My grandmother telephoned every Thursday evening at about eight, for years, and the conversation had a shape you could set a clock by. My health. Her neighbours. The price of things. And then, at the end, always the same sentence:
"You're coming on Sunday, aren't you?"
I said yes about eighty per cent of the time and came about sixty. I was twenty-four, I was working in an office in Tashkent that I hated, and Sunday was the only day that belonged to me.
She never argued when I did not come. She would say, "You're busy, aren't you?" and then talk about the neighbours again.
In October she stopped asking.
The Thursday call still came. My health, her neighbours, the price of potatoes. Then: "Well. God willing, we will see you." And she put the phone down.
I noticed it the third week, in a bus, on a Tuesday, and I sat there with my bag on my knees and understood the whole thing at once.
That tag had never been a question. Her voice went down at the end of it, every time — aren't you, not aren't you? — and a tag that goes down is not asking for information. She had known the answer before she asked. She was asking me to say yes.
And she had stopped asking because a woman of eighty-one does not go on asking for something she has been refused forty times.
I went that Sunday. She was surprised, and she hid it badly, and she had cooked nothing, and we ate bread and jam and a very old cake from a tin.
"You're not staying, are you?" she said, at about four.
"I am," I said. "Let's do the gutter at the back, shall we?"
She is ninety-one. She telephones on Thursdays. She asks the question again, at the end, in exactly the old way, and her voice goes down, and she is not asking for information — she is asking me to say yes, and I say yes, and now I go.
You do not hear those two words in a grammar book. You hear them in somebody's voice, and then one week you do not hear them, and you count what that means.