The Night Counter (12 page)

“Do you want to help me?” she asked.

Ibrahim put down the paper. “I’m sorry, it feels good to sometimes read Arabic. I haven’t read no Arabic since I used to read your mother her mother’s letters.” He smiled and pointed at the paper. “The world has all different news in Arabic.”

Laila did not ask him what the paper said. She didn’t want to know. She put a plate of grape leaves in front of him and one in front of herself. She placed a bowl of rice and ground beef stuffing between them and put on her bifocals and began rolling. Ibrahim pulled out his bifocals, and his eyes followed her hands. Then she put a leaf in front of him, and he awkwardly tried to straighten it out.

“I didn’t teach your mama nothing about no grape leaves,” Ibrahim finally said. “No, her mama taught her in Lebanon so she could cook good for your real dad when they came here. Marwan was a great man.”

That was what Ibrahim always said when he mentioned Marwan. Fatima had told Laila many times how Ibrahim had asked to marry her after Marwan died—just because she was pregnant with Laila. It was a great act of kindness, and so Laila felt disloyal talking about Marwan with him.

She laid a leaf on her plate, taking out every crease. “Follow me,” Laila said.

Laila took a little bit of the rice and meat and placed it in the center and then began folding the leaf in. He tried to do the same thing.

“What a mess, right,” Ibrahim groaned.

Laila stood in back of him and took his hands to guide them over the leaves.

“No, it hurts,” he pleaded. “It’s the arthritis. I can’t do no folding now.”

She looked at his hands, a map of purple and red veins. She set them down.

“Would you like to take a nap while I finish?” she offered. “The sheets in the guest room are clean.”

“I’m not sleepy,” he answered. “Maybe it’s okay if I’m just going to sit here?”

“I guess,” Laila said. How was she was going to make the pork with him watching her all the time?

“Maybe Nasser and Mo could come for dinner tonight,” he said. “Zaid and Nader, too. Four boys,
mashallah.
”

It was strange to hear her sons’ names come out of Ibrahim’s mouth, especially since Ghazi never said “Mo” anymore. He had told her last month that Mohammad was not a name to minimize.

“We should have named a child for you,” Laila apologized.

“That is a son’s job, not yours,” Ibrahim said. But none of your sons will name a son for you, Laila thought to herself.

“I had four boys to name. I could have called one Ibrahim.”

“If anything, you should have named one Marwan,” Ibrahim told her. “Me, I was the man who didn’t let you do nothing but homework.”

“You raised me when you didn’t have to,” Laila said. Conversation with him, let alone conversation about something that mattered, was more foreign than his accent. “You didn’t have to marry my mother.”

“Yes, I did,” Ibrahim replied. “I wouldn’t have had no nine other children with her if I did not want to marry her.”

Laila stopped rolling grape leaves. She could feel goose bumps under her wig. “It wasn’t for me?”

“Well, for you I would have married her anyway,” Ibrahim said. “I owed your father that much. But I didn’t owe him loving his wife from the moment I saw her.”

More goose bumps rose under her wig.

“Oh, you should have seen her hair. But it wasn’t just about no hair,” Ibrahim went on. “When your mama talked, she laughed a laugh—she brought Lebanon back to me. It wasn’t just that, but that’s what I told to my first wife—Betsy—who knew the minute Fatima got off the train that she had never really been loved by me like she do deserve. Then I left Betsy.”

“That’s terrible,” Laila said. Ibrahim nodded. She could not quite see the old man in front of her as someone capable of being love-struck. He had always been more of symbol to her—a father symbol—rather than a man with a life of stories, including some about love.

“Your mama to this day thinks Betsy left me like that for another man,” Ibrahim continued. “Your mama doesn’t know no different because she wouldn’t never have forgiven me the pain I caused Betsy. I myself cannot do no forgiving me for coveting my best friend’s wife. A union hero, too.”

Laila couldn’t envision what anything would have been like if Marwan had lived. It was not just that all her siblings wouldn’t have existed. She couldn’t picture how Ibrahim or Fatima could have managed all those years without each other. That was why their divorce had baffled her as
much as her sons’ collective inability to get married did. She couldn’t imagine how Ibrahim lived without Fatima these days, especially now that she knew that the marriage had not simply been his duty to an old friend. He had always treated Laila slightly better than her sisters. She had assumed he was overcompensating for her not being his blood, but now she understood that it had been guilt.

“Maybe I could invite Mama for Thanksgiving, like I used to when she lived here, and you could come, too, like before,” she offered. “I’ll make a big turkey. Just like before.”

Ibrahim waved away her idea. “Before is over,” he said, and once again he stared straight into her eyes until she finally had to turn away.

“That’s a new hair color you got,” he noticed. “I liked your real color better. It was the color of your father’s hair. Not so black black, like mine.”

“I liked it, too,” she admitted. “But sometimes change …”

“You girls was always not wanting no curly hair,” he remembered. Then he reached to touch a lock, and she pushed the chair back.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, worried that he would feel its fakeness.

“I understand. I’m no good man. I’ll leave.”

“No, Baba, stay,” Laila said.

“I can take the bus home,” Ibrahim said. “You keep rolling.”

“No, no,” she insisted. “How about you take a nap for a little while instead?”

It was a lot of time they’d spent together today, more time than Laila ever remembered being alone with him.

“I should go,” he said.

“No, no, please don’t go,” she said. “Just a nap. No leaving.”

Ibrahim picked up his cane. “I can take a nap at home.”

Laila took the cane from him and gave him her arm. “No, Baba, please,” she said. “Just a nap.”

After a few moments, he took her arm. “Okay, a nap,” he agreed. “A nap.”

“Good; you know where the guest room is.”

“No,” he said. “I have never slept in your house.”

It was not a judgment, just a fact.

She took him to the room and helped him into the bed. “Do you want me to get you the paper?” she asked.

Ibrahim shook his head. She heard the creaks in his body as he lay down. “Baba, it’s okay that all you let me do was homework,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. Ghazi is much harder on our boys than you ever were.”

“That’s because he was educated enough to do checking homework,” Ibrahim reasoned. “I could only make you do it. I couldn’t tell you if it was wrong.”

“My boys used to shake as soon as they heard his car in the driveway,” Laila told him. “They would run to their homework.”

“So they got no confidence.” Ibrahim nodded. “
Inshallah
, grown up on their own, they’re going to get enough confidence. It takes confidence to love a woman. Then when they love a woman, they can marry her.”

In one sentence, her father had given her the only explanation for her sons’ singleness that could be true. She had let her husband take a hard line with the boys, and so she could not blame him alone, as she wished she could.

Laila did not stay in the guest room when Ibrahim looked at the family photos on the dresser: Laila and her boys, Laila and Ghazi, Laila and her brothers and sisters, Fatima alone in her wedding dress. There were no photos of him. It wasn’t intentional, but she couldn’t tell from his face whether he knew that.

Laila went back to folding grape leaves, working faster on her own, hoping the speed would eliminate the disturbing thoughts of her sons’ cowering in front of Ghazi and of her parents’ unfamiliar love story. Did her mother-in-law have a love story, too? Laila would not ask Amani when she came home. Too much melodrama would be involved. There always was with Amani, from the day Ghazi had introduced her as his bride and Amani had cried that she already had picked out someone else for him, with the implication that her someone was better. Had she and Ghazi really had a love story of their own once? Maybe if her boys thought she
and Ghazi had a love story, they would have more confidence and get married. No, she didn’t know her parents had a love story when she married Ghazi. She looked at the clock. She needed to start making the pork.

She pulled the meat out of the refrigerator. She stared at it for a while, as if it might have something it was waiting to tell her. The she turned on the oven to five hundred degrees. She yanked the chops out of the packaging, grabbing them quickly and flinging them into the broiler pan, holding her nose, looking away as they landed, minimizing contact with them with all her senses. She did that with twelve pieces. A heck of a lot of pork. Too much pork. The pork chops were starting to land on top of one another. They weren’t all going to fit in one pan, and she did not want leftovers. She closed her eyes, grabbed the extra chops by their edges, and forced them down the garbage disposal. She’d dig them out and throw them away later, when it was dark and the neighbors wouldn’t see. In the meantime, no one would think to look in the garbage disposal for pork.

Laila understood that the Koran referred to pig meat as rife with disease, not sin, and that American industry had wiped out all worms and microbes. Yet she looked away again as she dumped the cans of tomato sauce over the meat. She opened the oven door with her foot so that her pork-stained fingers wouldn’t touch the handle. Then she washed her hands with tub and tile cleanser, a smell that was an unpleasant reminder of the hospital but preferable to porky hands.

She looked through the oven window. Yes, a lot of pork. She called Ghazi.

“Why don’t you bring some of your friends from the mosque over for dinner,” she suggested. “I was in the mood to cook today. I made grape leaves and a few other things.”

“Are you sure?” Ghazi asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Very sure.”

Laila used to invite people over for dinner, but that had stopped with Mo’s car accident, which had come six weeks before her cancer. Mo’s back wasn’t good anymore. Harder to get married with back problems, especially at thirty-nine. She then had told her second son, Nasser, who was
already thirty-seven, as well as her younger sons, to watch their backs. It was one thing for a woman to marry someone who later got sick; it was another to find someone willing to marry someone who was already sick. Just two weeks later, Nasser lost his job during another Ford layoff. Who would marry an unemployed son? Then came her cancer, which was almost as unfortunate for her sons as it was for her. As a sick mother-in-law, she would put another burden on a new bride. Laila thought about how much Amani weighed on her nerves even long after she had stopped being a new bride, and Amani hadn’t been sick a day in her life.

Laila looked in on the pork and turned the oven down to 350 degrees. She checked on the grape leaves. Perfect.

By the time Ghazi and his three friends arrived, just after the
aasyer
prayers, she had made hummus and salad; laid out the table; garnished it with oval plates of olives, pickles, and radishes; and filled wineglasses with apricot juice. Her father would be impressed to see how she could set a table. Still, she was happy to hear a faint snore from his room.

“Hi, hello,” Laila tossed out as she led the men right to the dining table. No wasting time with appetizers in the living room tonight. Ghazi once had viewed himself as quite pharaonic but was now more Santa Claus, with a big belly and a very full white beard. The three men, mechanical engineers like Ghazi, could be described the same way, except that their accents were much stronger than his. They hadn’t been in the United States as long as Ghazi and didn’t speak English at home as he did. Laila and the boys could understand a lot of Arabic, but unlike these men’s families, they didn’t converse in it.

She motioned for the men to sit down. They stayed standing. “
Salam Alakum
,” they said to her, slightly bowing their heads in unison. In her rush to get dinner started, she had forgotten to greet her guests properly.

“
Wa ala kum al salam
,” she responded.

“It was very kind of you to invite us to dinner,” one of them said as they sat down. Laila tried to keep their names straight. The one with the curliest hair was Abdul Kareem, the one with an accent so thick that he had never pronounced the letter
p
in his life was Abdul Latif, and the one with
a baldness equal to her own was Abdul Wahab. Abdul Kareem, Abdul Latif, and Abdul Wahab. Their parents had named them servants to three of the ninety-nine names of God. They were practically named after God. She decided to bring out the pork a little later.

Ghazi started filling the men’s plates for them, and she joined him.

“The meat in the grape leaves is
halal
, of course,” Ghazi said, as if he actually had cooked something once. The beef in the grape leaves was indeed
halal
, meat from cows slaughtered under Islamic laws that showed as much mercy to the animal as possible. Laila was sure that if Muslims ate pork, it would be
halal
.

The men looked at Laila and waited for her to sit down so that they could eat. When she did, she picked at some hummus with her pita bread while they took seconds to swallow the grape leaves she had spent hours rolling.

“These are delicious,” said Abdul Kareem. “Like my mother’s,
Allah yerhamha.
”

The others repeated the blessing to his deceased mother. Then they dug in for seconds.

“Looks like it might storm tonight,” Abdul Latif remarked.

“Thunder and lightening,” Abdul Wahab added.

“Maybe even a tornado,” Abdul Kareem threw in.

Laila didn’t like talking about the weather, especially tornadoes. “How are your wives?” she asked. Their wives had visited her in the hospital more than once, even though she had never met them before her illness. She could have invited the women to dinner tonight, but they were very nice, and so she had spared them.