Sabra closed my folder and put it under her arm and set off up Madison Avenue without saying anything, and I followed her, because that's what I do now.
"Where are we going?"
"All-hands," she said. "Monthly. Attendance is taken." She looked at the drainpipe I'd come down, and then at me, and then at her watch. "You've got mosque on you. Stand at the back."
We went down to the river by the old mill race, under the footbridge, past the place where the clerk had walked into the falls on the first day. We didn't go through this time. We went down. There's a path on the rock under the spray that people can't see, wet black steps cut into the basalt, and at the bottom the pool opens out, brown and white and churning, with the whole Passaic coming down into it seventy-seven feet in a roar you feel in your teeth.
The rocks were full. Every ledge, every boulder, the gravel bar under the far bank. Thousands of us in coats and cardigans and good suits, with the spray on our shoulders. I saw window nine in her grey cardigan with the pen on its chain. I saw the man from the canteen. I saw the bomber jacket from Clifton, on a rock near the front, with his zip up past his chin.
And they were all facing the same way.
Far out in the pool, where the falls came down hardest, the water was flat. Just in that one place, a circle of it, flat as a table, while all round it the river boiled. On the flat water there was a chair.
I won't tell you much about who sat in it. I couldn't see much. It was a long way off, and the spray was thick, and the air over the flat water shook the way air shakes over a road in August. There was a shape in the chair, sitting the way a man sits who has been sitting a long time and expects to sit a long time more.
The departments came forward by turns to the edge of the water and reported their month.
A woman from Roads said she had put a man through the windscreen of a Honda on Route 80. The chair said nothing. A thin one from the prayer department said that four hundred and twelve men in Haledon had finished the noon prayer last Friday without knowing a single thing they'd said. The chair said nothing. A fat one said he'd got a deacon in Clifton to put his hand in the collection. Nothing.
Then a young one in a narrow black tie came forward from Separation, and stood on the last rock, and said, clearly, so it carried over the water, that he had not left his man until he'd separated him from his wife.
"You have done well," said the chair.
The voice wasn't loud. It came across the water under the roar of the falls the way a draft comes under a door, and every one of us felt it on the skin. The young one in the tie walked out onto the flat water as if it were a floor, and kept walking, and the shimmer took him in, close, closer than I'd have gone for anything. Beside me Sabra wrote the time in my folder, and the pen didn't shake, and I watched it so I wouldn't have to watch the water.
Harrow was on a rock near the front with a bag of pistachios. He turned round, found me at the back, and lifted the bag to me, a little toast. The toast meant next month, and it meant me.
Low over the top of the falls, close to setting, there was a moon two days old, thin as a fingernail paring. I looked at it because I didn't want to look at the chair.
The last time Ibrahim watched for that moon was in February, at the start of Ramadan. Samira held her phone up to the back bedroom window to show him a picture somebody had sent from the mosque, the crescent over the parking lot, and he looked at it a long time.
The doctor had said no fasting. Eighty-one, a bad chest, pills four times a day with food. Allah made an allowance for that, and the old man knew it as well as I did. A man who can't fast feeds a poor man for every day, and that's the end of it.
I didn't let it be the end of it. I'd been losing to him for twenty-two years and I knew this was one of the last good chances I'd get, so I put everything I had into it.
"Thirty-eight Ramadans you ate," I said, in the dark, before the dawn. "In the shop, with the shutter down. Behind the cutting table, so the street wouldn't see. And now you've come back, and now you're holy, and you're going to lie here and drink tea like a baby? Fast. Show Allah you mean it this time. Show Him what you're made of."
That was the whole trick. He'd fast to prove something, and the proving would be pride, and the pride would do the work. If he fasted, he'd be sick by noon. If he got sick enough, so much the better.
He didn't take the pills before dawn. He told Samira he wasn't hungry. He lay there with his jaw set all through the dawn prayer, which he prayed sitting up in bed, and all the way into the morning, and I sat in his ear and felt him grip.
At nine he called her.
"Bring me the tea," he said. "Four sugars."
"Jiddo, it's Ramadan."
"I know what it is." He took the mug from her in both hands, the brown one, PATERSON GREAT FALLS. "He gave me the excuse. I'd be a fool to be prouder than the One who gave it. Take the money out of the tin and give it to the mosque. Thirty days of meals. Not twenty-nine. Thirty."
Samira took the tin down from the top of the wardrobe, from under the bubbled paint, and counted the money out on the bedspread, and he watched her count and corrected her twice. He drank the tea. I sat in the steam from it with nothing left to say. After that I only did small things.
They promoted Tusk at the end, with the notices. A clerk with a clipboard read his name off the list, TUSCANO, ROADS, and Tusk came up off his rock with his hands over his face, and everybody near him slapped his back. He found me on the way past. His eyes were wet.
"No hard feelings," he said. "It was procedure. You'd have done the same." He squeezed my arm. "Overtime, Mansour. Route 80."
Harrow came up the wet steps after him, shelling a pistachio with his thumb, dropping the shells in his coat pocket.
"Friend," he said. "Day forty is the fortieth-day gathering. The aunt's letting the whole street in. Nobody says anything at that door. You go in, you wait for three in the morning, you get on the monitor, you're Grandpa one last time. You tell her the imam lies. She'll go to him. They always go to the imam."
"And if I don't?"
"Then the allowance ends at dawn on forty-one, and Sabra fills in a green form, and I'm sad about it." He ate the pistachio. "Do it and the house is yours. Her whole life. You saw what you get for a wife, friend. Think what you get for a whole family."
I looked past him at the rocks, at the thousands of us facing one chair on the water, at the bomber jacket, at window nine, at Tusk being hugged. I'd seen rows before. I'd stood in one for twenty-two years, in his ear, while he faced Allah. This was the same shape facing the wrong way, and I didn't want a place in it.
I went to Twentieth Avenue anyway. Where else would I go?
Nobody had greeted the house at the door in days. I went up the stairs at a quarter past three and stood in Samira's doorway. She was asleep on top of the covers in her pharmacy tunic, with the baby monitor on the nightstand and its little green light on. Her prayer mat was rolled in the corner with a hair tie round it.
The Kid sat up in her ear the moment he saw me. He cracked his knuckles, one, two, three, four, five, six.
"You missed it," he said. "It worked. The wish worked. She hasn't prayed since Friday, not once. And Sunday she drove to Tariq's and gave him the ring back."