Hala drove the way she talked on the phone, fast, with one hand, and I rode in the back seat of her Lexus with the realtor's sign for her father's house lying flat beside me.
She'd come to Twentieth Avenue that afternoon with a tape measure and a woman from her office, and walked them both through every room saying square feet. In the back bedroom she'd stopped at the nightstand and looked at the baby monitor for a while. Then she'd measured the window.
I'd been in the house every night for a week by then. Eight nights on the monitor. Nothing big. Harrow had said not to rush it. A cough at two in the morning. Her name. One night I'd told her she looked tired and she didn't need to go to the mosque on Friday, that I'd be home. She'd sat on the stairs with the parent unit in her lap and said, "Okay, Jiddo. Okay."
The house in Wayne was on a curve of new houses that all had the same front door. Hala went in talking. She dropped her keys in a bowl and kicked off her shoes and turned on the television in the kitchen before she'd turned on the light, and she said nothing at the door, and I came in with her like a cat.
Her kitchen was white. White counters, white cupboards, an island in the middle with three tall stools, the television on the wall showing the Giants losing. And on the stove, under a cloth, a tray of her mother's chicken, roasted with onions and sumac on flat bread, the way Nadia made it on Saturdays for forty-five years.
I hadn't known she could make it. He hadn't known either.
"Sit, sit," she said, to Tariq, who'd been waiting in his car outside and came in behind us holding a bag of oranges. "She's going to be late. She's always late. Eat while it's hot."
He sat at the island. She put a plate in front of him, and one in front of herself, and tore the bread with her fingers. Tariq was talking about his tenth-grade class, and how half of them couldn't do fractions, and he took the first bite in the middle of a sentence.
Nobody said anything over it.
I ate. I sat on the third stool in the steam and ate from Hala's plate, the sumac and the soft onion and the bread gone dark with oil. It was hot. It was the right food. It was his daughter's kitchen and his wife's dish, and there was a game on, and somebody talking about school, and nobody was reading, and nobody in the room was going to say the name. I felt it go into me and stay.
For an hour I was home.
"The fortieth is a Wednesday," Hala said, with her mouth full. "The twenty-first. I'll do it at the house. Coffee, dates, the neighbours, whoever from the mosque. The week after, it goes on the market."
"Does Samira know that?"
"Samira knows what she wants to know." She pushed the tray toward him. "Have another piece. You're too thin for a teacher."
He had another piece. So did I. I'd sat at a hundred tables in that family, in a hundred kitchens, and I'd never once been at one where I could hear what everyone said and nobody was talking to me, and I didn't have to work. I just ate. I watched Hala lick sumac off her thumb, which her mother used to slap her hand for, and I didn't tell her anything at all.
The hungry years started at a kitchen table with a little girl on two telephone books.
2006. Samira was four. She had a plastic plate with a duck on it and a spoon she held like a shovel, and Ibrahim sat beside her with his own plate untouched, his sleeves rolled, very patient.
"Before every bite," he said. "Like this." And in Arabic, slow, so she could see his mouth: "In the name of Allah." Then he ate one mouthful of rice.
"In the name of Allah," she said in Arabic, and ate one mouthful of rice.
"Good. Again."
They did it for the whole plate. Every bite. She thought it was a game, and she was right, it was a game, and I lost it every time.
I was in the doorway. That was as close as I could get to that table by then. Two years before, I'd been eating everything he put in his mouth. Now I stood with my back against the frame and smelled the rice and the yoghurt and the bread, and every time he said it, it came across the kitchen at me like a slammed door.
"You're sixty-one," I told him from the doorway. "You look ridiculous. Your son is dead and you're playing games with spoons."
He didn't hear me. Or he heard me, and said it again. I could never tell which, in those years. Nadia stood at the sink with her back to them, and I saw her shoulders go up and down once, and she didn't turn round.
I went hungry for twenty-two years. I'd like to say I bore it. I didn't. I stood in doorways and hated him with everything I had, and he ate his dinner.
Even at night he didn't slip. After she was asleep he'd sit alone at that table with a glass of tea, and before the first sip he'd say it again, under his breath, to nobody. I'd go eleven days on nothing and then he'd yawn at four in the morning and forget, once, over a biscuit. I'd take the biscuit. I'd hate him for the size of it.
"She didn't go Friday," Tariq said.
Hala was scraping the tray. "She's exhausted."
"She's never missed. Not once since I've known her. Not when she had the flu." He turned his glass round on the counter. "And she's. . . she says she hears him. At night. On that monitor thing. She sits up and talks to it."
Hala stopped scraping.
"I heard Mom's slippers for a year," she said. "In the hall. Every night at eleven, when she used to go to the bathroom. It's grief, Tariq. It's what grief does. It goes away." She put the tray in the sink. "Which is why I'm selling that house before it eats her."
"Should I take it out of the house? The monitor?"
"Take it, and she'll go to Target and buy another one." Hala dried her hands. "Leave it. Let her talk. He never listened to anybody when he was alive, he can listen now."
I sat on my stool, full, and I liked her very much.
The front door went. Samira came in in her pharmacy tunic with her lanyard still round her neck and her hair coming down, and the Kid came in at her ear, cracking his knuckles, and he gave me a little nod across the kitchen like a man at a bar.
"Sorry, sorry," she said. "Mrs. Ortiz came in at ten to six with nine prescriptions." She kissed Hala, she touched Tariq's shoulder, she looked at the tray. "Is that Grandma's chicken?"
"Sit down."
She sat on the stool beside mine. She was so close I could see the lines the gloves had left on her wrists. Hala put a plate in front of her. The Kid leaned in toward her ear with his mouth open.
"You're tired," he said, fast and low. "Just eat. Nobody's saying anything. Don't make it weird in front of the boyfriend."
Samira put both her hands flat on the counter, one on each side of the plate, the way her grandfather did. She didn't look down at it. She looked at all of it, the tray and the oranges and her aunt and the man she was going to marry, and she said it over the whole table, out loud, in Arabic, the way he used to.
"In the name of Allah."
The kitchen hit me in the chest. I went backward off the stool, through the white cupboards and the wall and the hedge, and the road came up and took me across the back, hard, and I lay in the middle of the curve under a street lamp with the Giants still losing behind every window.