The Stationery Shop(69)

But then, with a pull that outdid any kind of gravity, she landed back on the chair again. Just to ask him why. Why did he lie? Why did he leave her there? Why did he break it all off so abruptly? Why did he change his mind? She deserved that, at least, after all these years. Who knew when the heart could attack? Let her just know once and for all.

She clicked on the “Contact Us” link and there was the phone number.

But she didn’t call. Instead, she went downstairs. Walter asked again what was wrong.

In the early days of their courtship in California, she had mentioned to Walter that she’d had a beau back in Tehran. Just a high school crush. No biggie, nothing doing. Didn’t we all?

It felt strange to mention the Newton stationery shop to Walter now, as though she were revealing someone else’s secret, not her own, as though she were pulling back the curtain on something sacred and sweet but filled with danger.

In the days that followed, she would cry for no reason. Out of nowhere, out of the blue, every time she thought of that shop sitting on Walnut Street for all these years, in the state in which she lived, a few towns down from where she spent her days, not that far from her colonial home with its shutters on the windows—she fell apart. She was losing it in her old age. And now when she thought of Bahman’s son, Omid, arranging the inventory in the shop, she was filled with a sense of the surreal, with a mix of nostalgia and disbelief. She remembered more than ever the kind stationer who had guided her in that shop in Tehran in the first place. Trauma and loss never went away—of course those memories had always been with her. But now she cried like she hadn’t cried in years, not since the early years after Marigold died. She was grieving all over again for something she thought she had finished with years ago.

Get a grip, Sister! Zari would have said.

But with each passing day, she would also remember the son’s kind comment: “Shall I tell him I saw you? He’d be tickled to know I met an old friend of his.”

She wanted to see him. Just to ask why. Just so she could know once and for all. And so, a week after her visit to the stationery shop on Walnut Street, and six decades after she had last seen the boy from the Stationery Shop in Tehran, she picked up the phone.

A receptionist. How can I help you and hold on, let me see, I will speak to him and get back to you, and then another phone call, and yes, please do come, Mr. Aslan will be expecting you.

Just like that.

After the phone call, she waited for the floors to crack open, for the walls to close in.

But Walter dried the dishes with a kitchen towel printed with a yellow chick holding an umbrella as she told him she had made an appointment to see that boy from long ago. And the world did not crack open.

And they would drive in the snow, she and Walter together. He had that in him—he was that kind. He said he didn’t believe in his wife sitting around moping and crying. If she needed to talk to him, then she should. We’re too old to suffer for no reason, he said. Lord knows that life is fragile enough.

And he would get out of the car to make sure her knitted scarf protected her nose and mouth against the wind, and they would climb the steps of the gray building labeled DUXTON SENIOR CENTER. Inside, a blond administrator would lead Roya to a hall where an old man in a wheelchair sat by the window, and she would see once again the boy whom she’d once believed would always be hers.





Chapter Twenty-Seven


2013



* * *



Reunion

When the administrator turned and clicked her way out, Roya and Bahman were alone in the overheated dining hall. He wheeled his chair around and smiled—his eyes still, somehow, filled with hope. “I’ve been waiting.”

It was an effort not to fall. Her heart jumped, as if it mattered, as if it wasn’t all just too late for the two of them. The gust of wind that blew through Mr. Fakhri’s stationery shop when Bahman strode in that first Tuesday in January so many years earlier—the same force that held her then—seized her now. He was hers, he’d been hers, his voice was the same. It was as if she hadn’t stopped hearing it for sixty years. Here was the boy who’d danced with her at Thursday night soirees, who’d kissed her by the jasmine bushes when they decided to marry, who’d written love letters that summer of the coup.

She looked down, and the sight of her gray little-old-lady shoes with thick soles and tiny bows jolted her back to the present. She was seventy-seven. No longer seventeen and in love for the first time, anticipating a life with this boy who was going to change the world. An old sadness rose up like bile. “I see. But all I’ve wanted to ask you is why on earth didn’t you wait last time?”

She was dizzy again; she had to sit. She walked over to the plastic chair by the window and plopped into it. She couldn’t fall flat onto the floor in front of him. He said nothing, but there was the whir of his electric wheelchair, and then he was next to her. They sat like that, side by side, facing the window. She didn’t dare look at him. It would have been like staring directly at the sun or into the beam of a strong flashlight. It hurt too much.

The glass pane was thick and wavy. Or was that just her vision blurring? The clangs from the radiator and Bahman’s heavy, labored breathing filled the room. Flake by flake she watched snow accumulate on the windowsill, on the hoods of the cars in the lot, on the roof of the other wing of the building, on crevices in the sidewalks, on the tops of the trees in Duxton. Her thoughts were like the snow: they needed to land and gather for this new scene. She and Bahman were together again. They were alone. After sixty years, they sat together alone.