Diane’s eyes, light-colored like marbles, roll up. She tries to cut a piece of lamb with a spoon. “Let’s sit at the table. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable that way?”

“Can I get you a knife?” Muneer says, feeling sorry for her.

“No, I’m fine.”

Jameel rummages in the kitchen and comes back with a butter knife.

“That’s no help,” Diane says.

Jameel hacks at the meat on Diane’s plate, gives up, tears it with his fingers, and offers it to her. Meanwhile, Saeedah puts on her sneakers. With the door open, she stands outside and lets the below-zero air blow in.

“It’s pretty cold out there,” Diane calls to Saeedah. “Don’t you want a coat?”

Muneer’s growing annoyance with everyone in the room is like water on its way to boiling, minuscule bubbles in his chest popping, then larger ones, bursting pockets of anger. On the soap opera he watches most weekdays to improve his English, there is a psychologist whose three children are addicts, and it has dawned on him that he, Muneer, is a journalism student unable to uncover the truth of whatever is wrong with his wife and his life. Last week, he took the small reporter’s notebook out of his knapsack and stood at the bathroom mirror, interviewing himself.

“When did your wife begin behaving this way? How did she react when you didn’t have enough money to go home over the summer? Is there anything you could do to make things better?”

“I don’t know,” he told the mirror. “No comment.”

In his socked feet and sweatshirt, he joins his wife on the front porch, hugging himself for warmth while flakes of snow turn her hair white as an old lady’s. His teeth clack; it’s that cold. He has never felt so out of place.

“What’s going on?” he says.

She turns to him, looking lost. Like she doesn’t know what to tell him.

She steps off the porch. Muneer watches her leave a trail of footprints leading to the car. She revs the engine. He returns to his friends and his nearly finished meal.

“That was strange,” Jameel says.

“The rice is delicious,” Diane says to Muneer. “Is there orange peel in here?”

Jameel scoops spicy duqus onto his rice.

“No problem,” Muneer says. “She’ll be back soon.”

AIRMAIL

There is a gap in Muneer’s memory of Saeedah five or six or seven years wide. She was a dirt-faced, plait-haired little girl in the courtyard one minute, and the next, mashallah, a beautiful woman glimpsed from behind a screen.