Hala wedged the front door open with a brick at five o'clock, and by eight half of South Paterson had walked through it without saying a word.
The twenty-first of October. Day forty. The old men came first, with their caps in their hands, and sat in the front room and read the Quran in Arabic for an hour, taking turns, and I waited it out on the back step with the cold coming up through me and the sound coming through the kitchen window in gusts. When they finished, the women came with foil trays, and the young men with folding chairs, and the house filled up with coats and talk. Nobody stopped on the step. Nobody said anything at the door. Hala was in the hall taking coats and saying, "Come in, come in, there's food," and the door stood open behind her on its brick like a mouth.
I came in behind a woman carrying a tray of stuffed grape leaves, and nobody stopped me either.
They said the name inside, at the sad parts, over cups of coffee: may Allah have mercy on him, in Arabic, the same words from twenty mouths, and it went through the room like a draught under a door. I learned where to stand. The corner by the coats was good. His tape measure still hung there on the hook under his scarf, yellow, gone soft at the ends from sixty years of his fingers, and every coat that went on the hook brushed it and set it swinging. The stairs were better.
Harrow had the stairs already. He sat on the fourth step in his camel overcoat with his knees up, splitting pistachios with his thumbnail and dropping the shells into Ibrahim's umbrella stand. Two from Separation stood by the fridge in the kitchen, eating off the trays nobody had blessed. They looked like a pair of insurance men. One of them had a wristwatch with no hands.
"Big night, friend," Harrow said, and moved his knees so I could sit. "Three o'clock. She'll be up. They're always up at three."
Samira went past us in black with a tray of coffee cups. The Kid was in her, high up, cracking his knuckles. Twenty-four years in post and he still cracked them like a schoolboy outside the principal's office. He gave me a little wave from inside her face.
At nine the doorbell went, though the door was open. Tariq stood on the step with a white box from the bakery on Main Street, tied with string. He was in a jacket too thin for October, and he'd shaved badly.
Samira took the box.
"Thank you for coming," she said, exactly as she'd said it to the man who fixed the boiler.
He stood there a moment longer. Then he went back down the path past the dead geraniums, and the Kid cracked every knuckle he had, one after another, like popcorn.
Hala made tea at ten for whoever was left. She took the mugs down, and the brown one with PATERSON GREAT FALLS on it was among them, the chip on the handle turned to the wall. She filled it for herself. She put in four sugars, one at a time, and stood at the counter and drank it, and made a face, and drank the rest.
I sat in the steam from it. I didn't think about whether I should.
The last evening he was alive, Tariq turned the bed.
It was the eleventh of September, a little after the sunset prayer. Ibrahim had been asking since the afternoon. He didn't have the breath for sentences anymore, so he asked with his eyes, looking at the window and then at the foot of the bed and then at Samira, over and over, until she understood.
"He wants to face the direction of prayer," she said. "For when."
Tariq got his phone out and found it on a compass. North-east, a little more east than north, toward the corner where the wardrobe stood. He was a maths teacher. He checked it twice.
"Like this, sir?"
He took the head end and Samira took the foot, and they walked the bed round on the carpet in little jerks, with the oxygen tube held up out of the way like a skipping rope. The machine clicked and hissed on the floor. I was in the old man's ear and I felt the whole room swing, the way you feel a bus take a corner.
"They're laying you out," I said. "Look at them. They're arranging you for the hole."
He wasn't listening to me. He was looking at Tariq.
"Look after her," he said. It took him the whole breath.
"I will, sir," Tariq said. "I promise."
Samira set the baby monitor on the nightstand afterwards, turned so the white face of it looked at him. She'd bought it at the Rite Aid in the spring, when he stopped being able to call out. She tested it. She went upstairs and said into the other half, "Jiddo, can you hear me?" and her voice came out of the little speaker beside his head, small and crackly, and he smiled at it with half his mouth.
That was the last time I saw him smile. It was at a two-way radio from a drugstore.
By two in the morning the house was empty.
Hala had shut the front door at midnight with her hip, holding a tray, without a word. Then she lay down on the couch in the front room under her grey coat and fell asleep with her shoes on. Harrow sat in Ibrahim's chair across from her and watched her sleep and ate pistachios. The two from Separation stood on the upstairs landing like a pair of coats on a rack.
At ten to three the Kid came down the stairs and sat in the doorway of the back bedroom with his knees up.
"She's up," he said. "Lying there with her eyes open. Same as every night. She's ready, man. She's so ready. Do the thing about the imam. Do the bit where he lies."
I knelt by the nightstand. The green light was on. The stripped mattress was still turned toward the corner of the wardrobe, where Tariq had put it, because nobody had thought to turn it back.
From the front room I could hear Harrow splitting shells, steady as a clock. He didn't need to come in. He'd given me the terms at the Falls and again on the pink memo, and they were good terms. Do the job tonight and the house was mine: this room instead of a bunk in a toilet block, that chair, the steam off that mug, and Hala's kitchen on Sundays, where nobody blessed anything. I'd be her grandfather at three in the morning for as long as she lived, and she would keep the monitor by her bed until she was an old woman, and she would never say the name at a door again.
The Kid was watching me. His knee was going up and down.
I had the voice ready. I'd had it ready for eighty-one years. The rasp at the bottom of it and the Ramallah in the vowels and the way it always went up at the end, as if every sentence might be a question he'd already decided the answer to.
"Samira."
Upstairs, the bed creaked.
"My darling. Listen to me, and then don't listen anymore. This isn't him. It isn't your Jiddo. Your grandfather can't hear you this way, and he can't talk to you through this. He's where Allah put him."
Nothing. The light on the baby unit flickered and held.
"He heard you in March. He was awake. He pretended to sleep so you wouldn't know he'd heard, and in the last week he held your hand anyway. He fell asleep holding it. Don't answer this voice again. Pray for him."
The button clicked upstairs. The speaker hissed.
"Who is this?"
I could have said anything. I'd said everything else.
"Nobody," I said, in my own voice, for the first time in her hearing. "He didn't know I was there."
Behind me the Kid had stood up. I heard his knuckles go, all of them at once, like a branch breaking.
"Traitor," he screamed.
Every light in the house went out at once.