Chapter 18: Our Home

July 2011

The call came on a Sunday evening, and it was Mariam who answered, because the telephone was one of the few wonders of the house she had fully made her peace with — she had decided early that a voice in a wire was no stranger than a voice through a door, and refused to be afraid of it.

“Mansoor house,” she said carefully, in the English his mother had drilled into all of them for exactly this.

And then his voice. “Is that my first wife answering the telephone in English like she was born to it?”

Mariam’s hand went to her mouth. The whole kitchen turned — his sisters, his mother, the three other women — at the look on her face.

“Omar.” She said it and then couldn’t say anything else for a moment, and the room erupted in silent frantic gesturing, is it him, is it him, and she flapped a hand at them to be still. “Omar. Where are you. When.”

“Wednesday,” he said. “Next Wednesday. The board’s signed off, the leg’s as fixed as it’s going to get, and they’re turning me loose. I fly into Cedar Rapids Wednesday afternoon. Tell my dad — someone can come get me at the airport.”

“Wednesday.” She breathed it. Four days. “Wednesday, you hear that—” to the room now, in their own tongue, and the kitchen exploded into noise, Yasmin’s hands flying to her face, Dina sitting down hard in a chair, Nadia laughing her quiet astonished laugh, his mother already weeping into a dish towel.

“Mariam.” His voice again, mock-stern, pulling her back. “Now listen. I’m coming home to my own house at last, and I expect to find it in good order. Clean floors. Something cooking. Four wives who’ve learned to run an American kitchen so I don’t come home to chaos. Can a man ask that much, after everything?”

Mariam’s eyes narrowed even as they shone. She knew him by now — knew the teasing for what it was, a man too full of feeling to say the plain thing, hiding it behind a joke about housekeeping.

“You want a clean house,” she said dryly. “Seven years that house of mine in the mountains was the cleanest, best-kept house in the whole valley, and the only thanks I got was a husband who chained me in the cellar. You’ll get your clean floors, Omar Mansoor. And then you’ll sit down in your chair and you’ll weep like a baby at the sight of us, and I won’t say one word about the floors after that.”

He laughed — she heard it crack at the end. “Probably true,” he admitted. “Four days, Mariam. Keep them well till then. Keep yourself well. All five of you.” A beat. “I’m coming home.”

“We know,” she said. “We never doubted it. Come home, husband. Your chair’s been waiting since the day we got here. Dina picked it out.”

The four days were the longest and the shortest the women had known since the firebase.

The house went into a fever of readiness — though in truth it had been ready for weeks, made so by his mother and grandmother and the steady work of the women themselves, who at five and six and seven months along had nonetheless thrown themselves into making the place a home. They had learned this house, over the weeks, the way they’d learned everything: stubbornly, completely, refusing to be beaten by it. The strange wonders that had frightened them at first — the stove that lit with a turn and no fire to build, the machine that washed the dishes, the growling thing in the sink drain that had made Yasmin shriek the first time Omar’s sister fed it a potato peel, the toilets, the showers that poured hot water from the wall like a miracle out of scripture — all of it had been gentled, one appliance at a time, by his patient sisters, until the four mountain women moved through a modern American kitchen with something close to ease.