Zeitoun Read Free Page A

they’d built—a sprawling family, a business of distinct success, and to be woven so thoroughly into the fabric of their adopted city that they had friends in every neighborhood, clients on almost any block they passed—these were all blessings from God.
    How could she take Nademah, for instance, for granted? How had they produced such a child—so smart and self-possessed, so dutiful, helpful, and precocious? She was practically an adult now, it seemed—she certainly spoke like one, often more measured and circumspect than her parents. Kathy glanced at her now, sitting in the passenger seat playing with the radio. She’d always been quick. When she was five, no more than five, Zeitoun came home from work for lunch one day and found Nademah playing on the floor. She looked up at him and declared, “Daddy, I want to be a dancer.” Zeitoun took off his shoes and sat on the couch. “We have too many dancers in the city,” he said,rubbing his feet. “We need doctors, we need lawyers, we need teachers. I want you to be a doctor so you can take care of me.” Nademah thought about this for a moment and said, “Okay, then I’ll be a doctor.” She went back to her coloring. A minute later, Kathy came downstairs, having just seen the wreck of Nademah’s bedroom. “Clean up your room, Demah,” she said. Nademah didn’t miss a beat, nor did she look up from her coloring book. “Not me, Mama. I’m going to be a doctor, and doctors don’t clean.”
    In the car, approaching their school, Nademah turned up the volume on the radio. She’d caught something on the news about the coming storm. Kathy wasn’t paying close attention, because three or four times a season, it seemed, there was some early alarmist talk about hurricanes heading straight for the city, and always their direction changed, or the winds fizzled in Florida or over the Gulf. If a storm hit New Orleans at all, it would be greatly diminished, no more than a day of grey gusts and rain.
    This reporter was talking about the storm heading into the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 1. It was about 45 miles north-northwest of Key West and heading west. Kathy turned the radio off; she didn’t want the kids to worry.
    “You think it’ll hit us?” Nademah asked.
    Kathy didn’t think much of it. Who ever worried about a Category 1 or 2? She told Nademah it was nothing, nothing at all, and she kissed the girls goodbye.
    With the thrump of three car doors, Kathy was suddenly and definitively alone. Driving away from the school, she turned the radio on again. City officials were giving the usual recommendations about having threedays’ worth of supplies on hand—Zeitoun had always been vigilant about this—and then there was some talk about 110-mile-per-hour winds and storm surges in the Gulf.
    She turned it off again and called Zeitoun on his cell phone.
    “You hear about this storm?” she asked.
    “I hear different things,” he said.
    “You think it’s serious?” she asked.
    “Really? I don’t know,” he said.
    Zeitoun had reinvented the word “really,” prefacing a good deal of his sentences with “Really?” as a kind of throat-clearer. Kathy would ask him any question, and he would say, “Really? It’s a funny story.” He was known for anecdotes, and parables from Syria, quotations from the Qur’an, stories from his travels around the world. All of it she’d gotten used to, but the use of “Really?”—she’d given up fighting it. For him it was equivalent to starting a sentence with “You know,” or “Let me tell you.” It was Zeitoun, and she had no choice but to find it endearing.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “Are the kids at school?”
    “No, they’re in the lake. My God.”
    The man was school-obsessed, and Kathy liked to tease him about it and any number of other things. She and Zeitoun spoke on the phone throughout every day, about everything—painting, the rental properties, things to fix and do and pick up, often just