Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  But Mom’s green eyes were heavy, her thin hair a mess, and her mouth was still set tight, the same look she had nearly the whole time since we had gotten to our wrecked home.

  That was a new thought, thinking something good about Baba. He had always been the one who came and went, destroying the peace in our house with his presence and his demands, and his insults about how much I wasn’t his daughter.

  He came while Mom was snoring on the couch, her thin arm covering her eyes from the remaining daylight. Baba had seen the door, and now he looked at the walls. He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Isra, what will we do about this?”

  I was stunned that he cared to know my opinion. I was seven. Adults never asked me what to do. They made the decisions for me. “I guess we have to go to your house,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes, disappointed. “Well, we must put everything away, then.” He picked me up and walked with me to the bedroom. “We will let your mother rest until we are done.”

  We didn’t have suitcases, so we put everything in big trash bags. I sat on the bed looking at him, at the curls he had on his head like mine but much shorter, at his deep brown eyes, his straight nose. I figured if he could ask me what I was supposed to do about all this, I could ask him a question I had been thinking about for the last couple of months. “Are you and Mom boyfriend and girlfriend again?”

  He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “Boyfriend and girlfriend?” he repeated, and laughed sadly, shaking his head. He said a few things in Arabic to himself, or maybe to me, and sighed.

  I nodded. I instantly regretted asking the question. Nothing set my parents off more than having to define their relationship, and I was sure they were the only ones who did that. Plenty of people at school had parents who were divorced or broken up or together but not married, but they knew that much—if their parents were together or not.

  He sighed. “It is very complicated, Isra, but there is … Your mother will not be around much longer, so it is best that we do not start this again.”

  I nodded and fixed my eyes on the sunset from our bedroom window, asking no more questions.

  THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

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