ABSTRACT
Fatima should have been shocked when she heard the news. But she was not. Instead, she experienced a vague uneasiness, as if she had taken a wrong turn during a rushed drive to town and suddenly found herself in unfamiliar surroundings. Parveen, Maryam's mother, was an unflaggingly diligent mother. Other cousins whose children were younger watched her with reverence and awe and a hope, voiced openly, that they too could do their job as well as she had done hers. Parveen was incoherent on the phone when she called with the distressing news. Now she was a freshman at Rutgers University and she wanted to marry Jerry Noggles, a young man who had risen from the position of stock boy to manager at Morey's. Aunt Sakina made Fatima tell her the entire story twice, chafing her plump hands and slapping her deeply lined forehead alternately as she listened.
