Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
Sixty seconds of silence followed on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to go through that again. What did you say?”
I repeated myself again but dropped the bit about grammatical versus vocabulary errors, since I feared I might be going over his head.
“So,” he began right away, which was promising. Then he stopped, and another sixty seconds of silence followed. “So what do you want to know exactly?”
“If he needs to get a medical exam before applying or not,” I said. I didn’t lose my patience because people had recently told me if you lost your patience with the INS, they had you deported. “Does he need the results of the medical exam with the application, or is that something he will be sent to do later?”
Again there was an extraordinarily long stretch of silence. “So you want to order an Adjustment of Status form, is that it?” the man on the other end said out of the blue.
I stared at the receiver, deciding he must be drugged. “No. I have the form. I want to know if my husband needs to get a medical exam or not.”
“Okay. Sorry. Umm . . . let me think a minute here.” He wasn’t kidding about the minute. I sat at my desk watching the clock hands tick around. “So you want to know what exactly?” the man said.
“If my husband needs to do a medical exam or not.”
“So you want to be admitted to the U.S.?”
I ripped out a large chunk of hair. “I live in the U.S. I am a U.S. citizen. I want to know if my husband needs a medical exam to adjust his status or not.”
“Well, generally . . .” The silence this time lasted two full minutes. I had a clock right in front of me, and I am not exaggerating. “Where are you applying now?”
“Through the local INS office in Charlotte.”
“Well, generally, if you submit forms, they’ll tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Just, you know.”
I swear my voice stayed patient. “If I don’t submit the right forms, they’ll reject this whole application.”
“Well, maybe they won’t,” he said chirpily.
“But if they do, we’ll be delayed six months and have to pay another six hundred dollars to have the application reconsidered.”
“Yes, well, okay, then,” said the guy on the other end. What, did he get a commission?
I drew a deep breath. “So should we do the medical exam ahead of time or not?”
“That’s what you should do then,” the man said and hung up.