The Night Counter (28 page)

“See you soon,
inshallah
,” Dawood said. “
Bon soir.
” He put out his
hand for another handshake and followed Houda’s hair to the front entrance of the house.

The first thing Rock or anyone else saw when he walked into Miriam’s kitchen was yellow tiled walls with pictures in wooden frames of Joe in his uniform, Rock as a baby, Rock in his uniform, and Miriam in her wedding dress, along with a black-and-white photo of Fatima in her wedding dress. Everyone got to be in photos all by himself in Miriam’s house.

“It’s my birthday boy,” Miriam boasted as she limped over to him. “I was just saying to myself there was some good reason I’ve been slaving away in the kitchen all day, and here he is.”

Miriam went to kiss Rock’s cheek. She saw Houda’s lipstick on his face. “Your father has such tacky relatives,” she said. “Well, happy birthday, son. Can you believe it’s been twenty-nine years? But we made it.”

She drizzled a platter of raw kibbe with olive oil and sprinkled it with parsley.

“The kibbe looks great, Mom,” Rock said before his cell phone rang. Miriam eyed him as he looked at the number until it went to voice mail.

“Jiminy Cricket, you’re seeing someone and you don’t want me to know about it,” Miriam concluded.

“Something like that,” Rock agreed. “Come on, we’ve left people hiding far too long this year.” He took the raw kibbe from her, and they went into a wood-paneled living room decorated with thick mustard drapes, old movie posters of famous men and women in love, and coil rugs.

At exactly this time every year, a crowd of twenty jumped up from behind yellow velour furniture that was just a few months older than Rock and began tooting horns. They were led in this endeavor by Carla and Brittney Walt Smith, bald, fat, and altogether charming, was the first to hug Rock and give him a pudgy man’s slug.

Walt had been Miriam’s boss since what he referred to as “the tragic death of young Joe,” although Walt had been born the same year as Joe. Rock knew that Walt praised Joe only out of respect for Miriam. Joe had borrowed a lot of money from Walt over the years, and Walt had been
paid back only for the money borrowed for the swampland in Florida, the only debt Miriam knew about.

Houda, followed by Dawood, popped out from behind a Naugahyde recliner. “Surprise, handsome,” she shouted. “It’s your birthday.”

Dawood shook Rocks hand again.

“Daddy, Daddy, look what I got you,” Brittney squealed. Rock took a box clearly wrapped by a little girl—too many ribbons and not enough paper—and unwrapped a G.I. Joe.

Brittney smiled up at him. “Mommy says it’s vintage,” she said.

Rock hugged his daughter and looked at Carla. Vintage was easy to find in New Castle: You just had to dig into your neighbor’s attic. But the G.I. Joe was not a gift for Rock. It was a stab at Miriam.

Carla always let everyone know she was born again, but she was also a closet avenger. Back when he and Carla had been in love, a delusion that had ended completely when Rock had stayed at Fort Bragg and Carla had gone back to New Castle to take care of her ailing mother, Rock had told Carla about Miriam throwing away his G.I. Joe dolls when Rock Hudson died. Although Rock had liked Carla’s mother—he’d always liked everything about Carla—Carla hated Miriam. Rock couldn’t blame her. Carla’s mother, who’d eventually died of Alzheimer’s, had had a much more legitimate reason for always forgetting everything Carla said.

Even now, Miriam ignored the G.I. Joe. “Look everyone, I made kibbe,” she said. She limped to the dining table and laid the tray down with rare grace. In response, the guests salivated and clapped. This was Miriam’s signature dish, made just for Rock’s birthdays and Joe’s annual memorials, the only two occasions when she entertained. “I don’t just make grape leaves like everyone else,” she bragged.

“Miriam, you still haven’t found me a nice Jewish girl who can make kibbe like you,” Walt said. For the twenty-nine years Miriam had been working for Walt, she had promised to find him a nice Jewish girl but had failed. “Even though my great-grandmother was an amazing matchmaker,” Miriam always told Walt by way of apology, “I guess my family only wanted to give me the family curses, not gifts.”

There were no other Jews at the party, practically none in town besides Walt. The other guests were Italian, mostly Carla’s relatives—her aunts and uncles, all pushing the seams of their sweats, hair still feathered back mid-1970s style, the last time most of them had felt sexy That was about the time Carla and Rock were both conceived.

“Just think,” Carla said to Miriam. “In four years, Rock will be as old as Jesus when he died. Did you know Jesus was a carpenter, too?”

Carla’s relatives, Catholics by birth, shuffled their feet, uncomfortable with religions that weren’t simply inherited. But despite her feelings about Rock, Carla wanted Brittney to see some good Christian qualities in her father.

“Say hallelujah,” Brittney proclaimed, raising her hands. “My daddy and Jesus do construction.”

Who was this adorable, Savior-loving child with teeth in need of braces? She had his nose bump and his perfect scores in math, but he really knew she was his when he caught glimpses of her forehead wrinkling up. He knew she, too, was a closet thinker.

Rock once had promised Carla that after her mom passed, they would move to New York, that they would leave New Castle the way nearly everyone in their high school band had. But Carla got pregnant before her mother died. She said Rock hadn’t used a condom because he secretly wanted her not to get a chance to be a singer. By the time his eight years in the army was over, Rock couldn’t help thinking that he had disappointed Carla over and over again, just as Joe had done to Miriam from the grave. Mike and Jesus had replaced him easily.

Brittney let go of Rock’s hand and pulled off a rubber bracelet way too big for her wrist. “Look what I got for you with my allowance,” she said, shoving the bracelet onto Rock’s wrist.

“See those letters? They stand for ‘What would Jesus do?’ WWJD. Get it?” Brittney explained. “The Lord is coming, Daddy, and Mommy says you’re going to be saved in time.”

“Uh, it’s very elastic, honey,” he said, catching Carla’s eye. All the others not born again looked at Rock sympathetically.

“Come on, big boy, open your other gifts,” Walt urged him.

Rock went to the gift table.“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I’m honored.”

Dawood shook Rocks hand again. “
Kul sinni wa inta salem
,” he said. Miriam and Houda shrugged. They had no translation. They could translate single words, but a whole string of them was a little much. Dawood didn’t understand that it took only a generation to lose a language.

“Same to you, buddy,” Rock said, and shook Dawood’s hand again.

“Start with the cards,” said Miriam. “My sisters always send the best cards.” Miriam bragged loudly about her family. In private, to Rock, she talked about how her family had married her off just to get her out of the house. “I’ll never be like that with you, Rock,” she would say. “You can stay with me forever.”

Rock opened the cards from Miriam’s sisters while Brittney danced around him, stopping occasionally to kiss him.

Rock was opening a book from Fatima—the most multicolored version of
A History of the Arab People
she’d given him so far—when his cell phone rang again.

“It’s your birthday,” Carla said, always sighing at him now the way Miriam did. “Answer it.”

“Geez, Louise, go ahead,” Miriam chimed in. “There will still be kibbe left when you’re done talking to your new phone friend.”

Everyone waited for him to answer it. Rock didn’t get many calls, and when he did, it was almost always from someone who was already in this room. He let it go to voice mail.

Brittney tugged on Rock’s U2 T-shirt. “Oh, Daddy, the Lord is full of surprises,” she exclaimed. “Just look.”

A pair of chubby hands held a massive cake in the shape of a pastel space shuttle. Miriam gave one of her seldom-heard giggles when Walt poked out his head from behind the cake.

“Remember how you always wanted to be an astronaut?” Walt said. “Well, here ya go. Your very own Rockette. Get it?”

Rock flinched for only a moment when Mike followed in behind the
cake, carrying one of the books Walt stocked just for Mike to buy Rock on his birthdays. Mike handed it to Rock and then put his arm around Carla. “Happy birthday, buddy,” he said with a smile.

There wasn’t a huge dating pool in New Castle for the under-thirty crowd. Carla had had plenty of alone time when Rock was at Fort Bragg. There were no bars for single mothers without child care and no cable at her mother’s house. Instead, she had watched evangelist TV and built up resentment toward Rock and a fondness for Mike, who had dabbled in real estate after he got out of the army and helped Carla sell her mother’s house, a hard thing to do in New Castle. More people were dying than buying, as Walt always said.

“Dig in, folks,” Miriam told the crowd. Everyone homed in on the raw kibbe, ignoring the cheese twists and the seven-layer dip. “Kibbe was Joe’s favorite dish.” Miriam sighed. “My mother taught me to make it for him when we got engaged.”

After everyone had his or her glass filled with Country Time Lemonade, Walt raised his glass in a toast. “Many, many more, kiddo,” he said.

Glasses clinked. Houda dinged her glass with her red devil nails. “And to Joe,” she cheered.

Rock’s cell phone went off when he held his glass up to heaven for Joe.

“Just answer it,” Carla snarled.

Rock put down his glass and turned off the cell phone. “She’ll call back,” he said. Miriam and Carla kept looking at him.

“Get me a beer, buddy,” Walter whispered to Rock. “I got a six-pack in the fridge, but I don’t want your mom giving me the old lecture about how I need to slow the calories.”

Rock found Dawood in the kitchen cutting up the space shuttle cake for the guests. “I’d shake your hand, but me a little sticky,” Dawood told him.

“You wanna beer?” Rock asked as he grabbed one for Walt.

“I don’t drink,” Dawood answered.

“Not much of a drinker myself,” Rock replied as he took half the cake’s launch pad for himself. No one could make sheet cake like Miriam.
Dawood just smiled and watched him eat as if he were a movie, which made Rock uncomfortable. “So, uh, you ever been to Iraq?” Rock asked him.

“Why would I have go to Iraq?” Dawood said, pronouncing the name with the guttural Arabic his grandparents used, as if one couldn’t say it without sounding pissed off.

“You’re from around there,” Rock said. “I thought you might have gone for spring break or something before it all went to hell.”

“Have you been to New York?” Dawood asked.

“No,” Rock said.

“New York is much closer to this town of yours than Deir Zeitoon is to Baghdad,” Dawood said. “But I don’t say you’re from around New York.”

“No, I guess not. … A lot of my old buddies have been sent over to Iraq,” Rock went on without thinking.

“
Haram
,” Dawood mumbled.

Haram
. Sacrilege. One of the few words uttered in Arabic by Miriam when she recalled the suffering in the world, particularly her own. He didn’t know if Dawood considered the death of the American soldiers or the invasion of Iraq the sacrilege. Maybe both. He really didn’t want to think about it anymore.

Dawood finished cutting the cake just as Brittney came in. Her forehead wrinkled when she saw Rock’s face. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”

Rock tickled her stomach. “Want some more cake, baby?”

“I can’t, Daddy,” Brittney said. “I came to say bye ’cause we’ve got to go or we’re going to be late for service. Don’t forget to come to my graduation this Sunday. And don’t drink any of Mr. Smith’s beer if you can help it. It’s the devil’s Pepsi.” She kissed him goodbye and skipped out.

“God is better than a meth lab, right?” Rock shrugged, not knowing why his thoughts never drifted to any options in between.

Dawood shrugged back and took the cake to the living room. The party was down to the regular old Catholics and Muslims and Jew. Carla’s relatives had finished the kibbe and so were obliged to move on to the
seven-layer dip, which they did with slightly less enthusiasm. Houda discreetly placed some tortilla chips in her purse. Walt helped Miriam clean up, and she giggled at something he said.

BY THE TIME
Rock got up at 5
A.M.
on Sunday to get ready for Brittney’s confirmation, he had finished the math teasers book and had not returned his last six cell phone calls. He would today, he promised himself, and then pushed the thought away. By 6
A.M.
, Rock was driving on US 422 with Miriam, Houda, Walt, and Dawood, heading to the Cornerstone Church in Youngstown for the eight o’clock service. The Yusefs were New Castle’s only Muslim family. Until 9/11, they had been known mostly as a military family. However, for a few weeks after that day, people who had never invited Miriam and Rock over before asked them to Sunday dinner and other neighbors came over with cakes to show that President Bush was right: Arab Americans and Muslim Americans were Americans period. That very support made them aware that they were no longer just Americans.

The Cornerstone Church in Youngstown once had been a supermarket owned by Walt. Now it held two thousand people every Sunday. The band was jamming. The drummer was tight, and Carla’s voice rocked out in praise of God’s love. Rock watched her on the video screen. Carla had said that this church was a little too liberal for an evangelical church, but it was good to be around God-fearing people, and it gave her a bigger audience for her singing than she’d ever had.

“Amazing what they’ve done with the place,” Walt remarked. “The pulpit is right where the fruits and vegetables used to be.” They found seats in the unobtrusive middle, near what had been the cereal aisle.

Up front, Brittney skipped in with several other girls in white ruffle dresses. The video screens showed them up close and giggling. When Carla stopped singing, the boyish blond minister motioned for everyone to sit.

“Let us pray,” he said. The two thousand people bowed their heads. Rock could not imagine all the thoughts that must creep into prayers, and
so he began squaring 8, in honor of Brittney’s age. He tuned out the service, Dawood’s uncomfortable shifting, Miriam’s sighs, and Walt’s comforting hands, one on Miriam’s arm and one on Rock’s.