Page 261 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

But until then, the only escape was to slacken the reins on my mind. From

time to time, I would find myself thinking of Jeremy Warwick, from math.
Jeremy had laconic blue eyes and a white-boy Afro. He was secretive and
brooding. He played guitar in a garage band—at the school’s annual talent show,
they played a raucous take on “House of the Rising Sun.” In class, I sat four
seats behind and to the left of Jeremy. Sometimes I pictured us kissing, his hand
cupped around the back of my neck, his face so close to mine it eclipsed the
whole world. A sensation would spread through me like a warm feather gently
shivering across my belly, my limbs. Of course it could never happen. We could
never happen, Jeremy and I. If he had even the dimmest inkling of my existence,
he had never given a clue. Which was just as well, really. This way, I could
pretend the only reason we couldn’t be together was that he didn’t like me.
I worked summers at my parents’ restaurant. When I was younger, I had
loved to wipe the tables, help arrange plates and silverware, fold paper napkins,
drop a red gerbera into the little round vase at the center of each table. I

pretended I was indispensable to the family business, that the restaurant would
fall apart without me to make sure all the salt and pepper shakers were full.
By the time I was in high school, days at Abe’s Kabob House dragged long
and hot. Much of the luster that the things inside the restaurant had held for me
in childhood had faded. The old humming soda merchandiser in the corner, the
vinyl table covers, the stained plastic cups, the tacky item names on the
laminated menus—Caravan Kabob, Khyber Pass Pilaf, Silk Route Chicken—the
badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from National Geographic, the one with
the eyes—like they had passed an ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant
had to have her eyes staring back from the wall. Next to it, Baba had hung an oil

painting I had done in seventh grade of the big minarets in Herat. I remember the
charge of pride and glamour I had felt when he had first put it up, when I
watched customers eating their lamb kabobs beneath my artwork.
At lunch hour, while Mother and I ping-ponged back and forth from the spicy
smoke in the kitchen to the tables where we served office workers and city
employees and cops, Baba worked the register—Baba and his grease-stained
white shirt, the bushel of gray chest hair spilling over the open top button, his
thick, hairy forearms. Baba beaming, waving cheerfully to each entering
customer. Hello, sir! Hello, madam! Welcome to Abe’s Kabob House. I’m Abe.
Can I take your order please? It made me cringe how he didn’t realize that he
sounded like the goofy Middle Eastern sidekick in a bad sitcom. Then, with each
meal I served, there was the sideshow of Baba ringing the old copper bell. It had
started as a kind of joke, I suppose, the bell, which Baba had hooked to the wall