I still go on Fridays

Before this one there was Hafiz Abdul Qadir. He had the masjid twenty-two years and he never once let anybody buy him lunch. He'd come into my station on Western, the one with the warmer in the back where we do the chicken on Fridays, and he'd take a box and leave a five on the counter and be out the door while I was still telling him to put it away. Twenty-two years of that. Then he had a stroke in the Jewel lot on Touhy and his son moved him out to Naperville, and after that we saw him one time, at a walima, sitting in a chair by the door with his hand turned in.

So the board had to go find somebody.

And I want to explain what a board actually is, because people hear the word and they picture men in a room deciding religion. Nobody on a masjid board decides anything about religion. A board does the dumpster. I'm serious. The dumpster contract, the snow guy who doesn't show till eleven when the lot's already full, the electric, the boiler that came with the building in 1974, the insurance company that wants a number for how many men stand in that hall on the twenty-seventh night, and whatever number you give them is wrong in one direction or the other. We spent ninety minutes on a printer once. Astaghfirullah. Ninety minutes on a printer.

My brother Junaid is on the board. I'm not on the board. What I am is the guy they call when the number at the bottom of the paper is bigger than what's in the account. Junaid decides who my daughters marry, more or less.

The one they brought in was younger than me by about six years. He'd done his hifz here and then studied overseas, but before any of that he had a job in Schaumburg doing something with networks, which is why he's the only imam I've ever known who could fix his own microphone. He'd climb up on a chair in his kurta with a screwdriver. The old uncles hated it and also told everybody about it.

The roof started coming in over the back hall in the spring of 2018. Not dripping. Just a stain that got bigger and then one morning a piece of the ceiling tile was on the carpet in pieces. We got three bids. I don't want to go through all of it. The cheap one left things out.

So it's a Tuesday night and it's me and him in the office behind the hall, because the numbers had to go to the board on Thursday and he had the folder. That office is one folding table and a window unit that only works if you hit it. Somebody's box of dates from Sharjah sitting there open since Ramadan. I'm in a chair with my leg out because of the knee. I'd had two of the samosas the ladies leave in the fridge, which I'm not supposed to have, I've been on the metformin since I was thirty-six and the doctor on Devon has a whole speech he gives me.

We'd been at it two hours. He's got a legal pad and he's writing the flashing number down the side.

And he said, without looking up, I look for your car before I come in.

And then he said the Polish company won't do the flashing, so their price isn't really their price.

I said something about the gutters. I don't remember what I said about the gutters.

And he wrote for another twenty minutes and I sat there, and then we put everything in the folder and he turned the unit off and we went out through the side door because the front one was already locked.

I sat in the driveway at home for a while. Sameena leaves the light on over the stove, she's done it for nineteen years. My middle one was still up watching one of those baking shows with the tent. I came in and she said, Baba, they put the pastry in the wrong oven, and I stood there and watched maybe ten minutes of a woman in a tent crying over a pastry, and then I went to bed.

Thursday the folder went to the board. The roof got done in September by a company out of Elk Grove and it came to sixty-one and change, and I paid forty-nine of it, and I asked Junaid not to tell anybody and he told everybody within the week, which is Junaid. People still bring it up to me at funerals.

He never said it again. I never said anything back.

In 2021 the board wanted him married and Junaid was the one pushing hardest, he had a whole thing about how a young imam without a family is a problem for the masjid. I drove out to a place off Golf Road for the flowers because the guy owed me on a fuel account. Family's from Skokie. Good people. There's a boy now, he's five.

I still close up at one on Fridays. Waseem covers the register, my cousin's kid, he's slow with the lottery machine but he's honest. I go early. Parking.

I sit third row from the back on the left, by the second pillar. Same place since the old carpet.

He leaves his shoes by the racks when he comes out of the office. They were brown for years. Resoled once, you could see it. Then a while back it was a black pair, and I noticed the first Friday, before he'd even got to the mimbar. I don't know what happened to the brown ones.

One of the uncles asked me at a funeral last year why I paid the forty-nine when I'm not even on the board. I said the water was going to keep coming in. Then I said something about the zip code, which isn't anything, and then I said the water part again. Junaid was two chairs down. The uncle said mashallah and went to get his coat.

I do the grey out before Eid because of the photographs. My daughters put them on their phones and the oldest one zooms in on my beard to make her sisters laugh.

The boy comes with him now most weeks. He's got those Velcro ones with the strap.