The Night Counter Read Online Free Page A

in Lebanon now. No, it was September when they bloomed, right? Wasn’t May the honeysuckle’s time?
    Dwayne winked at him, as he always did every Wednesday and Friday when he helped Ibrahim get down the bus steps. Ibrahim checked his pocket to make sure Fatima’s letter was still with him.
    “
Salam-alakum
, Brother,” Dwayne said slowly and paternally.
    “
Wa-alakum-a-salam
, Son,” Ibrahim answered. He did not wish to disturb Dwayne’s customary respect by telling him that it was much easier to just say “bye-bye.”
    “Rock on, dude,” Ibrahim added. He tried to stay “white groovin’,” as Dwayne called it. That way, if any of his children or their children came to visit, he would be able to speak the same “lingo,” as his son used to wish.
    As Dwayne drove away, Ibrahim looked at his watch. It was six forty-five. Six minutes late. He was sure things like this didn’t happen in Japan. Well, perhaps the plane was delayed, too.
Inshallah
.
    He opened his usual mailbox with the hook of his cane and let the letter drop from his hands into the slot. Ibrahim had not argued about the divorce. He always had given Fatima what she wanted, even though she did not know that because she did not know all the things he had kept from her. He always avoided telling her anything she did not want to hear, but he knew in this letter he was doing just that. For that, if nothing else, he was glad that they were divorced and someone other than he would have to read the letter to her.
    Ibrahim hobbled to the terminal. He knew it was the American inhim that was in a hurry. The Arab in him wondered why he was hurrying. After all, as Fatima’s Koran said, everything is already written, so no need to rush, no need to worry whether his children had bought Japanese—or Swedish or German—cars. No need to regret the past. He could not have changed it even before it started.

AMIR SCOOPED UP the last of the
majedera
with piece of pita bread. He burped, enjoying it for the second night in a row. He was sure the lentils and fried onions would come back to haunt him that night and make him momentarily grateful that he slept alone. Arabic food was what Fatima had raised him on, but he knew for certain that it wasn’t the best food for dating. He burped one more time, which mercifully drowned out Fatima talking to herself upstairs, a cacophony that unsettled him every night.
    “I finalized my divorce, and I’m coming to California,” Fatima had said to him on the phone 994 days ago. “Northwest Airlines Flight 435, in case you’re interested in knowing.”
    She had never been west of the Mississippi, and she hadn’t even specified to Amir where in California she would be landing. However, in the seven hours it took her to fly to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City, Amir had figured out her flight details, changed the sheets in the spare bedroom, and broken up with his boyfriend, who was also his next-door neighbor. Amir had come out to Fatima long ago, although she wasn’t listening, but her arrival worked as a good excuse to end a really mediocre relationship that had gone on for four months, about three months too long.
    The boyfriend had wanted to fight for their coupledom, but when he had trudged back across the street with his bags to his own duplex, he had found a message waiting for him. “I’m the new Dr. Grayson,” he informed Amir from his cell phone, giving him the finger from his front yard. Dr. Grayson was the lead role on a fairly popular daytime soap opera. Amir was relieved and somewhat disappointed that his latest ex would not have time to mourn his loss. He was also jealous about Dr. Grayson.
    But he tabled his jealousy and was at the airport to meet Fatima with a smile on his face. When they got home, the new soap star waved from his driveway, where he was polishing a new Chevy Tahoe he’d been eyeing at the dealership for the duration of their relationship. “Very handsome neighbor,” Fatima had remarked, and