. Then she reached over and took my hand. For a few minutes we lay awkwardly like that.

“I want to apologize,” she whispered.

“For what?” I asked.

“For everything. I’m sorry I let him come here.”

“Don’t be. He’s not the problem.”

She turned and looked at me. “What is?”

The guest room is above our room, and although we don’t hear our guests conversing, nor have any said they hear us from up there, we continued to whisper.

I shook my head to say that I didn’t know. Or that I couldn’t say. Or that it was way too much to elaborate with a guest in the house. I eventually said, “I am sorry too. I’m really sorry, Priya.”

She squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. It’ll all be okay. We’ll get through this.”

I lost my breath. I didn’t let her see, but I’d begun to cry, albeit without sound.

“He seems happier than I’ve ever known him to be,” she said.

Some moments passed before I could ask, “Are you pleased he’s here?”

“I’ve known him for such a long time. Forever, actually. It’s good to see him. But we don’t really have much in common, do we?”

“Doesn’t seem so. Though he’s an okay person.”

“He’s very ordinary, I know. But he’s also extraordinary. He’s known that I’m lesbian for decades. He’s a straight, conventional, Indian family man. And yet we’ve remained friends. He’s never abandoned me. Yes, I can use that word, abandon. He’s never abandoned me.”

“We’re all victims of our pasts, aren’t we?” I said.

“I guess it’s the excuse for our present selves. But you’re right. He isn’t a bad person,” she said wearily. “He’s not cruel or mean or malicious. I’ve never known him to hurt anyone. I told you that people at the university used to tease him about how he pronounced English words, interchanging v’s for w’s and vice versa. But I was ashamed to tell you that Fiona and I—his closest friends—also teased him mercilessly. In those days, no one thought that imitating someone’s accent or teasing them about it was a form of racism. We thought we were being funny and affectionate. It never occurred to us to consider how he might have felt about it. He always laughed and played along. What else was he to do? I wouldn’t tease him anymore about that sort of thing, of course. But have you noticed: he no longer mixes up his v’s and w’s. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

The conversation was revealing—she clearly had affection, and even admiration, for him. “He’s very straight,” I said.

There was quiet upstairs. I wondered what he was doing. I didn’t want this conversation with Priya to end. It had been awhile since there had been any connection between us. I felt grateful, and at the same time terribly sad. If I could have right then, I would have put my face in her chest and bawled.

“Are you being a bigot?” she responded, and chuckled softly at her own words. “But so what? We have tons of straight friends. How different is he from any of them?”

“Come on, you know what I mean. I don’t mean heterosexual. I mean he’s ordinary, a member of the card-carrying mainstream. Years ago, I knew a guy, Rao, a Brahmin from Calcutta,” I told her, whispering. “He grew up here in Canada. He was studying English—a theory guy. He once told me he tried living with what he called women like me—intellectual, opinionated—and he’d had one long relationship with such a woman but they fought a lot, and when they broke up he agreed to a marriage arranged by family members to a nice woman from India who was not likely to challenge him. I guess that’s what he wanted in the end. Did Prakash ever really imagine he could be with a woman like you?”

“Like me? What am I like?”

We heard him come down the stairs, and Priya got up.

She stood and moved to my side of the bed and looked at me for some long seconds, waiting perhaps for an answer. I said nothing. Then she asked, tenderly, if I wanted to come with them.

For the first time, I think she really did want me to come. “No. We’re already on a path here. You go. In any case, I’m a third wheel.”

“It’s inevitable with old friendships,” she said.

I asked what time she thought they’d be back.

“We’ll be a few hours, but definitely in time for dinner,” she said, adding with a soft, heartbreaking smile, “I can’t wait to eat a meal prepared by you.”

I told her I was going to rest in bed for a while, and to say goodbye to him for me. She stood at the door watching me. I couldn’t read her mind. Then she briskly walked back, bent down, and kissed me on my lips. The scent of his cologne was still on her.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Handsome. As usual,” I answered.

She rolled her eyes and, smiling, said, “I don’t look like a flaming lesbian, do I?”

“Not ‘flaming,’” I said. “But you can’t hide what you are. Why do you care, anyway?”

“I just don’t want to be flaming.”

I did not say anything about dinner. “Take your time. Be careful.” I reached my hand out to brush her as she walked away.

When the door to the bedroom shut behind her, the tears came. I couldn’t stop crying. I heard them walk to the back of the house. Their voices faded, and then several minutes later they returned and I listened to them put on coats and boots. They were taking their time, Priya pointing out the paintings she’d made. I waited until I heard the main door close behind them. Then the screen door. Then the car doors. I got up from the bed and looked through the blinds on the bedroom window and saw the car pull out.

I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually I called Skye. Her answering message came on. I left a message telling her I was alone and she could call as soon as she liked.