Darius the Great Is Not Okay(41)

In front of me, Mom’s shoulders bunched up.

“What is it?” I asked, but Mom shook her head. Laleh stirred against me, yawned, and rubbed her face into my stomach. My shirt was wet where she had drooled a little bit.

I looked to Sohrab, but he was staring at his hands folded in his lap.

Mamou and Babou argued back and forth until Babou slammed on the brakes—not that it did much, since we were barely crawling forward—and pulled over. The Smokemobile’s exhaust plumed around us.

Mamou unbuckled her seat belt, but Mom reached forward to put an arm on her shoulder. She and Mamou started whispering in Farsi, while Babou sat in the driver’s seat with his arms folded and his chin on his chest.

Mom popped her own seat belt and tried to get up, but Dad caught her. “What’s going on?”

“I’m driving us the rest of the way.”

Dad glanced at Mamou and Babou and then back to Mom.

“Let me.”

“You sure?” Mom’s voice caught, like she had swallowed tea the wrong way.

“Positive.”

Dad opened the sliding door, letting in a cloud of the Black Breath that nearly suffocated us all. Once Dad got out, Babou climbed in next to Mom and slid the door shut with the finality of a guillotine.

Dad settled into the driver’s seat of the Smokemobile—the most un-Audi car imaginable—and buckled himself in. “You’ll have to guide me.”

Stephen Kellner, Teutonic übermensch, had never asked for directions in his life.

“Take the next right.”

While Mamou guided Dad, Mom whispered to Babou in Farsi and wound her arm through his.

I cleared my throat and glanced at Sohrab again.

“What happened?” I whispered.

Sohrab bit his lip. He leaned in close so no one else would hear.

“Babou got lost.”



* * *





    Like I said. You can know things without them being said out loud.

I knew that Babou would never get to drive the Smokemobile again.



* * *





I didn’t say anything when we dropped off Sohrab. Just waved good-bye.

Some things were too big to talk about.

Sohrab understood that.

When we got back to Mamou’s, Laleh crawled over me and sprinted inside to pee. She’d been complaining since she woke up that her bladder was about to experience a non-passive failure.

Mamou led Babou inside, talking low in Farsi, while Dad waited for Mom at the door after letting Laleh in.

I stooped under Dad’s arm where it rested against the door frame and walked into the house. When I looked back, Dad was holding Mom, kissing her hair as she shook and cried against him.

I didn’t know what to do.

Darius the Great might have known. But I didn’t.

I went to the kitchen to make some tea.



* * *





Babou’s unnecessary and humiliating lesson in how to dam tea had one benefit: I now knew where Mamou kept her tea and hel.

When it was ready, I poured a cup and knocked on the sunroom door. “Babou? Do you want some tea?”

“Come,” he said, which made me think of The Picard.

Babou had changed into a plain white shirt and loose white pants with a drawstring waist, and he had hitched them halfway up his torso. He sat on the floor with a blue-patterned Persian tablecloth spread before him, picking through sabzi with Laleh’s help. The warm glow of a table lamp softened the planes of Babou’s face and brightened his eyes. Even his mustache seemed friendlier.

“Darioush-jan. Come. Sit.” He nodded at the couch behind him, then went back to paring the stalks of fresh cilantro from the colander next to him. Every so often, he’d hand some to Laleh for her to sort out the bad leaves.

“Um.” I handed Babou his tea and a sugar cube. Up close, he looked less warm—almost gray.

I hated seeing Babou like that.

I think I liked it better when I only saw him on a computer screen.

That’s normal.

Right?

“Did you see your mom?” He pointed his knife at a weird wrought-iron-looking frame on the wall with six oval photos in it, all of Mom when she was young: Mom as a baby, Mom as a little girl playing with Dayi Jamsheed and Dayi Soheil, Mom lined up with the family behind the haft-seen for Nowruz. There was this one stunning portrait of teenaged Mom looking over her shoulder toward the camera, tugging her headscarf toward her face.

Shirin Kellner (née Bahrami) could have been a supermodel.

“I never thought she would move to America,” Babou said. “But she did well.”

I could tell there was more that Babou wanted to say but didn’t.

“She did well,” Babou repeated. “She married your dad.”

It was the first nice thing—well, almost-nice thing—Babou had said about Dad.

“And she had you and Laleh.”

Laleh looked up at the sound of her name, and Babou gave her a handful of basil leaves from the colander, wrapped in a damp paper towel. He said something to her in Farsi, and Laleh hopped up and ran off.

Babou shifted the sugar cube around in his mouth, clacking it against his teeth. “Your dad is a good man,” he said. “But he is not Zoroastrian. You and Laleh are not either.”