Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Jeez,” Pup said, looking around. “Your aunt knows how to throw a party.”

  “Oh.” She waved her arm at the groups of people lined up at the buffet, drinking tea and wine at the tables, and crowded around a soccer game on the television above the bar. “These are all just my cousins.”

  “Whoa. And I thought I had a big family.”

  “Well, most of them aren’t really my cousins. In our community, we just call each other cousins even if we’re not technically related. We grow up with our parents telling us over and over again that us Eritreans in America are like one big family. And then they don’t understand that we find it a little creepy when they turn around and expect us to marry the same boys they’ve been calling our cousins all our lives.”

  “I hear you,” Pup said. “I have seven brothers and sisters, thirteen nieces and nephews—with another one on the way any day now—forty-one first cousins, and over a hundred second cousins. Which basically means I’m at least distantly related to half the people in this city. I’ll probably end up marrying one of my cousins by accident, and we’ll have a four-headed baby or something.”

  Abrihet laughed. “Well, I’m not from here, so you can’t be related to me. So if we ever get married, then you won’t have to worry.”

  Pup swallowed. His palms suddenly felt clammy and he felt a vague jittering in his gut. Was she—? No. Impossible. They were friends. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he’d made with Izzy. Besides, no girl had ever flirted with him in his life, and Abrihet Tesfay was far too smart and pretty to be the first. He’d won an honorable mention at a high school art show, after all. Which was cool and everything, but not exactly the type of thing to make girls like Abrihet come running all of a sudden.

  “Hey.” Pup pointed. “You invited Mr. Hughes.”

  “Yeah. Do you see that tall skinny guy he’s talking to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s my dad.”

  The two men were drinking bottles of beer and laughing together like they were old friends.

  “They seem to be getting along, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Abrihet. “Which is ridiculous, because I practically had to beg Baba to even let me take AP Studio Art in the first place.”

  “Really? Why? I thought parents loved it when their kids signed up for AP classes.”

  “Maybe normal parents do,” she said. “But my dad thinks anything that doesn’t directly help get me into medical school or dental school is a waste of time. The whole idea of taking a class simply because you enjoy it? That’s a very American thing. Baba says he didn’t leave his wife and his country and his life behind so that his daughter could spend her school days finger painting. So yeah, I guess you could say this is a little vindicating. Besides, he’s in a good mood today.” She beamed at him. “We all are. I’m going to see my mom in forty-two days.”

  “I would totally hug you right now except your dad is looking over here and kind of glaring at me.”

  Abrihet looked over her shoulder at her father, who was leaning against the wall next to Mr. Hughes and watching the two of them over the rim of his beer bottle. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s probably a good idea. You already have two strikes against you. One, you’re a boy, and two, you’re American. My dad doesn’t really like me hanging out with American boys.”

  “Kind of limits your options, this being America and all.”

  “I think that’s the whole idea. Now. Let’s go get you some food. It goes pretty quickly. My aunt’s cooking is kind of legendary.”

  She led him to the long buffet table against the wall. It was lined with trays of rich stew and curries and vegetables and these rolled-up tortilla-looking things and it all smelled delicious. Abrihet handed him a plate and began pointing things out: rice and salad, which he recognized, and tibsi and tsebhi, which he did not.

  “This here, shiro, with onions and tomatoes, is one of our vegetarian dishes. So are the hamli and the alicha. Mr. Hughes has already had about three helpings. And you’ve got to try some of our sweet bread, himbasha. Ooh, and this.” She pointed at a steaming tray filled with chunks of meat and boiled egg swimming in a rich red sauce. “You can’t say you’ve eaten Eritrean food without trying dorho. This dish is where Patrick’s egg-peeling skills would have come in handy.”

  Pup stopped short and stared at her.

  “What?” She looked at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Pup swallowed, recovering himself. It was just so strange to hear someone bring up Patrick casually in conversation, without tiptoeing around it, without using hushed tones. He leaned over the dorho so that she couldn’t see his burning face, breathing in the steam and the spices. “This all looks amazing. Where’s the silverware?”

  “We don’t use silverware. What you do is, you take the injera—this rolled-up bread here—and you tear off pieces and use it to pick up the food you want. Here, let me show you.” She reached over to the stack of spongy bread, tore off a chunk, and, with a graceful sweeping movement of her wrist, picked up a helping of dorho, folded it neatly, and popped it in her mouth. Pup knew he would shortly be embarrassing himself with his own attempts at eating Eritrean cuisine, but for the moment, he admired Abrihet for her ability to make forks seem like just another frivolity that Americans thought was necessary even when the rest of the world got along just fine without it, like triple-ply toilet paper or squeeze cheese.

  He set about heaping his plate with injera and dorho while Abrihet went off to work the room. He found an empty chair near the window and began switching off between stuffing his face with food and photographing the party with the film camera that Mr. Hughes had instructed him to bring wherever he went now that he had less than two months to build a portfolio. When he’d gotten through half a roll of film and an entire plate of food, one of Abrihet’s older cousins came up to him with a stack of plastic cups and a foamy pitcher of beer.

  “Thanks, but I don’t really drink,” Pup said.

  “James.” Abrihet had returned to lean over and whisper in his ear. “That’s suwa. It’s a homemade beer made from roasted barley. It would be very rude to decline it. Plus, it’s really not even strong. You’d need to drink a lot to feel drunk.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case.”

  The cousin poured a glass for Pup, Abrihet, and herself. They toasted each other, and even though the smell of beer reminded Pup of his least-favorite memories of Luke, the cool, amber-colored liquid trickling down his throat, mixing with the tastes of spices and onion and stewed meat, was unexpectedly refreshing. He finished his glass, and as Abrihet promised, he didn’t feel drunk. He only felt happy, and sort of at ease, which was weird, considering he was at a party where he knew only two people, one of whom was a teacher whose class he had almost failed. But everybody around him was in such a good mood that it was impossible not to feel happy right along with them. He thought about how hard it was for his own mother that he was missing one Sunday dinner. Abrihet’s mother had missed several years’ worth of Sunday dinners, and now she was finally going to be reunited with her family. No wonder everyone was celebrating.

  “James,” Abrihet said, swallowing the last of her suwa and placing her empty glass on the floor next to his chair. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  She led him over to a table of women who were drinking tea and talking animatedly in Tigrinya, and who instantly stopped their conversation to stare at him as they approached.

  “James,” she said, “this is my amoui.”

  Pup now understood why Abrihet loved to take photographs of her aunt. The woman was tall and striking, much younger than any of his own aunts, and the movements she made lifting and setting back down her teacup were spare and graceful. She had thin gold hoops dangling from her small, roundish ears and thick-lashed eyes sparkling with a glittery bluish shadow across the lids. With a movement of nothing but those eyes, she scrutinized Pup from the uppermost puff of his wiry red hair to the untied laces
of his Nikes.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  Abrihet’s amoui inclined her head and said something to her niece in Tigrinya.

  “Her English isn’t as bad as she pretends,” Abrihet explained. “Right, Auntie?” The woman only shrugged, and the rest of the table laughed.

  “Well, ma’am,” Pup said, sticking his hands in his pockets and then immediately taking them out for fear of appearing too casual, too sloppy, too stereotypically American, “I just want to say, your food is ridiculous.”

  Abrihet’s aunt narrowed her eyes at him while the two other women at the table glanced at each other and then back at their teacups.

  “Ridiculously good, I meant,” he babbled on. “It’s an American saying. Like, meaning, it’s so good it’s ridiculous.” He could feel the sweat beginning to accumulate at the back of his neck. Then, remembering the word he’d scrawled into the soft palm of his hand with a borrowed pen on the bus ride across the city, he opened his fingers to read it. The ink was beginning to streak, but it hadn’t sweated off yet. “What I mean is, um, yekeniyely.”

  Abrihet looked at Pup in surprise, as did all three of the women at the table.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “My sister Annemarie told me I should, you know, learn a couple words of your language before I came tonight. As a sign of respect. So I did some Googling on the bus.”

  “Did you learn anything besides ‘thank you’?”

  “Not really,” he admitted. “It took me most of the bus ride to figure out how to pronounce it correctly.”

  Abrihet’s aunt ran her fingers across the crisp white paper covering on the table. “My niece will teach you some more,” she said in perfect English, without looking at him. Then she turned back to her friends, and they resumed their conversation as if Pup and Abrihet were no longer standing there.

  “She likes you, James,” Abrihet said as they walked over to check out the dessert trays. “I can tell.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Because she spoke English to you,” she said. “And because she sees what I see.”

  Pup blinked. “What do you see?”

  “That for someone who’s so different from me, you’re really not that different from me.”

  Pup knew exactly what she meant. Even though Abrihet’s family came from a country seven thousand miles from Flanland, even though they spoke a language he couldn’t understand and cooked with spices he’d never tasted, big families were the same everywhere: loud and nosy, loyal and prying, bossy and loving, prone to shoveling mountains of food onto their plates before the good stuff ran out. Being at Shores of the Red Sea with Abrihet and her army of cousins felt less strange to Pup than dinner at Izzy’s house, with its loud silences and polite questions and clinking silverware.

  After he’d wiped his plate clean with a piece of injera and drained his second glass of suwa, Pup stood up to say his goodbyes. The crowd was beginning to thin, and he figured that if he didn’t have to wait too long for the bus, he might be able to make it home in time for his mom’s cake.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Abrihet said. “I need some air. And some escape from my relatives. I love them, but they’re so nosy.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Pup. “I grew up in a house with eight children and one bathroom. Privacy is a foreign concept to me.”

  Outside, the sun was setting, making the city glow gold. Pup felt like he was glowing too. Maybe it was the suwa, or maybe it was all the delicious food he’d eaten, or maybe it was just the feeling of Abrihet walking next to him, her arm brushing against his, her sandals slapping on the hot pavement.

  When they’d reached the bus stop, she pointed across the street to a redbrick building with a little shop on the ground level that sold international phone credit. “That’s my apartment. And that one there, down the street a little ways, with the grates on the windows? That’s the apartment we lived in when we first immigrated.”

  Pup looked up at the grated windows, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “That place was so tiny,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. “And we had to share it with three other families. There wasn’t enough room for everybody, so all the kids had to sleep on air mattresses in the kitchen. I could never sleep, though, because the room never got dark enough. There was the microwave clock light. The coffeemaker light. The streetlights shining through the transom. The headlights from cars swooping across the ceiling all night, like a laser show. I’d pull the blankets over my face to drown out the light but even the blankets were too bright—they had that sunny American laundry-detergent smell like fake flowers.” She was quiet for a second. “I remember just lying there, trying to sleep, except I couldn’t because I knew that back home it was already morning, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. I’d picture her getting out of bed, putting on her tea, standing at the table and pressing designs into the himbasha dough with the end of her fork. I’d picture the sun tipping over the mountains and flooding our kitchen with light. I’d imagine her closing her eyes, feeling that pink-gold heat on her face, somehow knowing that somewhere across the world, her daughter was lying awake on an air mattress and thinking of her.” She lifted a hand to her cheek, as if feeling for the warmth of that faraway sunlight. “That’s why the nights were the worst. Because for those hours, my mother wasn’t even living in the same day as I was. If it was Friday here, it was already Saturday there. And I know it sounds weird, but I could feel the absence of her in my Friday. That’s how I became fluent in English so fast. I’d practice it in my head, lying on that air mattress in the middle of the night, to make myself stop thinking about my mother. It was sort of like . . . if I could learn this foreign language, start thinking in it and dreaming in it, maybe it would make me feel farther away from her.” She squinted up to where the setting sun had turned her old windows into brilliant squares of fire. “And it worked, maybe almost too well. Because now, after all these years of thinking and speaking and dreaming in English, I feel so far away from her.”

  “But not for long,” said Pup.

  “No,” Abrihet said quietly. She was still gazing up at the building with the grates all over the windows. “Not for long.”

  She broke her gaze to turn and look at him. The sun had begun its descent behind the brick apartment buildings and the sky was striated with pink clouds. In this light Pup looked into Abrihet’s eyes and wished he was a smarter person with a better vocabulary who could think of the word for the color they actually were. Something deep brown and velvet; newly turned soil in his father’s garden, maybe, or tree bark after a heavy rain.

  “Hey,” said Abrihet. “I’m sorry I said the thing about Patrick before. I shouldn’t have just brought him up like that. Like I knew him. Or like I know you.”

  “No!” Pup shook his head. “Don’t be sorry. It was just—see, nobody in my family ever talks about him. So I was just surprised, that’s all. In a good way.”

  “My family can be like that too,” said Abrihet. “They’ll nag me to death about stupid stuff like a ten-point reading quiz or the way I wear my hair to school, but when it comes to important stuff, like the status of my mom’s visa application, I get just this wall. If it weren’t for my friends, I’d go crazy.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t really have many friends. I have the Pity Party—that’s the bereavement group I’m in at school, but we’re not really friends. We can’t be.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that the whole point of a support group?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” He shaded his eyes with his hands so he could see her more clearly in the setting sunlight. “See, there’s a guy in my Pity Party—I can’t tell you his name or anything; everything is supposed to be confidential—but he’s this big shot on the football team, and that’s what everybody knows him as around school. Except I know that after his mom died of breast cancer, he got into this habit of sleeping in her favorite purple work blazer every night. And he knows that I know that.
So he can’t wear his normal jock-dude mask around me at school because he knows I know it’s bullshit—and therefore, we can’t be friends. Make sense?”

  “I think so,” said Abrihet.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’m happy you brought Patrick up to me. Talk about him whenever you want. Ask me anything you want to know. Really.”

  “That’s a promise,” said Abrihet. “Because you want to know something, James?”

  “What?”

  “I really like talking to you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I really like talking to you, too.” He smiled at her, wishing he had Declan’s teeth. She didn’t seem to mind, though. She smiled back.

  “Your ride is here.” She nodded at the bus, which was just pulling up in a puff of exhaust and a squeaking settling of brakes. Pup fumbled in his pocket for his Ventra card. Stupid bus. It never showed up when you wanted it to, and then, the one time when you wanted to be stuck on a corner for the rest of your life, or at least until you figured out the right words to describe the particular color of a girl’s eyes, here it was, right on time.

  19

  WHEN PUP ARRIVED HOME and crossed through the yard toward the back door, the first thing he saw, silhouetted in the light of the kitchen window, was Luke’s profile. The tension that had been building in the pit of his stomach for weeks finally began to ease. After three weeks in a row of playing hooky, the prodigal son had finally returned to Sunday dinner.

  But as soon as he climbed the deck stairs and opened the back door, Pup knew immediately that things were not okay. For starters, it was nearly nine o’clock and the drying rack next to the sink was still overflowing with dripping dishes. The Flanagan children always washed up after the Sunday meal, but their mother insisted on putting all the dishes away herself because she claimed that her children couldn’t be trusted to remember the correct cabinets to stow the various utensils and pots and serving trays. She always completed this task as soon as the dishes were washed, because after everybody left, she liked to sit down with her weak, milky cup of tea, put her feet up on the shabby tweed ottoman, and binge on Antiques Roadshow until it was time for bed. For something to throw her off track, it would have to be major and it would have to be bad.