I was the one with the keys

The board is a Behringer X32 rack, which is more board than a room our size needs. We got it off a church in Berwyn for six hundred dollars and it hasn't given me one problem in five years. It sits in a cabinet at the back with a padlock on it that I've never once put through the hasp. There's a send to the main hall, a send upstairs, a send down to the basement for the nights the basement fills, and a send to the recorder for the channel.

The mic on the minbar is a gooseneck and it's fine for a khutbah, but in taraweeh the imam moves, so he wears a lapel. Shure, the wireless one with the black pack. You clip the capsule to the collar about a hand's width down from the chin and you run the cable inside the kurta so it comes out at the belt, and the pack goes at the back on the right. If you put it on the left it knocks the floor when he goes down and the whole hall hears it. I mic him at about 8:35 every night, before isha, and I take it off him after witr. Sorry. That's more than you asked for.

Isha that year went at 8:47 and moved a minute forward every couple of days. I print the timetable myself off the Hilal committee's numbers instead of the app, because the app does fajr at eighteen degrees and we go with fifteen, and if you print the wrong one you get four uncles at the door on the first morning wanting to know who made the decision. One of them, the tall one who parks on the, he does it every single year. Twenty rakat and then witr, and everybody's out by eleven. That's the first twenty nights.

The last ten is a different thing. We do qiyam from one in the morning until about three, and the basement opens, and there's a table by the door with the dates and the water, and a brother from Rogers Park brings a chai urn that's too big for the outlet he plugs it into. He got it out of a wedding hall that shut down and there were two of them, and I don't know where the second one ended up. Somebody told me the school has it. More people come at one a.m. than come at eight. I don't know why that is.

So being there at three isn't strange. The basement's open and there's people in it.

Yusuf is the assistant imam. He came from Cleveland in 2019, no, 2020, it was 2020 because the hall was shut half that year and his first taraweeh had about forty people in it. He leads from about the twelfth rakat, the twelfth or the thirteenth, it depends who's doing the first half and how his knees are. That year the twenty-seventh night was the big one, the way it always is. Eleven hundred people. I ran a line down to the basement and there were still men praying in the wudu area on wet tile. After, while I was coiling the XLR, Yusuf came over and said stay, I'll be a while, lock up with me. He didn't ask.

I had the keys, so.

It wasn't anything. I'll give you all of it.

Everybody was out by ten past three. I killed the big lights in the hall and left the two banks on the side, because that switch is by the front door and I do the front last. He came back in with his shoes in his hand and sat against the back wall under the shelf where the Qurans go. After a minute I sat down too, maybe an arm and a half away. There was a kid's water bottle left under that shelf, a blue one with a bear on it.

We talked about his mother's house. She was selling the one in Cleveland and he had to go back in May and clear out the garage, and he told me what was in the garage, which was mostly his father's tools and a chest freezer that still worked. Then he said she'd sent him another photo. A rishta. That was the fourth since January and he'd sat with two of the families already.

He asked me how I knew. I said knew what. He said, when they showed you Sana's, how did you know to say yes.

And I answered him. My father and her uncle have had money in the same thing since before I was born, so you're not really, and she's funny, that's the part nobody tells you about her, it's dry and you don't catch it for about a month. My own cousin still doesn't catch it. It took me a while to get any of that out. He let me finish. Then he said, I keep saying yes to the meeting and then the day before I can't eat anything.

Then there was a long part where neither of us said anything. And then he said he didn't think he'd be any good at it.

I said you'd be fine.

That was it. That was the whole of it. I'm fairly sure nothing else got said.

We sat there a while after. The AC goes off on a timer some point in the night, and when it goes off you can hear the ballast buzzing in the exit sign over the door, and I remember hearing it, so it was after that. His phone was face down on the carpet next to his leg and it lit up twice and he didn't turn it over.

Then he told me I should go home. He didn't move when he said it. I didn't either, for a bit.

Then I got up and did the lights in the order I do them and set the alarm, which gives you thirty seconds. The front door one is the brass one, it's on the ring with my car key. He stood outside on the step holding the door open, which you're not supposed to do, because the panel beeps at you the whole time. His Civic didn't catch on the first turn. It was the end of March and cold. It went on the second. He put the window down and said something about the urn, that we should get a proper one with a tap on it, and then he went up toward Devon, and I sat in my car in the lot until his lights were gone.

I got married in July.

There's four hundred and something photographs. I hate being in them and normally I get out of it by being the one holding the camera, but you can't do that at your own, so there's four hundred of me. Sana's mother has one framed in the hallway in Morton Grove where I'm looking at the wrong thing.

Two Ramadans since. Both of them I was at the back. He wears the same collar every year, a stand collar, and I don't measure anymore, I know where the capsule goes on it. It takes about eight seconds. You have to get your hand inside the collar to feed the cable through, there's no way to do it from further off. Then I go back to the board and bring his channel up about four dB from where the other one sits, because his voice is further back in his throat and it doesn't carry as much on its own.

Nothing happened. Two years and nothing happened and nothing's going to. He's still sitting with families. There was one from Columbus in February that got as far as her father driving up to look at the masjid, and he asked about the board so I showed him the board, and by the end of April it was off again.

Sana asked me once why I'm always the last one out. I explained the alarm panel to her, the thirty second delay, how you can't arm it from outside, and that's all true. She said okay. She was watching something on her phone with the sound off.