By CHELSEA BOLAN

When I got home from school that day, my mother was clearly excited about something.  She must have been watching for me from the window, because she met me at the door, and behind her I could see something denim folded up on the table beside the teapot. “I have a special treat for you,” she said. My heart ballooned in my chest. Levi’s. All at once I wanted to hug her and rush past her to put them on, I wanted to dance around the apartment like I never did, and I wanted more things, too—for my father to emerge from where he had been hiding all my life, the closet, or the jungles of Africa or Mexico, stepping from the shadows, framed by the doorway. 

She took my hand and walked with me over to the table. My heart began to deflate the closer we got, for it was clear that what was folded up there wasn’t a pair of Levi’s, but a length of raw fabric that had been created to rival Western denim. My mother was so happy that she seemed to slip outside her own body, snapping out the fabric like a flag, running her hand down it, wrapping it around my waist, nearly singing her words, because she thought she had given me what I wanted, that this would then be enough for me: this apartment, this city, this country, and my mother.