Oh, Brandon, I swear to God in heaven on high, you are gonna be some kind of lady-killer when you grow up. It’s all over, honey-pie. They are not gonna be able to keep their hands off of you.

When the telephone awakened him he had felt an immediate, overwhelming sense of sadness. He had abandoned his mother, indeed his entire family, for this odd and unproductive life. He had never decided to. It had simply happened, one tragedy and one failure at a time, until he no longer had a place to come home to without having to explain it all, and it would have taken forever to explain. His father had died while he was on a security detail for an oil company in a remote section of Indonesia. He missed the funeral and had yet to visit the grave. He had not visited his mother in ten years. He called her now and then when he was in Hawaii, holding stilted and disjointed conversations about her tulips and her dogs, but the same reasons that had kept him in Asia after the war somehow prevented him from going home.

Okay, where would we begin? Long time no see. So here’s how this disaster happened. I fell in love with a woman and kept killing bad guys so that I could stay with her, I mean everybody needs a job, and finally they killed her because I was too good at my job, and then I killed them back for her until the killing ended, more or less, and when that was over what was I supposed to do, come home and apply for a job at the Chamber of Commerce?

In the dream his mother was calling to him and now it was Van on the telephone calling to him, or maybe it had been Van all along as he struggled to awaken, rather than the voice of his mother in a dream. But when he finally came out of his stupor all he could say was—

“I’m sorry.”

She laughed at that. “What are you talking about? Are you awake?”

And now he was, finally, fully awake. He sat up in his bed, surrounded by the overwhelming darkness and the whining of the motorbikes below, and realized that he was indeed back in Sai Gon. At least for a day or two.

“Van?”

She laughed again, and yet he heard a nervous edge in her voice. “Who else did you think it was? Should I be worried that you asked me that?”

He shook his head, snapping his brain into gear, and finally chuckled. “I was dreaming about my mother.”

“That is a good sign,” she said almost happily. “Your mother visiting you in a dream just as I am calling you. A very good sign.”