“Yes, Mama,” Salma said.
I picked up one of the paper bags and followed my mother and sister into the kitchen. On the wall above the spice rack was a framed collage of black beans in the shape of a tree, which I’d made in the second grade. Each branch was labeled with a name. Daddy. Mommy. Salma. Nora. I was the last bough on the right. On the stainless-steel refrigerator were half a dozen pictures of Salma’s twins and a magnetic dry-erase calendar with no appointments marked on it. From the little desk by the window, where bills and magazines were stacked, Tareq pulled out a piece of paper and a black marker. “What are you writing?” Salma asked him.
“A sign for the diner.” He held it up. “We can tape it to the door.” In block letters, he had written THE PANTRY IS CLOSED DUE TO A DEATH IN THE FAMLY.
“You’re missing the i,” I said.
Tareq turned the paper around so he could see for himself. “It’s just a sign,” he said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters. Dad wouldn’t like it. He’s very touchy about things like that.” I glanced at my sister. “You remember how he reprinted all the menus because there was a typo in the steak special? He said customers would notice and think his restaurant was run by an idiot.”
“I remember.”
Tareq added a tiny i, barely visible between the m and the l. “There,” he said. “Fixed.” Then he took the restaurant keys and stepped out through the kitchen door. I leaned against the counter and watched my mother. She was scooping coffee grounds, evening out each spoonful before she poured it into the coffeemaker. Her movements were careful and precise, as if a great deal depended on this task. “I’ve been thinking about something,” I said. “The cops said they found him by the gutter on Chemehuevi Way. That means whoever hit him had to swerve all the way to the side of the road to hit him, right?”
“That’s why they think it’s a drunk driver,” Salma said. Often when she spoke to me, she could sound condescending, whether or not that was her intention. She must have realized it this time, though, because she quickly added, “Or it could be one of those Marines rushing to make it to the base at Twentynine Palms on time. They drive like maniacs when they’re late.”
My mother closed the coffeemaker lid with a snap and, with her back turned to me, began folding the grocery paper bags into rectangles, stacking them on the counter. I took that as a signal that I had to stop asking her about the accident. She had already told me all she knew.
In what remained of the afternoon, we worked in silence. From the glass cabinet, we took out cups and saucers for the coffee, and the little blue glasses for the tea. We washed mint leaves and unwrapped the snacks that Salma had brought. Whenever the phone rang, one of us answered it and gave directions to the house. In a little while, Tareq returned from the restaurant and set the keys back on the counter. “Who will take care of bookkeeping?” he asked.
I looked up from the napkins I had been folding. “What bookkeeping?”
“Who’s going to sort out payroll? Handle payments to suppliers? With the diner closed, everything’s going to run a little behind.”
“Are you seriously asking about money at a time like this?”
“Nora,” Salma said, her tone reproachful.
“What? You heard him.”
“These are not unreasonable questions. Not all of us can be like you, with your head in the clouds.”
Your head in the clouds. The idiom rang like an echo in my life. It had started when I was nine or ten, so absorbed in reading my books that I didn’t hear my name when I was called to the dinner table. “You have your head in the clouds,” my mother would say, often with affection. A few years later, when I helped out at the restaurant after school, the remark turned into a bitter reprimand. “You gave out the wrong change. You have your head in the clouds,” my mother complained. And later yet, when I decided against medical school, it became an accusation. “You’re going to ruin your life, benti. You have your head in the clouds!”
Having my head in the clouds was my way of surviving. This realization came to me early, on my first day at Yucca Mesa Elementary, when Mrs. Nielsen cheerfully read the children’s names on the roster, but could not bring herself to say “Nora Zhor Guerraoui.” Twice she started on the middle name and stopped, frowning at the consonant cluster. The class grew silent, united in its curiosity about the word that had made the teacher falter. Then Mrs. Nielsen lowered her reading glasses over her nose and peered at me. “What an unusual name. Where are you from?” At recess, the kids fanned out and gathered again in small groups—military kids, church kids, trailer-park kids, hippie kids—groups in which I knew no one and no one knew me. I stayed behind by the blue wall that bordered the swings, and watched from a distance. In the cafeteria, I ate the zaalouk my mother had put in my lunchbox, while the other girls at my table whispered among themselves. Then Brittany Cutler, a pretty blonde with plaited hair and a toothy smile, turned to me and asked, “What are you eating?”
I looked up, immensely grateful for a chance to finally talk to someone. “Eggplant.”
“It looks like poop.”
The other girls tittered, and for the rest of the day they called me a poop-eater. At story time, we all gathered around Mrs. Nielsen to hear her read from “Rapunzel,” but nobody wanted to sit next to me. Later, Mrs. Nielsen started playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the xylophone and asked us if we recognized the tune. I said, “It’s the purple and green song!” to which Mrs. Nielsen replied, “No, sweetie, the star twinkles, it’s not purple or green. You really need to learn your colors.” I didn’t know how to tell her that I already knew my colors, that I was talking about how the music looked, the shapes and shades the notes made. So when my father came to pick me up after school, I ran across the blacktop and into his arms as though he were a savior. He dried my tears, took me home, and let me have Oreos before dinner.
But the next day I still had to go to school. I learned the alphabet, learned the pledge of allegiance, learned to stay out of the way of bullies. In class, I was quiet. At lunch, I sat alone. The silence cloaked me with safety, but it betrayed me a few months later, when Mrs. Nielsen became convinced I had a learning disability. She called my mother into the classroom one sunny morning in May and used words like severe mutism, social anxiety, oppositional behavior. The terms failed to elicit a flicker of recognition from my mother. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s something wrong with your daughter,” she said. I sat on a yellow mat in the corner, playing, listening, waiting for my mother to say, “There’s nothing wrong with my daughter.” But she only nodded slowly, as if she agreed with the teacher.
When my father came home that night and found out what had happened, he said the teacher was a fool. “Hmara,” he called her, a word he reserved for the television anchors with whom he argued during the eight o’clock news. Then he reached into the fridge for a beer and started sorting through the bills on the kitchen counter. I watched my mother’s face for a reaction. It was immediate. “And you know more than the teacher?”
“I know more about my daughter.”
“Salma didn’t have this problem in kindergarten. She was first in class, always.”
“There is no problem, Maryam.”
“If she doesn’t speak, she has to repeat the year. That’s what the teacher said.”