“Here you are,” Kenneth said to them. I thought his voice was unusually loud, forced.

Julie and Tony turned and came towards us. Julie was smiling broadly.

“I think we should get going,” Tony said to me.

The four of us began to walk back as if nothing had happened. But surely what I had seen underneath the branches of the tree, just a moment before, could not have been false.

In bed that night I said, “Do you like Julie now? You used to think she’s too erratic.”

“I like her.”

“You like her a lot? I mean …”

“What’s this cross-examining?”

“I don’t know. You were talking to her for so long and so intently and …” I could not bring myself to make the accusation.

“She was telling me about some idea she had about people living in plastic houses—so that everything is exposed. That way we learn not to be ashamed of anything.”

Tony yawned.

That was the beginning of my suspicions of his infidelities, sometimes confirmed, sometimes unproven.

The beginning also of my own infidelities.

My father and Darius had come into the room and were looking at me. I was standing by the phone, as if I were paralyzed.

“What happened?” my father asked.

“He wasn’t in. He has gone away for a week.”

“There’s no rush for you to go back. If you return so quickly he won’t appreciate you. What does a man think of a woman with no sense of family?” Darius said.

“I’m tired. I’d like to rest,” I said.

“Maybe you weren’t so happy there,” my father said. “Or else why come back now, after so many years?”

I went to my room and sat on the bed and tried to think of what to do next. There was not much I could do. I had to wait until I reached Tony. In a way I was more anxious than before to get back, to settle things with Tony—the memory of the walk that night tormented me even more acutely now than when it had occurred. But I was not sure what I would say to him—he resisted talks.

The sense of helplessness I had felt since I came on the visit began to envelop me. As the afternoon darkened to twilight, I seemed to go back to my childhood, to the time when my mother left. Waiting and waiting for her and she never returning.

I remember seeing a square figure, wrapped in a chador, standing at the darkened end of the street, signalling to me to come out. I feel a thrill, an electric connection with that figure and run out into the street. I run with extraordinary speed. I come to a sudden stop before the figure, my mother. Inch by inch I am buried farther under her chador, hidden, safe, and at this point I begin to cry. I feel the muscles of her stomach twitching under my chin, shaking with fear, joy? She lays her head on my shoulder and mutters, “They won’t let me see you, they won’t let me. One day I’m going to come and take you away. Yes, one day ….” I am aware of the fabric of her dress on my cheek, silky, slippery. After that, every afternoon, I stand by the window, waiting for her.