All the while that he was downstairs, she could only think furiously that he had brought the evil into their home. With his lies, his guilt. He had explained it, of course. He had even cried with her a little. After he’d graduated from the university, they were going to deport him, he said. He’d needed a green card. So he got married, like a business deal. She’d done him a favor, but he still owed her two thousand dollars that he didn’t have.

But had they been lovers? No, he insisted, so adamantly that she believed him. “She wouldn’t have an Arab in her bed. Just in her third-story room, for the promise of six thousand dollars,” he said. The third story of the house on Chestnut Street, in case the INS checked up on them. He’d even paid her rent during those three years, in addition to the money she wanted. Two months after their official divorce, he’d returned to the Old Country and spent the remaining two thousand dollars on his wedding. His “real and meaningful” wedding, not the sham one of almost four years ago.

Siham sat at the window in her embroidery room, looking down at the sidewalk below. She had $850 in an envelope, tucked beneath layers of fabric and spools of thread in her craft box. She’d wanted to use it to buy a new crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair to put in this room. This room would soon be a nursery. If the baby was a girl, as she hoped, she had planned to buy the beautiful set of baby furniture she’d seen in the Sunday circular, an ashy wood with brass details on the drawer handles.

A blonde head appeared below and turned right heading down 9th Street, probably toward her beautiful and elegant home with its plants on the windowsill and clean, swept sidewalks. She was abandoning the numbered streets for one with an elegant and thoroughly American name: Chestnut. Only Americans named their streets after trees, instead of after presidents and wars and prophets. She probably wouldn’t even walk; she’d hail a cab along the way or maybe get into her expensive car.

Nader would come upstairs now, probably with a rose Mrs. Donato would wisely press into his hands. He would be climbing the steps, hoping it would make her smile. And she would smile, as genuinely as she could stretch her lips, and say that she understood. That it would take a while to forget it, but that they had to think about the baby now. Then she would hand him the envelope with the money and ask him to never mention this again. She would not tell him about the nursery set, just quietly toss out the picture in the circular.

And she would write her mother, asking her to mail a few more blue stones. She had to be more careful from now on.