“Come back. Emma.”

Emma stopped. “No.”

“Go to school please.”

“Never.”

“They’ll take you from me if you don’t go. They punish the parents when children don’t go to school.”

“I don’t care.”

“Come on. Please, habibti.” She let herself say that one word in Arabic; the likelihood any of the bus stop kids would recognize the language was slim.

And it worked.

Whenever Emma melts down, Lara has to try a different method of calming her. Promises of ice cream, television, a new Barbie they can’t afford. Nothing works twice. This morning, a simple endearment.

They held hands walking to the bus stop, and they were a block short when the bus slammed its doors shut and rumbled off. They ran-walked back to their car, Emma crying the whole way. Late again.

The hanging phone book knocks against Lara’s knees. Black blotches of chewing gum mar the metal writing surface. The phone booth is a space where she can speak Arabic safely, but she feels exposed speaking whole sentences of it. She wonders if anyone looking in through the plexiglass could lip-read and realize she’s not speaking English.

She doesn’t need to say her name. They recognize her voice.

Talk of God flows from her mother’s mouth. God protect you, God assist you, God keep you and your girl.

Mama says, “Saeedah. Darling. Where are you?”

Habibti her mother has called her.

“We’re here.” She wishes those words were enough.

Baba asks more insidious questions. About the weather. About what they do on the weekends. Trying to trip her up, solve the puzzle. She never tells him about the man looking for her.

“Thank God, we’re fine.” Her hand is sweaty on the handset. Her mother rattles on like a child learning to talk, infatuated with the sound of its own voice. Getting off the phone is like cracking ice cubes out of a tray. It takes three or four tries to find an opening to hang up.

Chris strides by, a bag of groceries under one arm. She’s learned enough in her ten years in America to look for a ring.

Chris Tanaka is a regular at the nursery. He comes most often for mulch, loading the bags into a black Chevy pickup. He tells Lara about a customer of his who looks like Jimmy Stewart.

“It’s not him, of course.”

“Who’s Jimmy Stewart?”

“Don’t you watch TV at Christmastime? It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Lara rings up the mulch. No reason to explain why she’s never watched a classic Christmas movie. After Chris leaves, the shop interior smells like his aftershave. She rushes outside to escape the scent, pretending, for Jimmy’s sake, that she’s worried about having left Emma alone for too long.

Emma has opened a bag of gravel and is leaving rocks in a trail along the aisles of plants.