“The Tuesday past,” said Allam, speaking precisely—was he disappointed that he hadn’t been asked?—“I could not come because my fambly had a celebration. Birthday of husband of my daughter. Small fambly, small celebration,” he added. “At a bistro. My grandchildren, two girls, one boy, were present. Is that correct? The sound is not right, I think.”

“Family,” Tom told him. “No b. Though I can see how the word can be heard that way.”

“Thank you, Toe-mas. I need to learn the small things about language as much as the big.”

“And how was your dinner out?” Tom hid his surprise at the sharing of personal news.

“The food, yes, fine. But tell me, Toe-mas, why must pork be pulled? Why must peas be smashed before they take their place on a menu in a restaurant that is said to be special? I am happy to be in this country, but smashing peas and pulling pork . . . well. I did not order pork, Toe-mas. I did not order smashed peas.”

“But you did eat something?”

“Arctic char, excellent fish. I did not complain about pork and peas. Those I read from the menu. We drank to the health of my son-in-law. I told stories to the children. Laughter on all faces is good. But later, after we returned to my daughter’s home, after everyone was sleeping, I sat by myself in the kitchen and thought of my father, how he roasted lamb outside, over a firepit. How he told many stories. That was long ago, in our village when I was a boy. Later, we moved to Aleppo. My father died there, age eighty-three, before the present troubles began. There have been many periods of trouble in my country’s history. When I was a child, my father showed me . . . things he wanted me to know.”

Allam looked toward the ceiling and rubbed the back of his hand beneath his chin before he went on.

“He showed me how to make the fire, how to slaughter and roast lamb. How to negotiate with others. To believe that learning is important. To know and remember the past. How can we go to the future if we don’t know our past?” Allam extended his arms as if the past might swoop in and land on his open hands. But the hands pulled back. He closed his eyes. “I was blessed to have a good father who lived many years. Others from my village were not so fortunate.”

In companionable silence, the two men contemplated their separate pasts.

“He taught me steelth, Toe-mas.”

Which Tom interpreted as “stealth,” recalling how silently and abruptly Allam came in and out of the shop.

And just as abruptly, with no prompting, he found himself sharing the only story he owned about his own father. The one first-hand story he had to tell.

“My father was a soldier during the war. He was sent off for training just before I was born. Any detail I knew of him was from a single photograph. Brown and white . . . well, sepia, actually. My mother told me that my father left Wilna Creek on a train, and later in the year, he embarked on a ship in Halifax to cross the ocean. He did not return home after the completion of his training. She told me no stories about him, no history. The only clue to his existence was the framed photograph of him in uniform, propped on my mother’s bedroom dresser. All this seems strange to me now, of course. We boarded in behind Ross and Main, with an older friend of my mother’s. I suppose I didn’t think about other belongings that might have been, or perhaps should have been, in the two rooms that were ours. My father had been born in northern England, border country, and we never met any of his family. As it turned out, they didn’t know we existed.