The phone blared in my ear as I gazed across the classroom. The students were feeling boisterous after two hours of testing, tossing their toys and puzzle pieces out onto the carpet. It was their free period, and I was giving them a bit of extra time. At just eight years old, the children of Al-Jarra needed this opportunity to be unruly and loud.

When she answered the phone, my mother’s voice was music to my ears. Despite her illness, her voice was still a stronghold for me. Something I needed to feel alive.

“Mom? Oh gosh. It’s so good to hear you,” I said, turning away from the children for a moment. It felt almost too intimate, speaking to my mother in front of them. Revealing so much of myself.

“Angie.” My mother’s voice croaked slightly, showing her fatigue. It was only six in the morning all the way in South Dakota. “How are the kids today?”

Sweeping my hand through my raven-black hair, I flashed a smile at one of my smaller students, who tossed a pile of markers from the shoebox, letting them roll across the ground.

“Chaotic, as usual,” I said, chuckling. “They just finished their testing. Can you believe they need two hours of testing at eight years old?”

“They would never have kept you in a chair that long as a kid, Angie,” my mother said, growing warmer. “You always had such a fire about you.”

My heart hammered in my chest, beating up toward my throat. I felt the tears begin to form in my eyes, blurring my eyesight.

“How are you feeling, Mom?” I finally asked her, the dreaded words that I so often tried to avoid, if I could. The words that so often had a horrible answer. “You had that doctor’s appointment the other day…”

“Oh, honey, I’m fine,” my mother said, trying to gloss over the fact of the tumor, of the diagnosis that had left us stricken for months.

At the back of the room, two students began to scuffle over a toy. I watched as one of them, Jamar, yanked at the plastic truck, falling back into the trash can. The other kid throttled forward, gripping the truck and trying to nab it back as Jamar began to kick his feet in the air.

I rushed forward, pointing my finger at them. I heard the strain in my voice, the fear from speaking with my mother.

“Hey! The two of you need to cut it out and learn to share,” I told them, my eyes gleaming with the kind of anger that only comes when it’s coupled with intense, internal emotion. “If you don’t, you’ll need to sit at your desks for the rest of free period. Do you want that?”

Slowly, they shook their heads and stumbled back onto their feet. They gave me wounded looks, and then began to vroom the trucks around the carpet. I took several steps back, lifting the phone back to my ear. I heard my mother’s chuckle on the other end.

“You’ve really put your foot down, haven’t you?” she asked, joking.

“I don’t know what else to do with them,” I laughed, rolling my eyes.

I stepped back toward the chalkboard, giving the class space once more. On the other end, my mother’s voice waned.

“How are you doing, baby?” she asked. “Have you tried dating anyone lately? Have you found some new friends?”

She was anxious about my recent move to a new location in Al-Jarra, knowing I’d left people behind. I’d only been in the new city for a few weeks, and, it was true, I felt the aching loneliness that comes with a new scene, a new start.

In the back of my mind, I reminded myself that this was necessary. That each day, I fought for a paycheck for my mother. That each day, the scholarship program provided me with room and board, keeping me alive, and always contributing.

I would be one of the reasons my mother remained alive. I had to be.

“I’m working on it,” I told her, trying to smile through the tears that glimmered down my cheeks. “But as far as dating, who on earth has time for that?”

“You should make time, honey,” my mother continued, her voice waning even more.

“Mom.” I felt my throat catch. I knew I was about to give into a wave of pain and horrible sadness. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m sending another check over to you at the end of this week. I get paid on Thursday night—”

“Oh, honey, stop it,” my mother whispered, rasping. “You need that money. You work hard for it. I don’t want you to—”

“Mom, don’t be silly,” I said, feeling exasperated. “It’s part of the reason I’m here. I can live off the scholarship and—”

“Tell me you’re there for reasons besides me, baby. Otherwise, I want you to come home,” my mother murmured, making my throat tighten.

My gaze wandered toward the window and I stared out at the gorgeous Middle Eastern landscape. The mountains in the distance, shimmering with sunlight. Beyond that, the ocean churned on in all its turquoise and white caps, a sight I’d grown accustomed to on weekend hikes. The people were warm, alive in ways that the people in my South Dakotan town were not. They simply couldn’t be; times were hard, and smiles were hard to come by.

“I do like it here, Momma. I just miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

I swallowed sharply, closing my eyes. In the background, I could hear the grumbling voice of my father—deeper, darker, from years of cigarette smoking, a habit he’d promptly quit after my mother’s diagnosis.

“Can I talk to her?” I heard him say.

Soon, the phone was passed to him. I could visualize it clearly: my parents, Sarah and Joe Peretti, poised at the kitchen table, watching as the sun rose over the bright green grass in the front yard. I’d seen it countless times before.

“Hey, baby girl,” my father said, his voice still gravelly, filled with something ominous. I felt the unrest within him. I knew, somehow, that the wave was about to crash down around me. In the back of the classroom, two girls began to bicker over a doll, but I held back, feeling latched into another world.

“Daddy,” I whispered. “Is Mom really okay? She sounds weaker than she did last week. And I know you had that appointment. You can’t keep things like this from me.”

I could hear my father’s footsteps as he moved away from the kitchen. I heard the click of the door, telling me that he was locking himself away in his study. After clearing his throat again, he said, “It’s true that we didn’t get good news, Angie. But I don’t want you to panic about it.”

Shooting down into the chair beneath me, I felt my knees begin to quiver. “Please, Dad. Don’t keep this from me.”

“We found out that the tumor is growing larger, Angie. And the doctors are fearful that the cancer will spread if they don’t do the surgery soon.”

“But Dad, we can’t afford the surgery yet…” I rasped, trailing off. “Can’t they do something? Do the surgery first, have us pay for it later? It seems like time is really important. Why can’t they see that?”

My dad grunted, sounding aghast. “You try to tell these guys that you can’t pay. They just wave you out the door, telling you to get better insurance.”

“And the checks I’ve been sending? Still not enough?” I asked, knowing the weight of the truth. It was never going to be enough. The type of surgery she needed was in the hundreds of thousands, far more than my paltry teaching paycheck.

“It’s helping, baby,” my dad told me. “It’s just not quite enough right now. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe I can take on another job,” I stuttered, my mind racing. I didn’t yet speak Arabic, but I could stagger through anything at a side job. I could work at the grocery store, or as a waitress. With enough fumbling and hand gestures, I saw no reason this couldn’t be my life. A life devoted to sending money home.

I would strive as long as I could to keep my mother alive.

“Let’s talk about something else,” my father said, his voice gritty and tinged with tears. “How are you doing, all the way over there? Your mother won’t stop talking about how you need to date. You’re 25 now, baby. You should start looking for someone. Even if it has to be someone from across the planet.”

Snickering, I drew my fingers beneath my eyes, mopping up the tears. “Yeah right.”

“Just think about it, will you? If these are your mother’s last few months on earth, then just know she wants you to be living your life the way you want to. Not just struggling to make us comfortable over here.”

“Ha.”

“I know. Selfishness was never one of your strong suits,” my dad said, chortling. “You were always giving the kids at school your toys. You gave them away right and left. Couldn’t keep anything in the house.”

“I wasn’t that good,” I sighed, frustration brimming. “I was never as good as you thought I was.”

“You’re right. You were better.”

The call ended a few minutes later, with my father having to leave and help my mother brew a pot of coffee. Apparently, she was now too weak to hold up a pot of water, to pour it into the top of the machine.

I shuddered as I said goodbye, feeling the tears rally once more. A sob escaped my throat, and then another one. Before long, I was a crumpled mess on my desk chair, mopping at my eyes with a pile of Kleenex.

When I finally blinked my eyes open, I realized the entire second grade class—all nineteen of them—were gathered around me. One of them, a little girl named Aya, had her hand across my shoulder, patting it softly. Many of the kids looked self-assured, certain that if they could just be there for me, I would be all right.

“What happened, Miss Peretti?” one of them whispered, his accent erring on the side of British, despite being raised in Al-Jarra. His parents were English, and spoke in that accent at home. Yet he’d taken on a few of my American slang words, dipping into one dialect after another. One culture after the next.

“Just a bit of trouble at home,” I told him, sniffing. “Sometimes it feels very far away. But you must know that.”

He nodded, his eyes growing wide, like saucers. “I know it,” he murmured. “But it’s going to be okay.”

After a while, I gathered myself together, asking the students to return to their seats. Lifting the textbook from the shelf, I asked them to turn to chapter three. And, as we staggered forward together, we began to learn more English vocabulary, more phrases. But they looked at me with large, understanding eyes, telling me, over and over again: I wasn’t alone.