The Milk of Birds (36 page)

You could press in hibiscus blossoms, Zeinab said. Like Saha, she has an eye for color and beauty.

I hope you do not think me ungrateful, K. C., but I did not feel excited to grow flowers and filter ashes and sit by the fire stirring a cookpot. Then I remembered that money can make even an ugly thing look beautiful.

Today Saida Julie and Saida Noor asked what I thought of making soap. Thanks be to God, I said, and Hamdu smiled up at me from his wrap. With this skill I will be able to provide for my son, I said. The best for us is what God chooses for us.

Saida Noor said, Perhaps God has chosen something else for you.

I did not know, but last month Si-Ahmad spoke to Saida Julie. He said that I have a gift for teaching and a way with animals. He asked if the
khawaja
provide training in this area. They do. It is for men, but when the veterinarian comes to this camp, I will have a place in the class. We will learn the common sicknesses and remedies and even give medicine with a needle. They will call us community animal-health workers, and we must settle one per village so that we can keep many herds healthy and do not become rivals.

God said, If you are grateful, I will give you more. Abdullah recited that many times, and it is true. I did not know how we could return to Umm Jamila, where the wells hold only sorrow now. But if I succeed in this training, I am sure that somewhere my mother, Muhammad, and I will be welcome. Man has only to think and God will take care of him.

Saida Noor is collecting our letters, K. C., so I must say
good-bye. You have given me so much. The seeds will grow from your letters for many years, and I will give them to my son. Perhaps one day I will read them myself,
inshallah
.

Peace be upon you always. Peace is the milk of birds.

Your sister, Nawra

Dear Nawra,

I got your last letter. How cool that you're going to be a community animal-health worker! I don't think I could give shots. Mom says when she was little, doctors used to give shots, but now pediatricians make their nurses do it so kids won't hate them. No animal could ever hate you, though.

I wish I knew what I wanted to be.

My mom's going to be a tutor. On Dr. Redding's recommendation, one of his molls—whose name is Molly!—is tutoring me in reading. I feel like I'm back in first grade: “Say the sound. Write it in the air.” For eighty bucks an hour!

Mom decided she needs a gig like this, so she signed up for a course at Dr. Redding's office. By next summer she'll be a certified tutor. Not of me! She promises she won't subject me to that. But once she graduates, Dr. Redding's office will refer students to her. Maybe after three years she'll make back the tuition for her class.

Even for a baker, Dr. Redding makes an awful lot of dough.

Dear Nawra,

You should have seen Sharon's face when Todd suggested Dad buy him a Nikon D300 for his birthday. Todd's like your brother Muhammad with the camels, only not such a good salesman.

I've been working on the forgive-Dad piece. After Mom laid into him a few months ago, Dad started asking me about my friends. I've been giving him a hard time, though, making stuff up or zipping my lips.

But he's trying. That should count for something. Now he always asks if Emily's mom has heard of any good herbs lately. I told him about saw palmetto, which supposedly slows baldness, but Emily says there's only one good study. Parker says he'll wait.

Whenever I mention Parker, Dad raises one eyebrow, which is one of his skills, and I have to say, “Dad, it's not like that!”

Except maybe it is.

Dad asks a lot about you, so this weekend I read him your letters. It gets easier after I've heard them a couple of times. He said you sound like an inspiring mom. The way he said it reminded me that he's like Adeeba with this chunk of mother missing from his childhood. War is overkill because there's
already more than enough car wrecks/cancers/dust bowls/tsunamis/earthquakes/etc. to go around. It's not like we need a new supply of misery.

Dad told me that in college he once spent spring break building a school in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island and a lot of misery with Haiti but produces a lot of really good baseball players. Todd was hanging around, sulking about the camera he's not going to get, but somehow from the DR we got onto the subject of elegant water filters and photography and chemistry. When Todd mentioned Kent State, Dad said, “Interesting.” Which isn't “No.”

Dear Nawra,

I'm a special ed person. I hate it. I duck into the office like a spy, checking that the coast is clear so no one sees me. We all want to be special, right? Just not that way.

But this kind of special doesn't mean I get the spa treatment or any break in grading. The school just has to find a way to give my brain equal access to what's going on, the way doors have to be wide enough for someone in a wheelchair to get into a classroom. This means that after Ms. DB's class, Frieda Goldberg hands me her notebook and the special ed office makes a copy for me. You should see Frieda's notes; they've got little bullets and numbers, and she leaves half the page blank to write in questions when she reviews them. Move over, Emily.

The best thing I get is extra time. Whenever I take tests, I'm allowed to sit apart, and nobody's hounding me with “fifteen more minutes,” “ten more minutes,” “finish up.” Last week Ms. DB handed back a quiz: C+. I almost fell out of my chair. Cell phone, here I come.

Dear Nawra,

I won! I won the 1,000 meters at today's meet! Okay, a small flu epidemic in Richmond public schools sidelined most of the competition, but it's still not bad for a freshman. As I was running, I said, “Eat my dust,” and I imagined a big
haboob
behind me.

Mom's going to let me go out for outdoor track this spring.

Sometimes Chloe and Emily help me practice. They stand on the sidelines, timing me on their cell phones and shaking their heads in wonder.

Dear Nawra,

Mom and I tracked down a stove person to speak to the Darfur Club. He couldn't light a stove in a classroom, of course, but we passed it around. It's really just a bucket with holes in strategic places, isn't it? He even managed to bring some
assida
and
mulah
made by a Sudanese friend, but since it was cold, most people stuck to the brownies.

Except Milton Stanley, of course. He had seconds.

After that the Darfur Club was all fired up: Let's raise money and buy some stoves! We came up with all the usual ideas—bake sale, car wash, ribbon pins. Which are fine, but what do cupcakes have to do with Darfur? For all most people care, we could be raising money to buy new pom-poms for the cheerleaders.

Everybody's raring to go, but I'm saying wait, which Emily pointed out is very strange and dangerous since people might lose their enthusiasm. Chloe agreed with her. I started to feel pressured, but Nathan said, “K. C.'s the one who's had an inside line to Darfur for a year, so we should back off.”

Nathan's doing a lot better. At the counselor's, he signed a no-jumping agreement with his parents, so they unlocked the windows.

I wish I could call you, Nawra! You and Adeeba might have an idea. Here I'm supposed to be this thinking-outside-the-box person, and all I can see are four cardboard walls.

Mom suggested I talk to Dad since he was really good at raising money long ago before he went into selling office supplies.

“She said that?” he asked.

According to Mom, he was Mr. Campus Activist, and he tried to get all the janitors at their college a raise, which happened. Just before graduation he applied to work for a health foundation, but the interviewer told him that he was too young to be talking about preventing sexually transmitted diseases with middle-aged matrons who didn't know what do with their dead husband's millions.

Dad looked at me for a long minute, kind of sad and thinking. “Actually there was no interview,” he said. “I never finished the application.”

“That sounds like something I'd do!” I said. We laughed. Later I thought about his making up a story to impress Mom. Once you start to lie, Nawra, the second time's easier and the third's a cinch. By the time Dad met Sharon, he probably couldn't tell the difference between what he wanted to believe and what was true.