Mariam put everything back where she'd found it. Later, as she was doing laundry,
she regretted that she had sneaked around in his room. For what? What thing of substance had she learned about him?
That he owned a gun, that he was a man with the needs of a man?
And she shouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for as long as she had.
Her eyes had read meaning into what was random body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bounced heavily before her, was sorrow for Rasheed.
He too had had a hard life, a life marked by loss and sad turns of fate.
Her thoughts returned to his boy Yunus, who had once built snowmen in this yard, whose feet had pounded these same stairs.
The lake had snatched him from Rasheed, swallowed him up, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake prophet in the Koran.
It pained Mariam—it pained her considerably—to picture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless,
pacing the banks of the lake and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dry land.
And she felt for the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they would make good companions after all.
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