To fill the silence in the living room while I did my homework, I turned on the television. The sound was oddly comforting, even though it made it more difficult for me to concentrate. I kept reading and rereading the same three or four lines in my textbook as my mind wandered to distant days when my mother was alive and healthy. She would never again watch me play ball with the team I’d worked so hard to join, never again expertly correct my intonation on the guitar, never again pretend to be amused by one of my stupid jokes. I hadn’t realized how close we were until she died.
Then Ashley began to follow the Johnsons to their church, where they ran a popular Bible study on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She would return home on those nights with a satiated look on her face that I was sure couldn’t have been solely the result of the meal that was served beforehand. Although both of my parents had been regular churchgoers, they didn’t force Scripture into every conversation, or leaflet the neighborhood, or roll their eyes at evolution the way the Johnsons did. But now my father didn’t even bother leaving the house on Sunday.
“Dad, should I make mac and cheese?” I asked.
“Whatever you think,” my father said.
I started to come home early so I could make dinner. I missed practice too many times and by the start of my sophomore year I was dropped from the baseball team. In September, when al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York, my father sat up in the easy chair and for the first time started to pay attention to the television. From then on Fox News was on at such high volumes that I retreated to my bedroom, ostensibly to do my homework, though most of the time I just read a book or played my guitar. My grades dropped.
But my cooking improved. Almost every night, I had a main dish and a side on the dinner table by seven. My father ate whatever I put in front of him, but Ashley was always rushing to get to the Johnsons’. She never finished her plate, so I finished it for her. I gained a lot of weight, and a lot of it in the wrong places. When I walked down the hallways at school, it seemed to me that everyone was staring at the man boobs growing under my shirt. Now if I tried to say hello to Maddie Clarke, she replied with a disgusted grunt. Only months before I had been a head taller than the other boys, but now I was visible in a way that, strangely, made me feel invisible. My days became a blur of mechanical motions: get up, go to school, go home, make dinner, go to sleep, start over.
Before my mother’s death, my plan had been to go to university to study speech pathology. As a child, I’d suffered from an articulation disorder that had required several months of therapy, and I still remembered how empowering it had felt to overcome it. And, having grown up with a mother who taught second-language learners, I thought that a career helping kids would be a good fit for me. But in December of my senior year, when I received an acceptance letter from the state school, my enthusiasm had dimmed and I wasn’t so sure speech pathology was right for me anymore.
“Dad, what do you think I should do?” I asked.
“Whatever you think,” my father said.
It was hard for me to escape the feeling that I had become my own parent. I did the grocery shopping, the cooking, and the laundry. When Ashley got her period, I was the one who went to the store with her to buy tampons. Because my father was now frequently short on cash, I found a part-time job at the ice-cream parlor, but there was never enough money to go around, and each month I had to figure out which bill to pay and which to skip. But just this once, I wanted my father to guide me, talk to me, help me sort out my future. And if he couldn’t do that, then the least he could do would be to show up. Just show up. For each public performance of the Yucca Valley High School jazz band, I would leave a flyer on the refrigerator, with the date and place circled in highlighter. When I walked onto the stage with my guitar, I would scan the back of the auditorium, hoping to catch a glimpse of my father. But he never came, unlike Nora’s. Even at this moment, I could recall the intense envy I felt whenever I saw Mr. Guerraoui in the front row. His eyes were full of pride, something I never experienced with my dad.
I glanced at Nora. The tip of her cigarette had grown heavy with ash.
“Careful,” I said. “You’ll get burned.”
She looked at her cigarette as if she didn’t know how it got there. In that slight movement of her arm, the ash scattered over the back of her hand. She brushed it off, then looked once more toward the living room. The crowd had finally thinned; only a handful of people remained. She stood up. “Thank you again for coming, Jeremy.” She walked me back through the house to the front door.
This time, when I passed by the picture on the hallway wall, I didn’t stop.
Maryam
I was trying to stay awake, so I switched on the radio and looked for Claudia Corbett’s show on KDGL. Usually, she’s on at lunchtime, and I listen to her while I’m peeling potatoes or chopping parsley, but the show is so popular that they rebroadcast it again at ten p.m. That night, a young woman was calling in to say she had gotten married just six months ago, but she and her husband were already fighting because he wanted to move to Portland to be a nature photographer, and she wanted to stay at her job with an insurance company in Salt Lake City, and neither one of them would change their minds. “Listen,” Claudia told her sharply, the way she does sometimes, when callers start to ramble and refuse to face the obvious, “nobody said that marriage was easy. Marriage is work.”