The Night Counter Read Free Page B

of the houses of people who didn’t seem to change much between Wednesdays and Fridays.
    With the lights turned on early because of cloudy skies, Ibrahim could view his regulars more clearly this evening. He could even see the dirty movie the fat man at Dwayne’s third stop was watching in his town house. No matter what the wild girls were doing on the TV, they stirred Ibrahim’s heart rather than the regions of his body they once might have. The TV girls made him think of Dalal, the girl in his village he was supposed to marry, the one with the two long thick black braids. She hadalways remained fifteen years old to Ibrahim, even eighty years later. In the only memory of her that had accompanied him to Detroit, she was looking at herself in her bedroom mirror, quietly crying, unraveling her braids just minutes after he had told her father that he couldn’t marry her. She would never know he had been standing outside her house staring up at her, her voluptuousness tempered by her virginity.
    “I must go to America to build cars,” he had said to her and her father, patting a mustache that was no thicker than the fuzz on those mountain figs near his mother’s house. “I will make enough money to build us the biggest house in the village, and then
inshallah
, I will come back worthy of marrying you.”
    That promise quietly, almost imperceptibly, faded away, lost to reality for years, until his own heartache brought Dalal’s tears back to him. He had arrived in Detroit in 1924, one of the last Arabs let in before new quotas restricted the influx of immigrants, particularly “yellow people,” as Arabs often were classified then. It wouldn’t have been easy to bring Dalal to America then. At least that was how he explained to himself never having written to her.
    Traffic inched forward, and the bus reached the house of the peroxide blonde, who was sitting on her front steps in her usual orange sweat suit, rolling a joint discreetly inside a newspaper. Ibrahim recognized that action from his son, who had fooled him for many years. The peroxide blonde was just forty-three or so, he guessed, about the same age as his son. With her football player chest and toothpick legs, she looked like the second and only other woman he had abandoned. Betsy was her name, the waitress who had taken him in when he’d first moved here without a job and with a three-word vocabulary—
yes, sir
, and
no
. He’d married her and then left her sixty-nine years ago when he had seen his best friend, Marwan, come back from his mother’s funeral in Lebanon with a beautiful bride from their village named Fatima.
    “There comes a time when you don’t want to live with a stranger anymore,” he had told his devoted first wife after ten years of a fairly pleasant marriage.
    Ibrahim wished that Betsy had yelled at him or clawed him instead of staring at him through a stream of silent tears. At the time he had thought that he had gotten off easy, but today he knew there was no redemption in shattering someone’s faith in you. For the last three years, he often jolted awake at night desperate to apologize to Betsy. But when dawn came, he never tried to find her, as he assumed she was dead, as were more than 99 percent of people his age. He hoped at some point she had realized how lucky she was to have lived the rest of her life, however long that had been, without him.
    Ibrahim looked away from the world outside and managed a slow smile at the little girl. It felt good. He wanted to tell her not to live as long as he had so that she wouldn’t have so many memories. If he had died thirty years ago, there were terrible things he would not have lived long enough to know. Nor would he have had the time to remember all the wrong he had done.
    An airplane flew over the traffic, distracting the little girl from Ibrahim’s mustache. Another plane followed in the wake of the first. The planes reminded him of his ten children, all but one of whom had fled