The Night Counter by Alia Yunis Read Free Book Online

to die from an overweight dress. Right? Come on,
yallah
, I’ve told you a story of a husband; now you tell me how I will die.”
    “Is there no more passion to this story, more details of the wedding night?” Scheherazade asked by way of an answer.
    “No,” Fatima said, and crossed her arms.
    “So now you will leave this dress and its stories to Amir’s bride?”
    Fatima uncrossed her arms. “No, I cannot give it to a grandchild when I still have a daughter that is not married,” she lamented, not realizing she was opening the storybook on her children
    “An unmarried daughter? You are eighty-five,” Scheherazade said. “How could you have a daughter not yet married?”
    “I had Lena late in life.” Fatima sighed, thoughts of her death easily made subservient to her daughter’s marital failings. “She is choosing marriage late in life.”
    “Choosing?” Scheherazade said.
    “This is what she tells me,” Fatima said, and began twirling her purple hair. “But my children do not often tell me the truth about anything but the weather. And when the weather is very bad, they do not even tell me that.”
    “Only one unmarried daughter,” Scheherazade said. “That is not so bad. You must give her the dress.”
    Fatima shook her head. “She will turn forty in ninety-seven days,” she said.
    “Every woman has her time,” Scheherazade offered. “Marriage later is better than sooner. How many years can you really spend with one man? I’m going on 1,108 years with the same one. Even with all the help of astrologists, magicians, and alchemists, it has not been easy to keep it alive in my stories. And look at you. Your marriage lasted only sixty-five years.”
    “True, but I did not have a matchmaker,” Fatima said. “How good my family used to be at marriage. It was not for nothing that my grandmother,
Allah yerhamha
, was the greatest matchmaker in all of Lebanon.”
    “How bad could your marriage have been if you made ten babies?” Scheherazade said, seductively running her hands up her body and licking her lips.
    Fatima covered her ears with her hair to shut out Scheherazade. She wanted only to spend time with her boxes.

ALAS, FATIMA HAD not been enticed to speak of her nuptials. However, talk of this daughter with no groom was the farthest the old lady had traveled away from Deir Zeitoon in a story. Perhaps a little more provocation was required.
    “It is possible that if you had been a more vigilant mother, your daughter would not be a spinster,” Scheherazade goaded. “She would instead be a wife.”
    “My daughter is too beautiful to be a spinster,” Fatima snapped back, and her eyes squinted in anger. “And you cannot blame me. I was more vigilant with my children than any quarterback guarding his ball.”
    Scheherazade was not familiar with the duties of a quarterback, but her shrug implied that the old lady’s words hadn’t altered her beliefs in any way.
    “For your information, my family may soon reclaim its success with marriage,” Fatima added. “Through my grandson Zade. He is my fifth daughter Nadia’s son. He runs a matchmaking service for Arabs.”
    “
Smallah, smallah
, your daughter sounds like she has raised a son more amazing than the logicians, geographers, and philosophers of the Abbasids,” marveled Scheherazade, who knew that nothing endeared her to people more than excessively complimenting their children.
    “He has his own coffee shop in Washington where young people can meet each other even without these computer things,” Fatima boasted. “Did you know Nadia can speak Arabic?”
    “Don’t all your children speak Arabic?” Scheherazade asked.
    Fatima bowed her head. “No, only Nadia.” She sighed. “Ibrahim and I would speak to them all in Arabic, but they would answer us in English. Then one day Nadia told us she had gotten a scholarship. Oh, our joy. We thought for sure it would be in accounting. She was always helping me write the bills. But it was a