I felt this rush when I discovered Afghan music on the internet. The soundtrack of my childhood flooded my room and swept me into the past. I found myself singing lines I didn’t realize I knew, humming melodies I hadn’t heard since before I lost my parents. I couldn’t get enough. I clicked on the second and third song before the prior one had finished. I hopped from one memory to another—an Eid fete, a Nowruz celebration, a wedding. In the same way that my muscles ache if I run after a long hiatus, the music squeezed my heart if I let too much time pass since I’d last listened.

Mom looks like she’s experiencing that same ache.

My phone buzzes. I open my purse to read Adam’s text without taking my phone out of my bag.

I’ll take it down. So am I even allowed to tell people you exist?

I tap out a reply.

If a tree falls in the forest, but no one posts about it on Facebook, is the tree even real?

My finger hovers over the Send icon, waiting for my better judgment to kick in. Maybe I’m being overly controlling when it comes to my privacy. No one will recognize me from my picture, and Adam has no idea why I’m so sensitive on the matter anyway.

I delete my message without sending it. Instead, I tap out a more tempered response.

Let’s not discuss via text. At the show now. How’s tomorrow?

I will tell Adam everything. That’s the only way he’ll understand.

Applause fills the theater. I close my bag and try to focus on the show. My mind races, though, replaying the afternoon with Shair and his daughter. I wonder if he’s realized who I am or if he’s shared anything with his family.

I watch the actors move about onstage in exaggerated movements. The songs are bright and infectious, sung in a western drawl that doesn’t befuddle me as it did when I was a teenager. Cowboys in vests and chaps and women in corsets stomp their boots in celebration of a new frontier. With steer roping and butter churning, with a rifle at every corner, this is as American as a musical can get.

Why don’t we all take a swim together? In Persia, where I come from, bathing is a social event, sings a character with eyebrows that dance like Groucho Marx’s. He is Ali Hakim, a flirtatious Persian peddler. He tells Laurey that in Persia women swim nude. Mom must sense my reaction. She leans in and waits for me to speak.

“I can’t imagine there were a whole lot of Persian men in Oklahoma a hundred years ago,” I whisper. “And why does he have to be such a perv?”