“I should go to Toledo,” Muneer says. He would walk there, if he had to.

“Let her figure it out,” Jameel says. “In a year she’s eighteen. She’ll be free to live wherever she wants.”

Muneer wants to keep chasing Hannah, but he’s also tired, and he knows where she is. He asks God to keep her safe. There’s the five hundred dollars and the ticket in the Chrysler’s glove box. Tomorrow, he’ll have Jameel take him to the Saudia Airlines office and have the ticket transferred to “Hannah.”

“Will you tell me where she is?” he says to Joanie. “So I can stay in touch with her until she’s ready to see me again?”

She writes an address on a notepad Diane ferrets out of a drawer.

“Thank you,” he says. “Could you write her name at the top?” He doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know what last name his daughter’s mother has given her. The girl writes it out in cursive. It’s not his name, but it belongs to his daughter and therefore is beautiful.

“MY NAME ISN’T SALLY”

1975

We had new hair and new names, but we didn’t go to the movies. I didn’t go to school. As the weather got less cold, sometimes you let W leave the upstairs windows open, the blinds up. From W’s bedroom, I glimpsed green buds growing wart-like on the tree in front of the house. Spring was starting without me.

On a warmish day when the leaves on the tree had poked out, waxy and curled at the edges, you got sick and slept for hours. I watched cartoons and crawled around the basement meowing like a cat while Poppy eyed me with concern. I wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich. The jar of peanut butter was way up high in the cupboard. I dragged a chair across the vinyl floor and climbed onto the counter to reach the jar. I got the jar open and a scoop of peanut butter into my mouth, but as I sucked on the spoon, the jar slipped out of my hands and crashed to the floor. I cleaned up some of the peanut butter with a dish towel, but left the glass shards. My brain felt thick and slow, like my tongue did when it was coated with peanut butter. I cut the crusts off slices of white bread I’d already laid on a napkin, and rolled the bread into doughy balls before eating it.