PART II

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG

ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS III

The Cagekeeper and Other Stories

Bluesman

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG

ANDRE DUBUS III

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY | NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright © 1999 by Andre Dubus III

All rights reserved
First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dubus, Andre, 1959–
House of sand and fog / Andre Dubus III.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-07035-4
ISBN-10: 0-393-07035-2
I. Title.
PS3554.U265H68 1999
813'.54—dc21 98-35255
CIP

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

For my brother, Jeb, and for my four sisters,
Suzanne, Nicole, Cadence, and Madeleine

Beyond myself

somewhere
I wait for my arrival

—From “The Balcony” by Octavio Paz

I am grateful to Capt. John Wells of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department for all of his generous technical advice. I am indebted to my old friend Kourosh Zomorodian, who for two years was my Farsi teacher over Friday night pitchers of Lone Star Beer in Austin, Texas. With gratitude, as well, to Ali Farahsat for relieving me of some of my ignorance of Persian culture. Thanks also to my agent, Philip Spitzer, for his faith and determination.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my diligent and gifted editor, Alane Salierno Mason.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG

Contents

PART I

PART II

PART I

THE FAT ONE, THE RADISH TOREZ, HE CALLS ME CAMEL BECAUSE I AM Persian and because I can bear this August sun longer than the Chinese and the Panamanians and even the little Vietnamese Tran. He works very quickly without rest, but when Torez stops the orange highway truck in front of the crew, Tran hurries for his paper cup of water with the rest of them. This heat is no good for work. All morning we have walked this highway between Sausalito and the Golden Gate Park. We carry our small trash harpoons and we drag our burlap bags and we are dressed in vests the same color as the highway truck. Some of the Panamanians remove their shirts and leave them hanging from their back pockets like oil rags, but Torez says something to them in their mother language and he makes them wear the vests over their bare backs. We are upon a small hill. Between the trees I can see out over Sausalito to the bay where there are clouds so thick I cannot see the other side where I live with my family in Berkeley, my wife and son. But here there is no fog, only sun on your head and back, and the smell of everything under the nose: the dry grass and dirt; the cigarette smoke of the Chinese; the hot metal and exhaust of the passing automobiles. I am sweating under my shirt and vest. I have fifty-six years and no hair. I must buy a hat.

When I reach the truck, the crew has finished their water and the two Chinese light new cigarettes as they go back to the grass. The Panamanians have dropped their cups upon the ground around their feet and Tran is shaking his head, and saying something in his language as he stoops to pick them up with his hands. Mendez laughs. He is almost as big as the radish and there is a long burn scar the color of sand upon one of his fat arms. He sees me looking at it as I drink my ice water and he stops his laughing, no longer does he even smile, and he to me says: “What you looking at, viejo?”

I drink from my cup and let him look at my eyes. His brothers have started to go back to work but now they stop to watch.

“Old maricón,” says Mendez. He takes up his trash spear from the orange tailgate, but my eyes look at the burn again long enough for him to see. His face becomes more ugly than it already is and he yells something at me in his language and his teeth are very bad, like an old dog’s. I don’t give him rest from my eyes and so now he steps to me, yelling more, and I smell him, last night’s wine and today’s sweating of it, and now Torez is yelling louder than Mendez. Again it is in their mother tongue and it is over quickly because Mendez knows this crew can manage very fine without him, and he needs money for his sharob, his wine. He is goh, the shit of life. They are all goh.

“Vamonos, Camello.” Torez moves by me and closes the tailgate. Tran is already working ahead of the truck while the smoking Chinese and the lazy Panamanians walk to the shade of the trees, pretending there is trash there.

I pull my sack over my shoulder and to Mr. Torez I say: “In my country I could have ordered him beaten.”

“Sí, Camello? In Mendez’s country he would have beaten you himself.”

“I was colonel, Mr. Torez. I was colonel in the Imperial Air Force. Do you know this, Mr. Torez? I was a colonel.”

He hands to me my garbage spear and looks me in my eyes. His are gavehee, brown as coffee, like all his people, like my people also. But I see he has made up his mind about me.

He says to me, to Genob Sarhang Massoud Amir Behrani: “Okay, Colonel, but today I’m Señor General. Comprende?”

At the lunch hour, Torez drives the highway truck down to the trees and we all remove our paper sacks from where we left them in the tool chest this morning. We eat in the shade. Many times Tran eats with me and I do not mind this because the little Vietnamese speaks no English and I am able to do my work in the classified pages of the newspaper. In my country, I was not only a desk officer; I bought F-16 jets from Israel and the United States, and when I was a captain in Tehran, a genob sarvan, I worked on the engines with my own hands. Of course, all the best aerocompanies are here in California but in four years I have spent hundreds of dollars copying my credentials; I have worn my French suits and my Italian shoes to hand-deliver my qualifications; I have waited and then called back after the correct waiting time; but there is nothing. I have had only one interview and that was with a young girl in college who I believe the company was simply giving personnel experience. That was over two years past.

But today and all week, I do not even attempt to look for a position. My daughter Soraya was married on Saturday and I feel already there is a hole in my chest with her gone. There is also a hole in our home, but now we are free to leave that place that has cost me three thousand dollars per month for four years. And I turn straight to this area called Legal Notices/Auctions. This is a part of the paper I have never before investigated. I have been speaking and reading English for over twenty-five years but the language of law in both our countries seems designed to confuse. Of course I know what is an auction, and this morning, when the air was still cool and we garbage soldiers sat upon the metal floor of the highway truck as it drove under the tall span of the golden bridge, the smell of the ocean behind us, I held the newspaper tight in my lap so no wind would touch it and that is when I saw the short notice of Seized Property for Sale, a three-bedroom home. Though of course this has not been my plan. My plan has been highly simple: stop spending money from home so we may use it to start some sort of business. I have been looking into many possibilities; a small restaurant, or a laundry, a video store perhaps. Though I know these American papers, I know what they say of this economy, still I see small shops going out of business on both sides of the bay. And of course we have no money for to buy a house as well, but there are many auctions in my country. There it is known as the legal way to rob.

Tran is eating rice and vegetables with a large plastic spoon from waxy paper in his lap. He is very small and yellow-brown. There are deep lines around his mouth and between his eyes upon his forehead. He smiles and nods at my own food. I eat rice also. Soraya used to save the tadiq for me, the hard cake of rice at the bottom of the pot Americans throw away, but for us, for Persians, it is the jewel. We cook it with very much butter so when the pot is turned upside down all the rice comes out onto the plate, even the brown and burned part we call tadiq. Now, each night, my wife, Nadereh, saves half for my lunch. She also packs for me radishes, bread, one apple, and a small thermos of hot tea. The Panamanians watch me pour the steaming tea into my cup and they shake their heads as if I am a stupid child. They do not know what I know of the heat, that there must be a fire inside you to match the one outdoors. At Mehrabad, my base near Tehran, sometimes the tarmac would become so bright off the sands even we officers, with our European sunglasses, would close our eyes. Of course we spent most of the days inside our air-conditioned offices. Many times there, between appointments or briefings, I would have my attendant phone Nadi at our home in the capital city. She and I would speak of the small events of the day, then she would let the children to the telephone. One morning, when my son Esmail was one and a half years, he said his first word to me, then, over the wire: “Bawbaw-joon,” father most dear.

With my fingers I tear out the small notice of the home to be auctioned and place the paper in my front shirt pocket beneath my vest. Today is Wednesday, the only day I do not work my night position at a small convenience store in El Cerrito, a neighborhood where I am not likely to see any Persian people, not the rich ones, the pooldar, those who live alongside us in that high-rise of overpriced apartments on its hill overlooking the bay and San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. In four years, this two-bedroom flat has cost me over one hundred forty thousand dollars in rent. But I will not let myself think of that now. I cannot.

Tran finishes his lunch. With his fingers he brushes off the wax paper and folds it neatly before putting it back into the bag with the plastic spoon. He pulls out a chocolate bar and offers to me a portion, but I shake my head as I sip my tea. I know that he will use that tired paper for his lunch tomorrow, and the spoon will probably last him half the year. I know, like me, he is a father, perhaps even a grandfather. And perhaps I will be a grandfather soon as well.

Of course I argued many times for a more reasonable place to live, but Nadi fought me; we must keep up our appearance. We must act as if we can live as we are accustomed. All because it was the time of hastegar for our Soraya, when young men from good families send roses to her and our family, when their fathers call me to talk, and their mothers call Nadi to introduce. If there is no family match, there can be no match. And naturally, because our daughter is very beautiful, with long straight black hair, a small face, and the eyes of a queen, she had many offers and of course could not make up her mind. Meanwhile, Nadi had to make certain our daughter did not attract any common Persians; she ordered all the best furniture and lamps and carpets. On the walls she has hung French paintings, and the mosaic-frame portrait of the battle of martyrdom in the Karbala. On the silver coffee table are crystal bowls filled with pistachios, dates, and fine chocolates. And near the sliding glass doors to the terrace are fresh green plants as large as small trees.

There are many other Persians living in the building, all rich, all pooldar. Many of them are lawyers and surgeons. One was a judge in Qom, our holy city before it became the headquarters for the mad imam, but the mullah is dead now and we still are on the list of those who will be hanged or shot if we are to return home. He left behind many such lists as that.

I think of these things as I look over at Mendez, sleeping in the shade, his brown stomach visible beneath his peerhan. When we flew from France—Nadi, Esmail, and I—I carried bank checks worth two hundred eighty thousand dollars. A man like Mendez would drink that money, of this I am quite certain. But many nights my sleep does not come when I think of how unwisely I let that sum be burned up, burned because my dear Nadereh could not and cannot bear to let other families know we have next to nothing left from the manner in which we used to live. If I had been stronger with her, if I had not been so sure I would have work soon with Boeing or Lockheed, making a respectable salary, then I most for certain would have invested in real estate. I would have told Soraya her hastegar must wait for a year or two, I would have rented us a modest apartment under one thousand dollars per month, and I would have purchased a partnership in an office building or perhaps even a residential property in a growing neighborhood of new homes. I would have watched the market like a wolf, then, in short order, I would have sold for an honest profit only to do it again.

We have forty-eight thousand dollars remaining, this is all, an amount my fourteen-year-old son will need for the first two years of university alone. It has been my hope to begin a business with this, but I fear now to lose it all, to become bankrupt like so many Americans. Of course, I have always seen the samovar as half full, and Nadi may have been right; Soraya has married a quiet young engineer from Tabriz. He holds two Ph.D.s in engineering and we can rest to know she will be taken care of and I thank our God for that. The young man’s father is dead and that is a pity because he is supposed to have been a fine businessman, a possible partner for myself. Perhaps it is the seized property I must begin to view, the used, the broken, the stolen. Perhaps there is where we can get our start.

BECAUSE OUR WORK is finished at half past three, the sun is still high as Torez drives us through San Francisco down Van Ness Street. I sit with Tran and the Chinese opposite the Panamanians, and I look over the pig’s head of Mendez—he stares at me with the tanbal eyes, the lazy eyes of a man who wants sleep then more wine—and I regard all the mansions of Pacific Heights, the high walls covered with white and yellow flowers, the iron gates that allow in only fine European automobiles: Porsches, Jaguars, even Lamborghinis, the cars of the old Tehran. My driver in the capital city, Bahman, he drove for me a gray Mercedes-Benz limousine. Inside was a television, a telephone, and a bar. Under Shah Pahlavi, we all had them. All the high officers of the Imperial Air Force had them.

The skin of my head is burning. Each morning, Nadi gives to me a sun-blocking lotion I rub there, but now, even with the warm wind in the open truck, my scalp burns and I promise to myself again I will purchase a hat. We continue south through the city past Japantown and its five-acre Japan Center, where one can buy electronics, porcelain, and pearls. Many Persian wives from our building shop there, and so I must sit low in the bed of the truck and stay in this manner until Torez turns onto Market Street, then down to Mission Street, where is the Highway Department’s depot. He drives us under a freeway, past a movie theater which shows films only in the Spanish language. On both sidewalks are no pooldar people, only workers, cargars, brown-skinned men and women carrying bags for their shopping. And there are many small food stores, restaurants, laundries, and clothing shops, and they are owned by the Nicaraguan people, the Italians, and Arabs, and Chinese. Last spring, after our thirty-day fast of Ramadan, I from an Arab purchased a shirt in his shop near the overpass bridge. He was an Iraqi, an enemy of my people, and the Americans had recently killed thousands of them in the desert. He was a short man, but he had large arms and legs beneath his clothes. Of course he began speaking to me right away in his mother tongue, in Arabic, and when I to him apologized and said I did not speak his language, he knew I was Persian, and he offered to me tea from his samovar, and we sat on two low wooden stools near his display window and talked of America and how long it had been since we’d last been home. He poured for me more tea, and we played backgammon and did not speak at all.

Torez drives into the dark building that smells of motor oil and dust. It is so large it reminds me of an airplane hangar, which I appreciate. He parks the truck beside the gas pumps opposite the office and we crew of garbage soldiers walk to punch our time cards. But Mendez and one of his friends stay behind. Each day it is different who Torez will choose for tool and truck cleaning duty, and I am certain the pig Mendez holds me responsible for today. I walk through the bright truck yard surrounded by a tall chain fence and I carry nothing but my newspaper and bag and thermos. Every day at this time it is the same; my back and legs are stiff, my head and face are burned by the sun, and I must walk four city blocks to Market Street to the Concourse Hotel where I pay to keep my white Buick Regal in their underground parking facility. Of course it is an added expense, but there is no secure location for my auto so close to the Highway Department. Also, it gives to me opportunity to clean myself and change clothes before returning home.

In the beginning I would enter the hotel through the carpeted lobby. At this time of day there is only one employee at the desk, a man of forty years with very short black hair and a large black mustache. He is dressed in a fine suit, but pinned in one of his ears is a tiny bright diamond. Each day he would regard me in my work clothes dirty from road dust, wet with my sweat, and each time he would ask, “May I help you, sir?” Soon enough I stopped explaining and simply pointed to the elevator I would take to the garage. But one afternoon, when there was a well-dressed lady and gentleman settling their account at the desk, the diamond man, the kunee, the one who gives ass, who in my country would be hanged, he looked over their shoulders and asked very loud of me: “May I help you, sir?” The lady and gentleman turned around, and I could see they were tourists, perhaps Germans, but they viewed me no longer than a man would take for a dead insect upon his windshield while driving. And for the thousandth time in this terrible country I wished to be wearing my uniform, the perfectly tailored uniform of an honorable colonel, a genob sarhang in the King’s Air Force, the King of Kings, Shahanshah Reza Pahlavi, who three times in my career his hand I kissed, twice at formal gatherings at Sadabaad Palace, once at the grand home of my dear friend General Pourat. But of course my uniform then, in the lobby of the Concourse Hotel, was damp work clothes with blades of grass on my lower pants, dust on my back. So I did nothing but move quickly away, once again the hot blood of a killer dropping from my heart to my hands.

Now I simply eliminate the lobby and every day walk down the concrete auto ramp into the shadowed belly of the building, where I unlock my automobile and retrieve the clothes I wore early this morning. I am never certain if there will be Persians in the elevator of our apartment building or not. In the cooler months I wear a suit, but now, in summer, I wear a short-sleeve dress shirt and tie, dress pants, and polished shoes with socks and belt. I leave these in a zipped garment bag laid out quite neatly in the trunk. The hotel elevator is carpeted and air-conditioned. I breathe the cool air into my lungs and soon I am in the second-floor lavatory opposite the ice machine, where I remove the auction notice from my front pocket, pull off my shirt, and wash my hands and bare arms and face. I shave for the second time today. I dry myself with the hotel’s clean paper towels, and I use cologne on my cheeks and deodorant under my arms. Today I change into brown slacks, a white pressed shirt, and a tan silk tie. I fold the auction notice into my wallet, wrap my work clothes and shoes in paper, then put them in the garment bag. When I step into the hallway and walk to the elevator, my covered clothes over my arm, my tie knotted correctly and straight, and my face shaved clean, I pass a Filipino maid pushing her cart and I take notice that she smiles. And even bows her head.

THE GENTLEMAN FROM the San Mateo County Tax Office gave to me a map for finding this home to be auctioned. He informed me to arrive by nine o’clock in the morning and be prepared to offer a ten-thousand-dollar deposit should I have a wish to purchase the property. He also to me said it was located upon a hill in Corona and if there were a widow’s walk on the roof, you would see over the neighbors’ homes to the Pacific Ocean below. I had not heard before this term “widow’s walk,” and so after traveling to the bank for a certified check of ten thousand dollars, I drove home to the high-rise and eventually last evening, after a dinner with Esmail and Nadereh where I revealed nothing, a dinner of obgoosht and rice and yogurt with cucumber followed by tea, I dismissed my son from the sofreh upon the floor where we eat barefoot and I searched for “widow’s walk” in our Persian-English dictionary. I found only “widow,” a word in Farsi I know quite well enough, and I felt a sadness come to me because this did not seem a good sign for the purchase of a home.

But this morning, that feeling had every bit disappeared from my body. Many summer evenings, instead of sleeping upon the sofa in my office, I rest on the carpet near the sliding door of the terrace with my head on a pillow beneath the leaves of the tree plants my Nadi cares for like her own children. Last evening the sky was clear, and sleep came for me as I watched the stars through the screen.

I rise with the first light from the east, and, after a shower and shave and a breakfast of toast and tea, I wake Esmail for his newspaper route. Then I dial the Highway depot and inform them of the summer flu I am suffering. I prepare tea for Nadi and bring it to the bedroom on a tray. The room is of course dark, with the shades drawn and the drapes closed, and I know she is awake because a cassette tape of Daryoosh’s sentimental music is playing softly beside her bed. I rest the tray on the bureau and open the drapes and both shades.

“Eh, Behrani. Nakon. Chee kar mekonee?”

My wife’s voice is still hoarse from sleep, and I know she again has not slept well. She says to me, “Don’t.” And, “What are you doing?” But this morning, for the first time since perhaps France, I know what I am doing; Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani knows what he is doing.

She sits up and I put carefully the tray upon her legs. I bend to kiss her cheek, but she turns her face from me and I sit down in the chair near her bed. My wife’s hair is thick and short, an area of gray near her face that she dyes black. Sometimes she applies too much and that part of her hair appears the color of a plum. Nadi has always worried about all that is not as it should be, and the overthrow of our society has aged her more than myself. But even still, her face is small and beautiful and many times when I am allowed to stand or sit in this shadowed room where she spends so much of her days, I hear the domback drum behind Daryoosh’s singing, and I see her and she has no longer fifty years, but twenty-five, and again, I desire to be with her in the fashion a man is supposed to be with his wife.

“What do you think you are looking at, Behrani?” she says in our mother language as she reaches for another sugar cube. She does not take her eyes from me. Her hair is tousled in the rear. I think of our children, and I smile at her and the cassette tape ends and the machine clicks off at once.

“Nadi-joon, today there may be a big opportunity for us.” I of course say this in English, but it is never any use for if she answers at all it is only in Farsi.

She says nothing. She turns over the Daryoosh cassette and she does not wait for me to proceed about this opportunity. She reaches to turn up the volume, and I rise and leave the room and dress into a summer’s weight gray suit.

It is not one of my finer sets of clothes, for I do not wish to appear pooldar, nor however do I wish to seem like a beggar in the marketplace. Before leaving, I kiss my son on the top of his head as he eats his cold cereal at the small breakfast table in the kitchen. His hair smells of sleep and needs washing. He is dressed in a loose T-shirt and shorts, and beside him on the floor is his skateboard and bag of newspapers. He has only fourteen years, but he is already my height—175 centimeters—and he has his mother’s face. Both my children have Nadi’s small, beautiful face.

THE HOUSE IS one-story but in a good state of repair. It is painted white and appears quite bright in this early sun that is already hot on my head that still carries no hat. There are hedge bushes beneath the windows and a small lawn of grasses in front that is in need of trimming. The street is called Bisgrove, and it is on a hill with houses built closely together on one side, a woodland on the other. But the county tax gentleman was correct; the street is not so steep one can see the water, only the pale morning sky so high and wide over the rooftops. Opposite the road are evergreen woods and brush and farther up are even more homes, all small, many with bushes and fences separating the lawns. I look once more at the woodland, at the fashion in which the sunlight drops through the branches, and I am thinking of our summer home in the mountains near the Caspian Sea, of how the light was the same in those trees along the winding earth road to our bungalow, and for a moment, I feel a sense of sarnehvesht, of destiny, and as soon as I do, I stand erect and look back at the property with as cool an eye as I am able, for I do not wish my judgment to be weakened at the point of sale.

Within thirty minutes we are all assembled, the county tax gentleman, the auctioneer, and only two prospective buyers: a young couple, a boy and his wife, who has not as many years as my daughter Soraya and is dressed in blue jean pants and white basketball shoes; and a gentleman close to my years, though very fat, as large as Torez, and he is dressed in a fine pair of suit pants but no jacket, simply a loose tie and white dress shirt that is stretched over his belly, and he is sweating on the forehead and above the lip. It is him I view as my main opponent, and all of his sweating makes me straighten my shoulders and I feel quite calm.

First, the county tax gentleman takes us for a walking tour through the bungalow. There is no air-conditioning, but the rooms are cool and I note every floor except for kitchen and bathroom is carpeted. The living room is large enough, and the dining area is a counter with stools where the kitchen begins. In the rear are three rooms, and as we step out in the backyard, I pat my breast pocket and touch the certified check from the Bank of America.

The young wife is very fond of the rear lawn, which is small and surrounded by evergreen hedges taller than a man. They shade us from the morning sun, and she begins to tell to her husband of the privacy they might have here, but it is the sweating gentleman, the radish, I am regarding. He stays close to the county tax officer and the auctioneer, who has as many years as me, carries a notepad and pen, and wears a department-store necktie and shirt. He has upon his face a confused expression, and he pulls the county tax gentleman aside for a quiet word.

Then we continue around the side yard to the front, and the sale begins with the auctioneer’s suggested starting price of thirty thousand dollars. I am at once so astonished at this low figure that I do not respond and the young wife raises her hand and the auctioneer acknowledges her and the radish nods his head and the price is thirty-five thousand. The wife lifts her hand again, but the young husband forces it down and begins whispering loudly to her that they do not have that much saved, reminding her they are expected to pay all at once. My hand raises slightly from my side and the auctioneer points to me and the price is now forty thousand. The radish regards me with his wide wet face and his eyes become small, as if he is at once assessing me and my intentions as well as the numerous numbers in his head, and now it is clear to me he is a professional, a speculator, and he most possibly buys and sells dozens of these bungalows. I turn my face towards his and smile a most relaxed smile, one that is meant to invite him to bid all afternoon for I am prepared to do the same, sir, though of course I am not; I can barely go further than this, and I am not so certain any of this is wise.

“Forty-two fifty,” says the radish, his eyes still upon me.

“Forty-five,” my voice answers.

“Will there be a fifty-thousand-dollar bid for the property? Do I hear fifty, ladies and gentleman? Fifty thousand?” The auctioneer regards all our faces, our hands and fingers. The county tax officer consults his watch, and I feel the fat man’s eyes upon me, and I make my own look to the house as if I am prepared to bid and bid. The sun is hot upon my head.

“Forty-five thousand, going once, going twice—”

The radish turns and walks to his car, and now the auctioneer cries, “Sold,” and the county tax gentleman steps forward to shake my hand and receive the deposit which I hand to him from my jacket pocket. I sign his papers, and I hear the young couple drive back down the road, but already I am calculating what this house on this street might bring me in the open market, and I am certain I will surely be able to double my money. Yes, yes, I will put it up for sale as soon as we move in.

NADI NOTICES THE new hat upon my head before she says anything of the flowers I have brought her, tiger lilies, the flower gentleman in Ghirardelli Square named them. My wife still wears her sleeping gown, and she is polishing the silver tea table. On the carpet around her she has rested the crystal bowls of nuts, dates, and chocolates, each covered with plastic wrapping to protect them from the fumes of the silver polish. In Farsi she says: “You should have a brown colah on your head, Behrani, not blue.”

I know of course she is correct. The new hat I wear is of an artificial material, with a short visor like taxi drivers wear, and it is the color of a swimming pool. But I purchased it because in the shop’s mirror it gave me the appearance of a man with a sense of humor about living, a man who is capable to live life for the living of it. And when I bought the flowers, I naturally hoped my Nadi might also for a moment see things in this way. But as I put the tigers in a water vase and set them upon the floor, I find myself preparing a proposition of numbers in my head. This must be handled quite delicately.

“Nadi-joon?”

“Why are you not working today, Behrani?” She does not look up from her work. I want tea, but I feel the moment is now to be taken. I sit upon the sofa, close to the silver table and my wife.

“Nadereh, do you remember our bungalow near Damavand? Do you remember I ordered the trees cut down on the north side so we may view the Caspian?”

“Saket-bosh, Behrani. Please, be quiet.” My wife’s voice is weary and there is fear in it as well, but I must continue.

“Do you remember when Pourat brought his family there for our New Year’s and we celebrated spring on our terrace? And his khonoum, your dear friend, said what a gift from God to have the sea spread before us?”

“Hafesho, Behrani! What is the matter for you? Please.” She stops polishing and closes her eyes, and when she does this I see water gather beneath one eye, and I feel the moment has come.

“Nadi, I today bought for us another bungalow.”

She opens her eyes slowly, as if perhaps what I said is something she did not hear. “Do not joke. Why are you not working?” Her eyes are wet and dark and I think how in our country she would never let me see her like this: no cosmetics upon her face, her hair untended, still wearing what she slept in beneath a robe, doing what before only soldiers or women from the capital city did for us. But we have not looked at one another this directly in many months, and I want to hold her tired old face and kiss her eyes.

“I am not joking, Nadi.” I begin to tell her of the auction and the price no one would believe I paid for the home, and how of course the open market will pay us three times that, which is the point, Nadereh; this is the way for us to make significant money now, not Boeing or Lockheed, but real estate; we will live in the home for a short time and perhaps we will build a widow’s walk to increase further the value of the property and we will take our tea there where we can view the ocean and you will be very comfortable there, Nadi; you will enjoy to invite Soraya and our new son-in-law there until we sell it and find an even better home and perhaps—

It is now that she stands and throws down the polish rag and yells at me in Farsi she did not come to America to live like a dirty Arab! So kaseef! Some family roaming the streets like gypsies! All their possessions being damaged and ruined along the way! She stops and closes her eyes, raises her hand to the side of her head, her fingers trembling at the knowledge she has invited one of her migraine headaches. I watch her walk back to her room and close the door behind her. Soon I hear Daryoosh’s music on the cassette player in her room, the domback drum sounding as steady behind him as a march to bury the dead.

I lie back upon the sofa, no longer wanting tea, only rest. My wife has always been afraid. Both our fathers were lawyers in Isfahan, colleagues, good friends, and our marriage was their design since we were children. But I believe when I came of age I would have sent Nadi the flowers of hastegar anyway. She was always such a quiet girl, forever standing or sitting out away from the center of things, and her large brown eyes, so gavehee, looked often to me shiny with feeling.

Her confidence grew as an officer’s wife, and she began to speak back to me, but she always was so fair and kind with our children, and with the soldiers who served in our home. The night we fled, she trembled like a wet bird, and she let me direct everything while she held the children and repeated to them whatever it was I had already said when, at three o’clock in the morning, one week to the day after Shahanshah flew to Cairo and the imams and ayatollahs were making massive crowds in the streets, I and two captains stole a large transport plane and flew our families across the Persian Gulf to Bahrain. Nadereh and our driver, Bahman, and I loaded five suitcases of all we could carry into the trunk of the limousine. Nadi was afraid to drive through the streets in it; she was afraid a mob would attack us for being pooldar, and only six blocks west one of our finest hotels was burning. University students with beards were breaking open cases of Dom Pérignon champagne and pouring the contents of each bottle into the street drains. I assured my wife a dark car was best in the night, one with bulletproof windows.

On the flight over the black water, our wives and children sat in the middle of the wide cargo floor wrapped in blankets and the women sang songs to the youngest children who were so afraid because they had heard what had happened to our dear friends, the Pourats. They had heard how my rafeegh, General Pourat, and his family were stopped at the airport the previous day, accused of taking what was not theirs; the children had heard how the entire family was put on trial there in an empty baggage room, how they were made to stand in front of a wall with a large cloth banner which read in our language: MUSLIMS DO NOT STEAL FROM THEIR MUSLIM BROTHERS. MUSLIMS DO NOT TORTURE AND KILL THEIR MUSLIM BROTHERS. It was under this banner my friend’s wife and three young sons were one at a time shot to death. They were first forced to read aloud from the Koran. Then they were killed. My friend, an officer admired by even the lowest of soldiers for his generosity and strength, was saved for last. They shot him numerous times in the head and chest. They then dressed his body in full uniform, and from the observation tower, hung him by the feet.

I close my eyes. I have grown accustomed to these images in my head, and it is not long before sleep begins to take me and I dream once again of a large cave full of naked children. They are dirty, their thin arms and legs streaked with dust. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And yet they are quiet, their faces raised to the darkness as if they are awaiting bread and water. Then Shah Reza Pahlavi and Empress Farah float through the crowd in a convertible limousine. They are dressed in long red robes covered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls. Some of the children move from the path of the auto, but others are too small or weak and they are crushed beneath the wheels. Shahanshah and his queen wave to them, their wrists stiff and their smiles fixed. I sit in a pilot’s chair behind a large rock. My hands are on the controls, but I can do nothing but watch. I watch them all.

WEDNESDAY EVENINGS ARE not so busy at this convenience store/ gasoline station near San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito; it is on Thursdays and Fridays when I am forced to hurry behind the counter like the young man with whom I work on those nights, and of course my legs are already very heavy from the long day working for Mr. Torez on the highway crew. This evening that is not the case, however, and for this I am grateful.

After my sleep this afternoon I made for myself tea, and I ignored the sound of more melancholy Persian music coming from Nadereh’s room. I gathered the telephone book and telephone upon the floor, and I dialed six Realtors in the Corona–San Bruno–Daly City area. I described to each the home I owned, and I inquired as to a fair selling price. Each of them reminded me of the recession in which we live, Mr. Behrani; this is a buyer’s market, and still, unfortunately, hardly anyone is buying. Yes, I said, but are there many good three-bedroom homes selling for under one hundred thousand dollars? Each Realtor—four women and two gentlemen—said no, not usually, and they of course then asked me if I had anyone representing my interests in this matter. I had just terminated my final conversation when my son Esmail returned home from practicing skateboarding with his friends. Both his knees were skinned to the start of blood, and I told to him he must wash them before he thought of having a snack.

“Mohamneest, Bawbaw-jahn.” No problem, Daddy, he said, and I followed him into the bathroom and I sat upon the toilet seat while he removed his Nike basketball shoes and stepped into the tub to run water over his knees. I remained silent as he washed himself, and I noticed once again the black hair he is growing on his legs like a man. In front of his ears is the shadow of hair that in only a year or so will become reesh, a beard. And for the very first time, I felt the difficult position I was in with him as well.

“Esmail-joon?”

“Yeah?” My son turned off the water and looked at me quickly in the face. I handed to him a towel and he began drying himself.

In English I said: “I did not work today. Do you know why?”

He shook his head, then stepped out of the bathtub and folded the towel.

“I bought for us a house, Esmail. There is a beautiful hill for your skateboarding, and your friends can take the BART train to see you.”

“Cojah?”

“In Corona. You remember that beach village we have before driven through on Sundays?”

My son of fourteen years looked at me then with Nadi’s beautiful face that becomes so ugly so easily with bad feeling, and he walked past me and said in our language: “I don’t want to move.”

It is my practice halfway through this nightwork to purchase a Coca-Cola and drink it while I eat a package of peanut butter crackers. By nine-thirty or ten o’clock, the majority of my customers come only for gasoline or cigarettes, though many times a young husband or wife will arrive to buy milk and bread, ice cream perhaps. I sit upon the stool behind the counter and have my snack, and I am thankful of the long cigarettes display rack over me for keeping the bright fluorescent light from my eyes. Today has been a day of many decisions. After my son left the bathroom I stood quickly and felt the hot blood fill my hands and fingers, and I kicked my bare foot through Nadi’s clothes hamper basket, then rushed into Esmail’s room where he had turned on his television and I switched it off and stood over the bed where my son lay. I pointed at him, yelling in full voice, and I do not remember all I said except I know Esmail became hurt, perhaps frightened; I saw it in his eyes—though he lay there very relaxed-looking, his hands loose at his sides, and he would not show any of this to his father. I told to him he would do as I said without question, and then I heard the music stop in Nadereh’s room, the bedsprings squeak as though she were sitting up to listen, and I pushed her door open and I went directly for the cassette player and pulled it free of the wall and threw it to the other side of the room where it knocked over the bureau lamp and the lightbulb shattered and Nadi began screaming, but I shouted back and soon she became quiet, but I did not lower my voice; I yelled in our language that, yes, perhaps she did not come to America to live like a gypsy, but I did not come here to work like an Arab! To be treated like an Arab! And then I did lower my voice because even my son does not know the manner of jobs I have been working here. He has seen me leave dressed in a suit and he knows I work at two jobs, but that is all he knows, and many nights at this convenience store, even though it is situated two towns to the north of us, I have worried about his older schoolmates with driver’s licenses making this discovery. So I lowered my voice to almost a whisper, and I told to my wife that beginning tomorrow she will begin packing and there is no more to discuss, Mrs. Behrani. Do not open your lips.

Once, before dinner at our home in the capital city, while Nadereh and Pourat’s wife were in another room and after I had just raised my voice at our daughter of seven years for something I do not now recall, Pourat said to me softly: “Behrani, every night you must leave your work behind you.”

Pourat and I were of the same rank then, both captains, genob sarvans, and I did not at first understand him until he nodded at Soraya, at her brown eyes wet from my yelling, from my orders. My face became warm with embarrassment, and after that moment I have worked hard to discipline myself from viewing my wife only as a junior officer, my children as soldiers.

But I am prepared now to give all the orders necessary until we are out of that pooldar apartment. The rent is paid through the month, two more weeks, but the Behrani family will be discharged this weekend, I promise that. I have a security deposit of three thousand dollars to claim. This leaves a total of six thousand dollars for us after I pay the remaining thirty-five on our new property. Tomorrow, Friday, I will receive my checks from this store and from the Highway Department, and I will leave these jobs with no notice. Torez and Mendez, and even Tran, can watch my backside as I go, as Genob Sarhang Behrani prepares for a new life, a life in the buying and selling of American real estate.

MY HUSBAND GOT TO MISS ALL THIS, THAT’S WHAT I KEPT THINKING, that he didn’t have to be around for any of this, and I was stuck at the El Rancho Motel in San Bruno. It was a shitty little one-story L of rooms wedged between an electrical parts warehouse and a truck-stop bar near the 101 freeway ramp. The TV in my room got sound but nothing on the screen, and it was only a Wednesday night but there was a live country band playing at the truck stop and the management must have had all the windows open, so I turned the TV up and listened to an old movie with Humphrey Bogart and in the end he gets shot and his girlfriend weeps and says he’s free now, he’s free.

But I was still so mad it had backed up on me and now I felt weak and a little sick. I was dying for a cigarette, which made me even madder because I hadn’t smoked one since a month after Nick left, and I hadn’t really craved one in five. So I chewed gum.

I was getting out of my morning shower when they knocked on the front door of my house: a man in a suit, two cops, and a locksmith with a huge gut that hung over the tool belt at his waist. I answered in my robe, my hair wet and scraggly around my face. Parked out front was a van, a big LTD, and two police cruisers. The man in the suit did the talking. He handed me some kind of document and said he was from the civil division of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. He had a crewcut and a double chin, the rest of him slim. The policemen had star badges on their light blue shirts, sheriff’s deputies. One was tall and skinny with black hair and a mustache he’d trimmed too much on one end, and he kept staring at me. I read over the court order, then handed it back to the man in the suit, my fingers shaking, and I told him the truth, that my husband and I had never operated any damn business out of our home and did not owe a business tax. I went to the county tax office myself and told them so, even signed a statement and had it notarized, and I thought that was the end of it. The man in the suit asked to be let in and when I stepped back, all four of them walked into my small living room while I stood there in my robe, still naked and damp underneath. The fat locksmith squatted at my door and started unscrewing the knob and lock.

“What is he doing?”

The man in the suit handed me back the court order. “The county has petitioned the court in its behalf, Mrs. Lazaro. This should come as no surprise to you. I’m sure you had ample warning; your house is up for auction starting tomorrow morning.”

“Auction?”

The pager on his belt went off. He asked if he could use my phone on the kitchen counter, then went to it without waiting for an answer. I stared at the court order, but didn’t see any of the words; I was picturing all the county tax mail I’d been throwing away unopened since last winter, sure I’d done my part and they were now after the wrong person.

“Is your husband home?” It was the tall deputy with the crooked mustache.

“That’s none of your business.”

The deputy looked like he was about to say more, but then just looked at me.

“What? Why do you need to know that?”

“We need to notify all residents of the house, Mrs. Lazaro.”

“Well, he doesn’t live here anymore.”

The tall deputy nodded at me, then folded his hands in front of him and looked down at my bare feet. I walked away from him, but I didn’t know where to go.

The other deputy was short, chewing gum, watching the locksmith like he wanted to remember how to do that himself. The man in the suit finished his call and waved the tall deputy over, whispered something to him, then came back into the living room and said he had to leave but Deputy Sheriff Burdon will assist you in vacating the property. That was his exact word, vacating, and he said it in a low tone, like it was a skill not many people had. Then he was gone, and the tall deputy with the crooked mustache asked where I kept my coffee. He suggested I get dressed and he’d make up a pot. I hesitated a second, but I felt like all three of them could see through my robe. I went and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and when I came back out, the short deputy was using my phone, the locksmith was already going at the back-door knob, and Deputy Burdon was setting four of my cups on the counter. He glanced at me and said I might want to put on something cooler, there’s no fog today and it’s going to get hotter.

“That’s all right ’cause I’m not leaving.” My throat felt dry and stiff.

The locksmith looked up from his work on my back door.

Deputy Burdon rested one hand on the countertop, and he had an understanding expression on his face, but I hated him anyway. “I’m afraid you have no choice, Mrs. Lazaro. All your things will be auctioned off with the property. Do you want that?”

“Look, I inherited this house from my father, it’s paid for. You can’t evict me!” My eyes filled up and the men began to blur. “I never owed a fucking business tax. You have no right to do this.”

The tall deputy handed me a napkin from the counter. “Do you have a lawyer?”

I shook my head and wiped under my eyes. “I can’t afford a lawyer, I’m a house cleaner.”

He took a notepad and pen from his front shirt pocket, wrote down the name of a Legal Aid office in San Francisco, then ripped out the page and handed it to me. “Nothing’s written in blood. You just have to clear out today. Who knows? You might be moving right back in next week. Do you want to phone some friends to come help you pack up?”

“No.” I kept my eyes on my full coffee cup.

“I’m afraid everything has to go today.”

The locksmith was using a battery-powered drill on my back door. I could smell the sawdust spilling onto the linoleum. “There’s no one to call.”

He looked at me, his brown eyes narrowed like he thought he knew me from a long time ago. I felt my cheeks get hot. He reached out his hand. “My name’s Lester.”

I hesitated before I took it. He stood then used my phone to call the Golden State Movers, signed a slip of paper for the locksmith, took from him the new keys I wasn’t supposed to have, and stepped out onto the front stoop with the other deputy. They were standing close to the screen door and I heard Deputy Lester Burdon tell his partner to go back out on patrol, he was going to call in some personal time and help this lady clear out.

The storage sheds across from the El Rancho Motel were his idea. It took only four hours to move my life from the only house I’ve ever owned to one of those steel shacks with the padlock I now have to pay for and can’t afford. The movers didn’t have any boxes to sell me, so the tall deputy went out for some while the moving men—three college kids—started hauling out my Colonial living-room set with the plaid upholstery, a wedding present from Nick’s mother and father. I was feeling kind of numb, stuffing the small things into plastic trash bags, each one thrown into a moving truck like this was all natural, part of some bigger plan that shouldn’t have surprised and upset me so much.

AFTER A WHILE, the band quit for the night and I turned off the lamp and sat there against the headboard. I heard an eighteen-wheeler pull into the lot, and the last call noise inside the barroom. I was fighting the urge for a cigarette. I stretched out on the motel bed, rested my hands over my breasts, and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. I was wondering again where Nicky was, Los Angeles maybe, or Mexico, though nobody back East knew he’d even left me. So I lay there in the dark, remembering what Irish Jimmy Doran said to me. He was from Dublin, small and wiry with bad teeth, and he tended bar where I used to waitress at the Tip Top on old Route I. I saw him in the grocery store parking lot right after Nick got his job offer in Frisco. It was a gray day in April, but Jimmy was squinting his eyes like the sun was on him, and when he saw me he came over and gave me a big hug, smelling like Chesterfields and Schnapps. I told him we were off to California, the land of milk and honey.

“Dat’s what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: ‘America, the Land of Milk and Honey.’ Bot they never tell you the milk’s gone sour and the honey’s stolen.”

AT THE FIRST sign of daylight spreading over the cars in the El Rancho parking lot, I gave up trying to sleep and drove the Bonneville down the coast on Highway 1. The sun was still coming up from the east. The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside. The few cars I passed had their headlights on, and I kept hearing Deputy Burdon’s voice in my head warning me to stay away from Bisgrove Street until I’d talked to a lawyer and straightened things out or else I’d be trespassing and up for arrest. This got my heart beating fast, and I kept the radio off and drove for twenty minutes, past the state beaches through the tourist-shop town of Montara to Moss Beach, where I stopped at a gas station/beach supply store and drank coffee at a table by the window. The morning was still quiet. The beach across the road was empty, and I watched a seagull dive into the water for a fish. At the front of the store was an old woman behind the register. I went to the cigarette machine, stuck in my coins, and pulled the knob hard: Who did they think they were evicting? And for what? A tax they billed to the wrong fucking house? My dead father’s house?

I backed out the Bonneville and drove south along the water. I lit another cigarette and I kept seeing Nick’s face the morning he left, the way he looked in the shadowed room after he woke me with a nudge, sitting on the side of the bed. At first I thought I’d slept late and he was on his way out the door to work, but then I saw how early it was, and I could smell all the cigarettes on his breath, and I knew he’d been up a long time. I moved to switch on the bedside lamp but he touched my hand to stop me. Then he held it. In that dim light, I couldn’t make out his eyes.

“What, honey? What?” I said. I was thinking of his father or his mother, a late-night phone call I’d missed. But as soon as he opened his mouth and said, “Kath,” I knew it was about us again, and I started to sit up, but he put his other hand on my chest and I stayed still and waited for him to say what he was going to say. But he never said another word; he sat there and stared in the direction of my face, and even when I asked him what, what’s the matter, Nicky, my heart jerking all confused under his hand, he only stared, and then, after another half minute of nothing, he squeezed my fingers and left the room, and I jumped out of bed in just a T-shirt and followed him through the house to the front door, saying, “Wait, wait.” I stopped and watched him get into the used Honda we’d just bought as a second car. Daylight was breaking out over the yard and the woods across the road. Then I saw the two suitcases and his bass guitar in the backseat, and I ran out into the driveway, the January air hitting me like a bat. He was already backing up and I rapped on the driver’s window and screamed his name and kept doing it until he shifted gears in the street and drove down the hill, not once looking back at me, even in the rearview mirror.

I started to cry as I drove. The sun was lighting up the ocean, and the sand was getting bright.

IT WAS CLOSE to ten when I drove into the parking lot of the motel. Most of the trailer trucks next door were gone, and the sun was starting to shine bright off the cars in the lot. As soon as I got into my room, I lit another cigarette and called the lawyer’s number Deputy Burdon had written on the back of his card. A man with a soft voice answered and I started to tell him how I’d been evicted from my own home yesterday. I almost cried again and I hated myself for it. The man said he was sorry to hear of my dilemma but you’ve reached the Walk-In Legal Aid Society and all you have to do is come in and explain all that to one of our attorneys. He gave me the address in the city and wished me luck. Before we hung up I asked him what it would cost and he told me all services were delivered on a sliding scale.

I undressed and put on my robe and sat on the edge of the bed. I had about eight hundred in checking, fifty in savings, and this month the house insurance was due. Now I had the storage shed to pay for, and this new lawyer, and there was no way I could pull my shit together for my two cleaning customers today. One was a house over on the San Andreas Reservoir, the other a doctor’s office in town. I called and postponed both, leaving me three jobs to do tomorrow, then took a long shower. I dried myself with the motel’s thin green towel, thinking how even this place could sink me, though I knew there was nowhere else to go.

I started to blow-dry my hair, which had grown out past my shoulders the way it hadn’t been since I was nineteen and married to Donnie, my first cokestorm, my period late, and we both told ourselves we weren’t ready and he drove me to the clinic in Brookline and the whole family found out. Dad had never really looked right at me anyway, but then he stopped doing it at all, would only give me his quiet profile, usually in his recliner in front of the TV. And Ma started giving me that look, her eyes locking in on me dark and flat, like I was something from her bad dreams that kept showing up in her day life, in her home, and just who did I think I was?

I went through my suitcase for the least wrinkled clothes there, which was a new pair of jeans and a white blouse with horizontal pleats in the front. Just before I left I thumbed some blush onto my cheeks that were pale from no sleep. My eyes looked sunken and I brought them out with black eyeliner.

The Legal Aid office was in the Mission District in San Francisco. I had to drive around the block a few times before I saw the window sign on the second floor of a building on 16th and Valencia. It was above one of those New Age coffee shops this city is full of, the Café Amaro. It was a half hour before lunch and all the small tables were full of west coast men and women eating food like tabouleh salads and miso spread on sesame crackers, the men skinny and clean-shaven, a lot of them with ponytails, but I was really seeing only the women as I went by, their unmade-up look, their long thick hair tied up in back with more hair, their colorful T-shirts, their breasts small, or else hanging long and heavy underneath the cotton they probably only bought from catalogs. They had handmade jewelry hanging off their ears, around their necks and on their wrists. They wore shorts or homemade skirts or loose jeans and there wasn’t a painted finger or eyelash or lip on any of them. Some of the women glanced up at me, then looked back down again, not really interested after all, and I was back in high school walking down a hallway crowded with the girls in clubs and organized activities I wasn’t interested in but felt left out anyway, my face a doughy mask.

The receptionist upstairs had the same soft voice as the man I talked to on the phone. He wore jeans and a bright aqua silk shirt. He was my age, thirty-five or-six, and when he stood to greet me he smiled and said his name was Gary, then handed me a clipboard with a form to fill out. There was no one else in the waiting room. On the walls were posters of women’s movement marches, announcements for lesbian poetry readings, boycotts of fruit and vegetable farms in the state.

After I filled out the personal information sheet, including my income and how I made it, the receptionist led me to a corner conference room that was small but full of daylight from all the tall windows that faced the street below. He offered me bottled water, herbal tea, or coffee. I told him I’d take as much coffee as he had, and I laughed, but I wasn’t feeling funny; really, I felt like an old magazine somebody finds wedged under a chair cushion, and I knew that’s where I wanted to be, under a huge cushion somewhere, curled up cool and private, to sleep a long time.

AFTER LEGAL AID, I made the mistake of taking a nap at the motel. When I woke up the room was dark and there was talking and laughing coming from nearby. The air smelled like cigarette smoke, and I didn’t know where I was. Then an eighteen-wheeler started up outside, its driver revving it until something metal began to rattle. I switched on the bedside lamp and read my watch: almost nine. I lay back down and took a deep breath that made me shudder, but I refused to cry. I concentrated on a brown water stain on the ceiling, and listened to the early drinking crowd at the truck-stop bar next door, and remembered the spring before last, when both our families gave us a going-away party at my brother’s house in East Boston. Frank had taken the afternoon off from his car dealership in Revere, and he was still dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a loud silk tie. He was big and handsome, his black hair moussed back. There were forty or fifty people there, just relatives and in-laws, and they filled all three floors of my brother’s house. It was a party with no cocktails or beer—my mother-in-law, mother, and aunts made sure of that—not even red wine to go with the veal and sausages and spaghetti. Most of the older women stayed in the kitchen, where they warmed the food and kept telling each other the right way to cook. All the little kids were on the first floor, where the Ping-Pong table and dartboard were, and because it was a Saturday in March, most of the uncles and guy cousins sat in the family room watching basketball on Frank’s wide-screen TV. One or two were out on the second-floor deck with Nick, wanting to hear about the new job. I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with Jeannie, sipping a coffee before dinner, my eyes on Nick out on the deck. I could see the huge Mystic Bridge behind him, the gray clouds, the skyscrapers of Boston. We were a few days from spring and it was warm enough that I didn’t wear a coat. My new husband was standing there in a bright yellow cashmere sweater and black jeans, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into his Coke can. He was nodding his head at something one of his cousins was saying, and I felt so much love for him right then my eyes filled up and Jeannie put her hand on my arm and asked what’s wrong, K? What’s the matter?

Later, Frank led everyone out of the house to the driveway and the shiny red Bonneville. There was a wide white ribbon running from the front bumper over the roof and into the trunk. And somebody had taped to the driver’s window a huge card both families had signed, though I knew the car was from Frank, a low-mileage sales bonus he usually took for himself but this year gave to us. One of the uncles videotaped us climbing inside, then backing out for a test drive. We didn’t want a big American car, though; we were planning to buy something small. But on the drive west we kept it on cruise control the whole way and steered with two fingers. When we weren’t talking, we stretched out and played cassettes till one of us needed to crawl into the backseat and lie on th

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 537