Palaver

In Tokyo, a son works as an English tutor and spends his nights drinking with friends at a gay bar. He is caught up in a sexual relationship with a married man. He has built a chosen family in Japan, but he is estranged from his relatives in Houston, above all his mother. Her preference for his troubled, homophobic brother, Chris, was what drove him to leave home. Then, in the weeks before Christmas, ten years after they last saw each other, his mother turns up uninvited on his doorstep.

With only the son's cat, Taro, between them, the two bristle against each other from the start. The mother wrestles with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, and tries to square her good intentions with her mistakes. The son struggles to forgive.

As life nudges them in unexpected directions, the mother toward a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son toward cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar, each begins to see the other more clearly. Over shared meals, conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try to work out where home really is, and whether they might find it in each other.

Bryan Washington is also the author of the story collection Lot and the novel Memorial.