I remembered what I’d heard that night, crouching at the top of the staircase. Heard Baba making his statement to the police—how the two men, wearing masks, had leapt out of the dark corners of his garage as soon as he’d pulled in his cart and rolled down the door behind him. How they had forced him down on his knees, hands behind his head, as they broke open the locked, aluminum box that he kept on the top shelf of the cart. How the cold steel of a gun had been pressed against the side of his head, how he had begged for his life, pleading that he had a wife and a little girl who needed her father. How the triggerman finally relented, despite his partner’s protests to just “shoot the motherfucker,” and how a kick to the stomach and a blow to the side of the head had satisfied them. Baba had seen them creep out the door, the blood oozing into his eyes, before he’d passed out. That had done it. Now he would always be afraid. I imagined him slowly morphing into Mama, and wondered if I had to start hating him a little too.

We passed the bakery, and he forgot about the cannolis, and I didn’t ask. But when we passed the church and he crossed himself again, I made a point not to. I’d help myself from now on.

The Journey Home

The Journey Home

The day I married John, my mother was at home, venting her anger by smoking cigarettes and watching the clichéd and overly dramatic Arabic soap operas on the satellite TV. “I will not give you my blessing—never!” she’d said when I came home with a small diamond on my finger and John on my arm. “What do you want with an amerkani?”

So she stayed stubbornly home that day, while I recited my vows to a beaming John, at the St. Nicholas Catholic Church. Though the church was right around the corner from my parents’ house, no amount of cajoling from anyone would make her accept this marriage. Maybe it really was because John was an amerkani, or, more likely, because I was pregnant.