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Saeed hesitated, then took Nadia’s hand, his palm covering her knuckles. She curved her fingers,
furling the tips of his around hers. She thought she felt his pulse. They sat like that for a long while.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“So am I.”
She almost kissed him on his prickly cheek. “Well, somewhere down there is everything in the
world anyone could want to eat.”
• • •
NOT FAR TO THE SOUTH, in the town of Palo Alto, lived an old woman who had lived in the same
house her entire life. Her parents had brought her to this house when she was born, and her mother
had passed on there when she was a teenager, and her father when she was in her twenties, and her
husband had joined her there, and her two children had grown up in this house, and she had lived
alone with them when she divorced, and later with her second husband, their stepfather, and her
children had moved off to college and not returned, and her second husband had died two years ago,
and throughout this time she had never moved, traveled, yes, but never moved, and yet it seemed the
world had moved, and she barely recognized the town that existed outside her property.
The old woman had become a rich woman on paper, the house now worth a fortune, and her
children were always pestering her to sell it, saying she didn’t need all that space. But she told them
to be patient, it would be theirs when she died, which wouldn’t be long now, and she said this kindly,
to sharpen the bite of it, and to remind them how much they were motivated by money, money they
spent without having, which she had never done, always saving for a rainy day, even if only a little.
One of her granddaughters went to the great university nearby, a university that had gone from
being a local secret to among the world’s most famous in the space of the old woman’s lifetime. This
granddaughter came to see her, often as much as once a week. She was the only one of the old
woman’s descendants who did this, and the old woman adored her, and also sometimes felt baffled by
her: looking at her granddaughter she thought she saw what she would have looked like had she been
born in China, for the granddaughter had features of the old woman, and yet looked to the old woman,
overall, more or less, but mostly more, Chinese.
There was a rise that led up to the old woman’s street, and when she was a little girl the old
woman used to push her bike up and then get on and zoom back down without pedaling, bikes being
heavy in those days and hard to take uphill, especially when you were small, as she was then, and
your bike too big, as hers had been. She had liked to see how far she could glide without stopping,
flashing through the intersections, ready to brake, but not overly ready, because there had been a lot
less traffic, at least as far as she could remember.
She had always had carp in a mossy pond in the back of her house, carp that her granddaughter
called goldfish, and she had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been
there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the
years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to
make the effort, for people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every
year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows
where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home
than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were
younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates,
even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it.