Page 74 - A Woman Is No Man

sight of the gold letters printed on it—WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU!—and
sighed. She couldn’t imagine a man coming up with that line. No, it
must’ve been a woman.

Something caught Deya’s attention as she turned the corner onto
Seventy-Second Street. Farther down the block, a woman was lurking
outside their home. Deya stopped to watch her. The woman was tall and
thin, dressed in American clothes, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Deya couldn’t tell exactly how old she was from where she stood—thirty
perhaps, or maybe forty. Too young to be one of Fareeda’s friends, too old
to be one of her sisters’. Deya moved closer, staring.

The woman approached their front stoop in slow, careful movements,
looking around as if she didn’t want to be seen. Deya scanned her face. She
couldn’t map her features, but she felt as though she had seen the woman
before. Something about her seemed so familiar. But who could she be?
There was something in the woman’s hands: Deya couldn’t make it out
from where she stood. As she watched, the woman placed the thing

carefully on their front stoop. Then, all at once, she turned and ran toward a
cab waiting at the curb and disappeared inside.
Deya looked behind to find that her sisters had stopped and were talking
among themselves. Something about Fareeda marrying them off, one after
the other, like dominoes. Good, Deya thought. They hadn’t noticed. She
walked ahead, scanning the street: the cracked pavement, the dead grass,
the green trash cans on the corner block. Everything seemed normal.

Everything but the white envelope on the doorstep.
It was likely nothing. Her grandparents received mail all the time. Still,
she snatched the envelope off the concrete. As she squinted at it, she
realized why the woman had moved with such careful steps. The envelope
didn’t have her grandparents’ names on it. Instead her own name was
handwritten across the front in bold ink. A letter. For her. That was unusual.

She tucked the envelope away before her sisters could see.

She waited until dark to open it, pretending to read a book until she was
certain her sisters had fallen asleep. Then she locked the bedroom door and
pulled the envelope out. The letters of her name—DEYA RA’AD—were still
there. She hadn’t dreamed it. She opened the envelope and looked inside. It
wasn’t a letter but a business card.