Harbor by Lorraine Adams

Author:Lorraine Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426161
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

19

It was a walk-up above the Fair City Supermarket on Coney Island Avenue. Roaches strong from grocery leavings lined the underside of the stove, the sinks, the baseboards. His roommates Waheb and Rachid looked to be improvements over the Chinese and the sick Nigerian. Unfortunately, Waheb was stupid. So dumb, that while it was true Aziz could tell him the most intricate of his thoughts with all the words needed, Waheb was mostly incapable of understanding what it was, even halfway, that Aziz meant. As for Rachid, he was constantly on the phone to someone in Germany, and this someone spoke German, and Aziz had no German.

Then there were the shoes. Waheb and Rachid kept them in boxes stacked in a closet. They filled it top to bottom. He never saw them wear them. He did not ask about them. He had learned. If they had packed the closets with grenades, he would have been silent. After the first few weeks, he avoided them.

So when he was not working at the Haha Smoke Shop, Aziz sought out the old man he had helped sell books outside the cell-phone store. He felt comforted by him, in his so-washed djellaba and their easy talking about not much. Whether it would be better to get an orange from the man who sold them around the corner or from the one who came into the store, but not every day, with his basket. Whether Hussain’s daughter would marry the man with the over-big gold watch. Whether Hussain’s wife was against the gold-watch man. But Aziz could not explain to this man, who had lost his family to some strange scourge of hyper-justice in Yemen, how it was that Boston had become to him something close to home. Something he grieved he had lost.

Mourad had no interest in Heather as an object of lust, but when he realized she had no interest in him that way either, or any way, he was heartbroken. They were, after all, in the same bed, night after night. True, he always found her in the bed in a long nightgown and a longer bathrobe. He knew she pretended to be asleep, because when she was actually asleep, which he had noticed many times when he lay awake in the middle of the night, her breathing was slightly different.

But he let her pretend. It was maidenly in a way. It had been a long time since he realized she was not the spoiled child he had assumed. It was a long time since he had half expected to be required to fight her off. He had judged her objections about sleeping in the same bed to be a coquette’s pose. They were not. And it was unexpectedly gratifying that she was naïve but he, Mourad, was not, about the dangers of surveillance. He felt protective of Heather.

Heather thought of moving back to Virginia, but that meant her mother. And her sister, Sweet Briar’s field hockey champion and Bum Chum Tap Club president.

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