Page 253 - The Kite Runner

242 Khaled Hosseini

I glanced in the side-view mirror as we pulled away. Wahid
stood surrounded by his boys in a cloud of dust whipped up by the
truck. It occurred to me that, in a different world, those boys
wouldn’t have been too hungry to chase after the car.
Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I
did something I had done twenty-six years earlier: I planted a fist-
ful of crumpled money under a mattress.