opacities

My mother drove down to visit last night. When I came home from work, she was sitting in the living room, a laptop on her lap. "Let's go out to dinner," she said and I put on a sweater and a coat. Walking down the hill, I pulled my hands up inside my sleeves. "Are you all right?" asked my mother. "Just a little cold," I said.

The restaurant that we wanted to go to had a sign on the front door that said "Closed For Private Event," so we went to the Chinese restaurant next door. "I think we went here last time I was here," said my mother. "I think we're sitting at the exact same table." I examined the watercolor scrolls on the wall and realized that she was right. My mother ordered tea and I asked for water and we both read our menus. There were so many things that we didn't want to talk about that we said almost nothing at all.

I explained what I was doing at work. My mother told me about the book she was working on. The waiter brought the food on a huge silver-colored tray and we watched him use a spoon to roll the moo-shi neatly into its wrappers. "I've never seen them do that before. Have you?" asked my mother.

She spooned out rice and some of the chicken dish she had ordered. "These are wonderful," she said, "Would you like some?" "No, thanks" I said and concentrated on using a chopstick to poke holes in the Peking ravioli. I thought about lots of things, most of them sad.

We ate slowly and, when we were done, the waiter brought the bill and two fortune cookies. "I prefer the vanilla ones to the chocolate," said my mother. I cracked my cookie open and read the fortune out loud: "Faith is not only belief. It is also full." "Full?" said my mother "That can't be right." I passed the piece of paper across the table. "I think you're right," I said. "It must be a misprint or maybe a mistranslation." "Probably," said my mother. We stared down at our hands, considering, but, in the end, neither of us could even guess at what the fortune writer had been trying to say.