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“Hours?”I said, and I started to laugh, though I felt pretty disgusted. Larry cut me off and said how “inappropriate” remarks like that were in Group. I looked at Nick. He was studying the burning cigarette in his hand like he wasn’t part of this conversation at all. Then he glanced at me, his eyes dark and a little shiny, and my cheeks got hot and I had to look away.

On visitors’ day, while I was waiting for my brother and his wife, I kept watching Nick on the other side of the room sitting straight across from his parents, who reminded me of my own, though Dad was dead and Ma couldn’t face seeing me anymore. Sometimes he’d glance in my direction and I’d look away. All around us were visiting families in plastic chairs around fold-out tables, some of them hardly looking into each other’s eyes, others loud, telling stories and jokes like they were relieved everything had only come to this, a Get Well helium balloon floating in the haze of cigarette smoke above them.

But I felt grateful just to be sitting there. In the two weeks I’d been at the program, the lining inside my nostrils had already stopped bleeding, I hadn’t drunk anything stronger than coffee, and the only stranger I would wake up to was me. But more than that, I had already stopped wanting what I’d been craving off and on since I was fifteen, for Death to come take me the way the wind does a dried leaf out on its limb.

 

Q UITE EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, AS I LIE SLEEPING UPON THE CARPETnear the open sliding screen, my son touches my shoulder and wakes me to a glass of hot tea and four cubes of sugar. Outdoors, in the trees below us, a bird calls, but the sky is gray and the air through the screen is cool.

“Bawbaw-jahn. Man goh khordam. I am sorry.”

My son is already dressed in shorts and T-shirt, his hair dry, but combed. I sit up and take the tea and drink it without sugar. I look through the screen at the small concrete terrace outside, and I hear my Esmail sit upon the carpet beside me.

“I know you work very hard, Bawbaw. All the days and almost all the nights of the week.”

I look at my son, at his brown eyes that on a woman would be beautiful, and in Farsi I thank him for his apology and for the tea, and I tell to him he must begin preparing his room for moving.

Today, on the freeway crew of garbage soldiers, we work the southbound lanes of Route 101 where it runs along the tall evergreen trees of the Golden Gate Recreational Area. I wear my new blue hat all the day long but of course the morning fog never lifts and I wish for a light sweater. At the lunch break I eat quickly beside Tran, then rise to speak with Torez as he sits behind the wheel of his truck, the door open very wide, as he studies one of those odd crossword grids in the newspaper. I stand there a moment until it becomes clear to me I am standing at attention. I discipline myself to relax my shoulders and speak.