“Yes, we’re going shopping, and then we’re getting together with his friends from the birding club.” She rolled her eyes. “God help me.” I cracked up at the look of horror on her face. But as much as she griped about Jim’s hobby, the last few times I’d seen her, she’d woken me up before dawn to take me bird-watching with her. “At least it’s at that new Caribbean restaurant that opened a few months ago. We need to go when you visit—the owner’s Dominican.” She delivered that news like the Obamas had just moved to her neighborhood. But she caught up to me soon enough. “Don’t distract me, Desta. I was going to ask you something. Has that man called you? I talked to your Tía Lily and she said she saw the wedding announcement in one of the Santo Domingo papers. The nerve that little boy has after wasting your time for two damn years.”

Oh man, if we went down this particular road, I’d be here until dinner. “No, I made it very clear to Miguel the last time we talked that I had nothing left to say to him.” The finality in my voice was a new development I knew was at least partly related to a certain Ethiopian psychologist. “I doubt he’s going to be calling me.”

She looked primed to go on yet another rant about how Miguel was the embodiment of evil, and I was not in the mood. At least her earlier sadness was fully gone now and replaced by righteous fury. That’d definitely take her mind off my dad.

“I got to go, Mamí. I have to shower and get a little bit of work done before Saba comes to pick me up.” I was probably going to take a nap, since I’d gotten very little sleep. Not that I regretted it in the slightest.

She nodded, but I could tell she was trying to get a read on my dismissal of Miguel, and we were not going there. “Okay, papí, bendición. Be careful. Love you.”

My mother always told me to be careful, even when I was thousands of miles away and she literally had no control over what I did, but she had to get that in there.

“Bendición, Mamí, I love you too.”

That blessing, or bendición, was also a must in every conversation with my mom. Despite the fact that neither of us had gone to a church for anything other than a funeral or a wedding ever since I could remember, I could not get off the phone without asking for a blessing. Who was granting said blessing was yet to be determined, but it had been our sign off my whole life.