Deal of the decade, the billboard said, so I called the number listed along its lip. The woman on the billboard looked like my mother, nothing in her hands, a dimple deflating her left cheek, a bracelet of crows circling her wrists. When I was little and she was asleep, I wedged pennies into those dimples, sometimes dead beetles or my own fingertips, pretending I had invented her dents. I asked her why I had none, and she said I would develop a dimple of my own only after I gave birth. She got hers when she bit the inside of her cheek while birthing me, her mouth caving into my name.

When I called the billboard's number, I was driving on the highway toward the cemetery. A woman answered: Wei? I asked what she meant by the deal of the decade. It was unclear what the billboard advertised: the woman was captioned only by a phone number. It reminded me of that game my mother and I used to play: Guess What They're Selling. For example, this commercial: [a road glazed with galloping horses, tugging a stagecoach with a blonde child inside]. It's selling the horse, I said, and she said, it's selling the child. Half the commercials were for something called insurance, and my mother said she had never heard of so many kinds of accidents. Fires, earthquakes, lost dogs. Years later, I tried explaining to her: the commercial is asking for a down-payment on loss. You assume you'll die or your house will raze itself or your dog will disassemble beneath a car, so you pay the company until/if it happens, and then someday they'll return what you risked. My mother shook her head and said people should just accept. Back in Su'ao, she said, when your house was hassled by a typhoon, the wind didn't blow money back to you. When someone died, you were owed nothing but smoke.

On the phone, the woman responded to me: We are a service. We collect your unused years and refurbish them for future use. Unused years, I repeated. Yes, she said, the bad ones, the wasted ones. The ones you spent drunk or in bed. Years you grieved or spent on sadness. Anything counts, she told me, like years one-through-three. Who remembers those? But I remembered those years: my mother rinsing me in a plastic tub, the vinegar of my skin, how she filled our house like a fire. I wanted years one-through-three to remain in my memory. I didn't want them wiped blank as bones and returned new to me. Imagine knowing you have an extra decade in the bank, the woman said. It begins with 149.99.

My mother always said: Anyone that tells you to spend is a scammer. But I still dialed numbers just to listen to the ringing. The first language I learned was call now. Call now to claim your very own [         ]. At the end of every commercial, my mother picked up her wrist and dialed it. I pressed my palm to my ear, answering. Are you calling to claim me, I said, and she laughed. Yes, but only if you come with a sibling. Another same as you.

When I didn't respond, the woman on the phone said I could call back, but her mouth snapped shut like a coin purse, counting me a loss. I want to ask one more thing, I said. The woman on the billboard, I said, where did you find her? I thought maybe I'd get a name, that face, that dimple with the depth of a nest, where I burrowed the bird of my thumb. But there was only silence, so I pulled out of the gas station and merged back onto the highway.

By the time I arrived at the cemetery, the sky was the color of a bruised forehead. I crossed the lot and walked with my phone pressed to my ear, wondering if I should call the woman back and ask her whether it was possible to erase an absence. When my mother first told me she was sick, I was six cities away. She told me not to be worried, that all those commercials lied: dying costs nothing. I know you're lying, I said, and my mother laughed and said at least when she was dead, I might come visit her more often. Don't joke like that, I said, remembering years one-through-three, when I fell asleep on her lap in front of the TV, how we were the only ones who only watched the commercials, the things in-between, the light throbbing like a loose tooth, how sometimes I still answered the phone with are you calling to claim me?

The urn squatted on a marble shelf, perforated with bird poop. Instead of her name on the urn, I'd wanted her dimple engraved, the first name I knew her by, but I couldn't remember its shape or length, only the shadow that filled it. My phone hummed, and when I picked up, the woman on the other end was begging me for a year, any year I'd lost to something, pneumonia maybe, or an accident that left me bedridden, something small to invest, maybe a handful of lost days like loose change. This time it was me who hung up. There was nothing I wanted to give her, no years I hadn't used, even the ones I spent ignoring my mother's calls, the ones I spent learning symptoms from commercials, migraines, insomnia, frequent vomiting, my mother asleep as I mopped sweat from her dimple. Accept it, she said, when a house burned down on TV, when a girl jumped onto the highway. Accept that you will recover nothing. Ring, ring, I said to my hand. I will always choose my time with you, I said to my wrist. I drove with one palm pressed to my ear, listening to my hand the whole way home, her blood voicing my veins.
.

Read her postcard.





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