Galway Review 8 - April 2020

while he asks us for money time after time towards the
end of every month?
I wanted to ask more of Sara, that was her name, but at
the last moment I hesitated. It seemed to me that I
would mess up their relationship and addle my brain as
well. I had never been very clear about my relationship
with my son. He used to leave things half said as if he
was implying something. Our conversations resembled
the muted cracks of ice in a half-frozen pond. In most
cases I had to guess the rest of his unspoken words.
When I tried to reformulate his answer to show that I
had understood him he muttered a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. His
muteness stressed the lack of understanding between
us. Our relationship was sailing into thick mists and I
was not surprised any more that the ship of our
communication, instead of being in friendly harbours,
was drifting towards rocky windswept shores.
These were the things I was wondering about after we
said goodbye to young Sara. My wife was silent but I felt
that she was boiling. It was clear that she was
concerned. I had told her about last night’s
conversation. She had considered it a joke, a word
game, or a metaphor. Probably he had been with
another girl and did not want to worry us because he
knew that we liked Sara. But we liked Sara for him, not
for us! ‘This girl is sweet’, my wife had once said.
We sat in another café plunging in reflections. Then
abruptly my wife’s mobile phone tinkled. She opened it.
There was a message on WhatsApp from our son. It
ran: ‘I’m in a terrible predicament. Mimi gave birth this
morning and two of her five kittens were born dead.
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