He sleeps on the other side of my wall

The whiteboard at the shop is mine. I do the rates every morning with a marker that's been dying since Christmas, dollar to rupee on top because that's most of them, taka under it. My father checks my numbers after I've written them. He's been checking my numbers since I was nine and he has never once found a bad one, which hasn't slowed him down.

I was going to be an engineer. I got two and a half years into it at UIC and then I didn't, and the way my family puts it is that I'm helping at the shop for now. It's been four years of for now.

I've been bald since I was twenty-three. My uncles call me chaand. My mother's older brother does a bit at every dinner where he puts a hand up like he's been blinded by me, and I laugh.

Our house is on Talman. Upstairs is my parents at the front, then me, then Ayesha and Faraz, and the room at the back that didn't exist until the wedding. My father and Uncle Nasir put a wall through the big back bedroom over one weekend so Faraz's younger brother would have somewhere to be. That's Talha. He came over from Karachi three weeks before the shaadi and nobody has mentioned him leaving since.

The wall is two-by-fours and half-inch drywall. Uncle Nasir was proud of that wall. You can hear which drawer.

In January the pipes on the north side froze, the week it went to minus eleven, and my father shut the heat off to the back of the house and handed out the little ceramic heaters we sell at the counter for nineteen dollars. Talha's side has the outside wall. He came around with his blanket at about midnight and we sat on the floor against my radiator, which was also off, and watched most of a Bulls game on my phone. They were down twenty in the third and he kept watching it anyway. Then he stayed and we ended up in my bed. That was January and it's still going.

Nobody in this house goes out at night without somebody asking where. I'm twenty-six. The storm door has a sound, and if it goes after ten my mother's voice is down the stairs before it's shut, kahan ja rahe ho. She just wants to know.

So you need a reason and there aren't many. The shop is the only one I've got and we used it once, in February. I have the alarm code. What I didn't think about is that my father gets a notification every time that alarm goes on or off with the time sitting right there in it. At breakfast he said the shop opened at 2:40 on a Tuesday. I said I thought I'd left the safe cracked and it was bothering me. He looked at me for about a second longer than he needed to and said theek hai and went back to his egg. I've thought about that second maybe two hundred times.

Faraz works the ramp at O'Hare and his shift rotates every month so you can't know in advance what the house is going to be like at eleven on any particular night, and Ayesha's six months gone and up twice anyway whatever he's doing. My father is a light sleeper and proud of it and brings it up.

Mostly it's the wall. One knock means are you awake. That's the whole system, there's no second signal. It's happened seven times since January.

In the daytime we're completely normal. He passes me the dahi. I ask him about his manager at the Jewel. In February, Ayesha said at the table that it was nice I finally had a friend in the house, and everybody agreed with her, and then my mother said something about how I don't go out enough.

His screen cracked in March and I did it at the counter in twenty minutes and didn't ring it up. My father counts parts. He hasn't said anything about it.

Then Ramadan, and the house stopped sleeping. Somebody's in the kitchen until two and then my mother's up at four doing sehri and won't be helped with it, and after taraweeh at the masjid on Devon everybody comes back and eats again. Faraz's mother calls from Karachi whenever she feels like calling and nobody finds that rude.

The last ten days are the only time of year the shop makes real money. Everybody's sending zakat home and my father keeps us open till eleven, and some nights the line is out to the door, all men, half of them asking whether the rate moved since yesterday. A guy at ten at night asked me if I was my father's brother, and my father took his time correcting him.

Talha started coming by after his shift to break the boxes down in the alley for me. My father says the boy has adab. He says this in front of me. The English word for what's sitting in our house is shame, which isn't the right word and I don't have the right one, and I'm standing there in the alley holding the door open with my shoe so it doesn't lock behind us.

My mother has a folder on her phone, by the way. She's shown me four girls since Ramadan started and I said something polite about every one of them, and my uncle says a bald man shouldn't be choosy, and that one gets a laugh every time. The photo of me she's sending out is from the shaadi with a topi on, because it's the last one where I've got anything going on up there.

Four days before Eid, Talha turned his phone around at the back of the shop and showed me a picture before it had gone to anybody else. Girl in Naperville, finishing pharmacy school. Their families are from the same part of Karachi. His mother had sent it to him and it was going into the family group that night and after Eid the parents were going to sit down. He held the phone there and waited.

I said she looks nice.

He said yeah. Then he took the flattened boxes out to the dumpster.

The moon got called on a Thursday and that was it for sleeping. My mother had the sewaiyan going by eleven at night and Ayesha couldn't find her bangles and cried about it, she's the one who married into them, and my uncle turned up at midnight with a box of mithai from Taza and did the chaand bit with his hand up and gave it a full thirty seconds this time because it was Eid. Bigger room, longer bit. Talha was halfway up the stairs filming my mother on his phone for his own mother.

I went up around one and his door was shut. The wall does this thing where you get the charger before you get anything else, that little click when the cable goes in. Then his mother on speaker, and I could hear him laughing at something. After that it was mostly her talking.

Downstairs my uncle was telling the mithai story to somebody who'd already heard it. My phone was at nine percent and the charger was across the room on the desk.