Page 271 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Ask me tonight. When I’m not as tired. I’ll tell you everything I know.

I nodded. I gulped the rest of my tea, which had gone cold. At a nearby table,
a middle-aged couple traded pages of the newspaper. The woman, red-haired
and open-faced, was quietly watching us over the top of her broadsheet, her eyes
switching from me to my gray-faced mother, her beanie hat, her hands mapped
with bruises, her sunken eyes and skeletal grin. When I met her gaze, the woman
smiled just a tad like there was a secret knowledge between us, and I knew that
she had done this too.
So what do you think, Mother? The fair, are you up for it?
Mother’s gaze lingered on me. Her eyes looked too big for her head and her

head too big for her shoulders.
I could use a new hat, she said.
I tossed the napkin on the table and pushed back my chair, walked around to
the other side. I released the brake on the wheelchair and pulled the chair away
from the table.

Pari? Mother said.
Yes?
She rolled her head all the way back to look up at me. Sunlight pushed
through the leaves of the trees and pinpricked her face. Do you even know how
strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you?
There is no accounting for how the mind works. This moment, for instance.
Of the thousands and thousands of moments my mother and I shared together
through all the years, this is the one that shines the brightest, the one that

vibrates with the loudest hum at the back of my mind: my mother looking up at
me over her shoulder, her face upside down, all those dazzling points of light
shimmering on her skin, her asking did I know how good and strong God had
made me.

…

After Baba falls asleep on the recliner, Pari gently zips up his
cardigan and pulls up the shawl to cover his torso. She tucks a loose strand of
hair behind his ear and stands over him, watching him sleep for a while. I like
watching him sleep too because then you can’t tell something is wrong. With his
eyes closed, the blankness is lifted, and the lackluster, absent gaze too, and Baba
looks more familiar. Asleep, he looks more alert and present, as if something of
his old self has seeped back into him. I wonder if Pari can picture it, looking at