Inshallah

Zia cannot remember where she lost God. She thinks of the coffee shop her son-in-law opened, sinewy girls with low cut shirts leaning over to take her order. Perhaps this is where she left Him, in the Tip Jar.

She thinks, too, of bandaging a scrape on her granddaughter’s back. This is why girls shouldn’t skateboard. She wonders if God was there, sandwiched between the pavement and Naomi’s fragile back. Of one thing she was sure: She’d lost him in America. America was not good for her God.

She should have stayed in Tehran with the ghosts of her family, each of them killed with a pop by uproarious revolutionaries. She could have stayed in that house with its fading wallpaper and empty dressers, but she didn’t. She came here and sacrificed her religion with her loneliness.

The girls are here again. They come over every weekend now to scatter cookie crumbs on her carpets and smear Play-Doh in the cracks of the tiles. Play-Doh is a ridiculous toy. It is a ridiculous substance.

“Mamani, Mamani, do you know what today is?” they are yelling to her. They have their mother’s features, and Inshalla, will keep them as they grow. They have her deep brown eyes, her thick eyebrows, her square chin. The pink crinoline and pigtails give them away.

“No, what day is it today?” she asks.

“It’s Independence Day!” Sophia says.

“Independence from what?”

“From England, Maman. This is the Fourth of July.” Zia’s daughter comes in; struggling with bags of things she thinks her children will need while she is gone. She is always telling her they will not die without their Barbie dolls and fish-shaped crackers.

“Oh, is it? Wonderful!”

“Mamani, we have sparklers!” Naomi is trying to contain her excitement. She is eight this year, and Zia is trying to keep her from outbursts. It isn’t lady-like, it isn’t appropriate.

“Sparklers? What are these?” She asks, taking a box from her hand.

“You light them, Mamani! You light them outside and they’re little fireworks you can hold!”

Zia imagines having to gather her granddaughter’s fingers from the front lawn. A thumb in the garden, a pinky on the trunk of the neighbor’s car.

“Oh, no no, Naomi-joon, you can save these for when you are with your father.”

The girls look deflated.

“Maman, come watch, it isn’t so bad.” Her daughter calls from the front porch.

Zia wants to protest, but the girls have their little fingers wrapped around her own. They are pulling her.

Shirin is outside with no shoes on. She shakes a sparkler out of the box, a long metal incense stick. She lights the end and holds it out.

“See, it isn’t dangerous.” The sparkler sputters and then sizzles to life.

“Me! Please-please-can-I-have-one?” the girls are jumping up and down with arms raised. Sophia’s dress is too short for this position, her underwear is showing. Zia pulls her dress down.

Shirin lights three more, hands one to Zia.

She holds it an arm’s length away while her grandchildren chase each other across the front yard and her daughter shakes the last of the embers from her own smoldering stick.

Zia isn’t going to find God this way, holding a burning stick while her granddaughters cartwheel and show the neighborhood their underwear. God has left her, fled back to Iran and the empty house with an empty clothesline.

“See, Maman, it isn’t so bad.”

But Zia thinks it is.