Zeitoun Read Free Page B

to say hello. The banter they’d developed, full of his exasperation and her one-liners, was entertaining to anyone who overheard it. It was unavoidable, too, given how often they talked. Neither of them could operate their home, their company, their lives or days without the other.
    That they had come to such symbiosis continually surprised Kathy. She had been brought up a Southern Baptist in suburban Baton Rougewith dreams of leaving home—she did so just after high school—and running a daycare center. Now she was a Muslim married to a Syrian American, managing a sprawling painting and contracting business. When Kathy met her husband, she was twenty-one and he was thirty-four and a native of a country she knew almost nothing about. She was recovering from an unsuccessful marriage and had recently converted to Islam. She wasn’t even vaguely interested in getting married again, but Zeitoun had turned out to be everything she had not believed possible: an honest man, honest to the core, hardworking, reliable, faithful, devoted to family. And best of all, he very much wanted Kathy to be who and how she wanted to be, nothing more or less.
    But it didn’t mean there wasn’t some fussing. Kathy called it that, their spirited back-and-forth about everything from what the kids ate for dinner to whether they should enlist a collection agency to help with a particular client.
    “We’re just fussin’,” she would tell her kids when they heard the two of them. Kathy couldn’t help it. She was a talker. She couldn’t hold anything in. I’m going to speak my mind, she told Abdul early in their relationship. He shrugged; that was fine with him. He knew that sometimes she just needed to blow off steam, and he let her. He would nod patiently, sometimes thankful that his English wasn’t as quick as hers. While he searched for the right words to respond with, she would go on, and often enough, by the time she was finished, she had tired herself out, and there was nothing left to say.
    In any case, once Kathy knew that she would be heard, and heard to the end, it softened the tone of her arguments. Their discussions became less heated, and often more comical. But the kids, when they were young, sometimes couldn’t tell the difference.
    Years before, while Kathy was driving and fussing about somethingwith Zeitoun, Nademah spoke up. Strapped into a car seat in the back, she had had enough. “Dad, be nice to Mom,” she said. And then she turned to Kathy. “Mom, be nice to Dad.” Kathy and Zeitoun stopped cold. They looked at each other, and then, in unison, back to little Nademah. They already knew she was smart, but this was something different. She was only two years old.
    After she hung up with Zeitoun, Kathy did what she knew she shouldn’t do, because clients no doubt needed and expected to reach her in the morning. She switched off her phone. She did this every so often, after the kids had left the car and she’d turned toward home. Just to have that thirty minutes of solitude during the drive—it was decadent but essential. She stared at the road, in total silence, thinking of nothing at all. The day would be long, it would be nonstop until the kids went to bed, so she allowed herself this one extravagance, an uninterrupted, thirty-minute expanse of clarity and quiet.
    Across town, Zeitoun was at his first job of the day. He loved this place, a magisterial old house in the Garden District. He had two men on the job and was stopping by to make sure they were there, that they were busy, that they had what they needed. He jumped up the steps and strode into the house. It was easily 120 years old.
    He saw Emil, a painter and carpenter from Nicaragua, kneeling in a doorway, taping off a baseboard. Zeitoun snuck up behind him and grabbed his shoulders suddenly.
    Emil jumped.
    Zeitoun laughed.
    He wasn’t even sure why he did things like this. It was hard to explain—sometimes he just found himself in a playful mood.