Then there were the hospital bills. Insurance paid most but not all of them. Rafik assigned Aziz to go to Linda’s house every day and take the bills from their mailbox, so she would never see them. He instructed Aziz to toss them, but Aziz kept them under his bed. Eventually, even with Aziz removing the bills, there would be trouble about that, and that was why they had moved and why Heather had quit the job at her dad’s company, which luckily, it turned out, was not actually his company. The calls to Linda from collection agencies began long after she and Heather had had four glasses of wine and a tearful two hours at a bar near their office. Heather told Linda she would be going back to college in the fall, and in the meantime her father was taking her on a tour of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was going to be hard to go without talking for six months, but Heather promised Linda she would call her along the way.

Chapter 8

8

It was early for the club, not quite ten. The music was still low enough for talking. Rafik looked hard at Aziz. “You are not telling me the whole story,” he said.

“Another one?” A waitress pointed to Aziz’s empty bottle.

“Two,” Rafik told her. “There is a woman in this story,” Rafik continued. “There was one for you.”

“There is no story.” Aziz did not want another beer. He did not want Rafik’s blunt to have any chance at the intricate of Soumeya.

“Your brother is coming soon enough. He will tell me why you came. And—”

“We are lucky American immigration has this lottery,” Aziz interrupted. “It is—what—nine months since I came? And the prize, the lottery for green card, my brother has won.”

“You enter both your names in the lottery, and he, who does not want to come, wins. You, who wanted to come, lost. God hates us.”

“My parents are happy.”

“One less to feed.”

“Mourad is hungry, and there is no work for him, and my father cannot take him and Latif and Bilal and my mother and her sisters. Oh, and of course my aunts, my father’s sisters. He cannot feed them all. It is not possible.”

“Mourad should have found a woman.”

“He is depressed.”

“He is ugly.”

Aziz laughed. His youngest brother, Mourad, was no uglier than any of them. But he was apart, pitied. Yet he was the only student in the family. Unlike his three older brothers and two older sisters, Mourad learned some English, not just French. He was dour, he said little, and, because he was the youngest, was often ignored. But this forgotten one would have a green card from the start, which would mean a real job. They would start sending home money. After nine months, he had not sent any. He had not paid any hospital bills either.