When I first invented her, I asked Pa many questions about her. Apparently, she was in her thirties, financially independent and a single mother whose daughter was just three years younger than I was. I felt an irrational hatred of the invented floozie and her child, as if they were going to take my Pa away. Worse still, the floozie was Chinese, and there had always been the real fact that Pa's grandmother had wanted him to marry a Chinese woman. I made Pa promise that he wouldn't leave my mother, at least until I was grown up and had left home. That sounds rather selfish now, putting my happiness above that of my mother's, but it was how I felt at the time. He agreed, so long as I didn't stay too long after I was an adult. He said it with a smile in his voice and eyes, so I knew he had no intention of leaving. That made me happy, but still I kept attacking him with the floozies at every opportunity, as if to punish him for scaring me.

A few months after I discovered the phone, Pa started using it openly instead of his old model. He said he was going through a midlife crisis and was trying to be trendy. He gave his old phone into a recycling centre, where they did some charitable good with it, use in the third world or green disposal or something. I felt relieved that whatever its original purpose had been was now over. Even so, I have always had a nagging doubt in my mind about it, right up until a few minutes ago, when the doctor said that I had better go in and see Pa.

Return to stories