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Once, before dinner at our home in the capital city, while Nadereh and Pourat’s wife were in another room and after I had just raised my voice at our daughter of seven years for something I do not now recall, Pourat said to me softly: “Behrani, every night you must leave your work behind you.”

Pourat and I were of the same rank then, both captains, genob sarvans, and I did not at first understand him until he nodded at Soraya, at her brown eyes wet from my yelling, from my orders. My face became warm with embarrassment, and after that moment I have worked hard to discipline myself from viewing my wife only as a junior officer, my children as soldiers.

But I am prepared now to give all the orders necessary until we are out of that pooldar apartment. The rent is paid through the month, two more weeks, but the Behrani family will be discharged this weekend, I promise that. I have a security deposit of three thousand dollars to claim. This leaves a total of six thousand dollars for us after I pay the remaining thirty-five on our new property. Tomorrow, Friday, I will receive my checks from this store and from the Highway Department, and I will leave these jobs with no notice. Torez and Mendez, and even Tran, can watch my backside as I go, as Genob Sarhang Behrani prepares for a new life, a life in the buying and selling of American real estate.

 

M Y HUSBAND GOT TO MISS ALL THIS, THAT’S WHAT I KEPT THINKING,that he didn’t have to be around for any of this, and I was stuck at the El Rancho Motel in San Bruno. It was a shitty little one-story L of rooms wedged between an electrical parts warehouse and a truck-stop bar near the 101 freeway ramp. The TV in my room got sound but nothing on the screen, and it was only a Wednesday night but there was a live country band playing at the truck stop and the management must have had all the windows open, so I turned the TV up and listened to an old movie with Humphrey Bogart and in the end he gets shot and his girlfriend weeps and says he’s free now, he’s free.

But I was still so mad it had backed up on me and now I felt weak and a little sick. I was dying for a cigarette, which made me even madder because I hadn’t smoked one since a month after Nick left, and I hadn’t really craved one in five. So I chewed gum.

“What is he doing?”

The man in the suit handed me back the court order. “The county has petitioned the court in its behalf, Mrs. Lazaro. This should come as no surprise to you. I’m sure you had ample warning; your house is up for auction starting tomorrow morning.”