Love from a to Z

Yes. There was something sad in his eyes.
And now maybe I was going to know why.
I glanced at Auntie Nandy again. She was still blinking.
Then she turned the car into a plaza parking lot and reached into the
glove compartment for a tissue box.
I pulled my arms in tight and clutched myself while she blew her nose,
wondering if I should hug her or something.
Auntie Nandy drew a breath. “Adam’s mother passed away when he was
in my class in the fourth grade.”
“Oh God.” I gripped myself tighter. “That’s so sad.”
“It was obviously devastating for him, for the whole family. She was
diagnosed with her illness, MS, many years before, in her late twenties, and
she coped, even did well, but then, after she had her second child, it
progressed rapidly.” She began crying again.
I reached my hand out and rubbed her arm. She wiped her face with a
folded tissue and swallowed before turning to me. “I’m telling you because
Tuesday is the anniversary of her death, and I see it in him, the
remembrance of it.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“She was one of my closest friends. She taught at DIS too. High school
art.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m usually not like this. I think it was just seeing Adam again last night
after not seeing him for months.” She started the car again. “Anyway, just a
heads-up. In case you see him quiet.”
“Hanna must have been really young?”
“One and a half years old. Of course she doesn’t recall Sylvia.” We were
waiting to turn onto the road from the parking lot, so she looked at me for a

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moment. “Adam was nine, and he’d been very close to his mother.”
The rest of the way to the apartment we were quiet, me looking at the sky
the whole time, unable to imagine his pain.
Daadi’s death in the fall had been traumatic beyond belief.
But then, Mom?
She and I fought sometimes, but she was also the number one reliable
factor in my life, Dad being inaccessible at times due to his busyness as one
of the few ophthalmologists in town.
I couldn’t imagine my rock being removed from me.
As I got out of the car, I blinked away my own tears.
• • •
After Maghrib and Isha prayers, combined, I lay in bed but couldn’t go to
sleep.
Maybe it was jet lag. And how I’d slept in today.
I sat up.
Not jet lag.
It was Adam.
I think I felt something I hadn’t felt since I swore off feeling this way.
It was just a twinge and felt very buried, but it was there.
Like a pull inside whenever I thought of him.
After Yasin, this guy who hung out with Ayaan’s brothers, who I’d met at
her house, I hadn’t felt it again. That was a year ago.
I’d liked Yasin, and he had liked me back, and then just like that, after
three months, he had stopped liking me. Because he said he didn’t know
why everything was an issue with me.
What he meant was he hadn’t liked me asking why he’d written a whole
screed on how hijabi girls who wore makeup canceled their hijabs.
After Yasin, I’d decided nobody was going to get me interested in them
unless they had something real to stand for. And brains.
That was my number one criterion.
That and a sense of quiet mystery?
I looked at the photo of Adam again.
He was sad.

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