Too bad this story didn’t end like that, where everyone is happy and doing the right thing.

Honeymoons don’t last forever. Sameer was back to working long days: ten hours, twelve hours, fifteen hours. He would usually go home for lunch, and in the beginning he would try to stay, but as time passed, my dad had more and more for him to do. On the days when he didn’t come home at lunch, he would come home in the evening with some little present for her, a candy, a flower, a stuffed animal. But over time he stopped doing that too.

He adored her. All day long he thought of her as he boxed and unboxed and shelved and swept and accepted money from people whose language he still had difficulty understanding.

Suad began taking English classes and Sameer was relieved that she had something to do all day while he was gone. On her way home she would stop by the grocery store and he would sit with her. When the weather was nice, which was almost always, they sat on milk crates together and drank sodas, or they would sit together in the little back room. It was really sad because it was so obvious that he loved her way more than she loved him. So many times I saw them sitting together, with him looking at her all lovey-dovey like in a music video, and her looking away into the distance with God-knows-what thoughts in her mind.

I used to tell my mother, but she didn’t see it. I think some of the problem was that Suad was a very smart girl, and even though Sameer was so nice and all, he wasn’t that brilliant. Maybe what my mother and all those ladies had been calling “headstrong” for generations was really just women being smarter than the men they were married to. Nobody really knew Suad or was close with her. She would talk sweet in everyone’s face, say all the right things, but who knows what she was thinking, one of those people who show one face outside her house and another one inside.

Sameer would watch Suad leave, watch her thin ankles and imagine them carrying her home, imagine them supporting her as she cooked so that when he came home at 10:45, there would be a delicious meal waiting for him. He imagined her watching television, or a wedding video, or listening to music, or dancing, or talking on the phone with this cousin or that aunt. He would fill his mind with these thoughts for as long as he could and it would keep him awake until 10:45, which was when he always returned home.