Our mothers know each other

The buildings are on Cedar and everybody calls them the towers even though only one of them is a tower. That's the tall one you can see coming up the highway. Behind it there's four shorter ones, and then one more across the walkway that has its own address but counts as ours anyway. I'm in the second building, seventh floor. My mother's had that apartment since 2004.

My mother's sister is in the fourth building. Her daughter is two floors above her in the same building, with a baby now. The guy who fixes phones in the storefront under the walkway is married to somebody on my mother's side and I couldn't tell you exactly how. My mother knows most of the women in all six buildings and she knows them by their mothers' names.

I work at a distribution center in Eagan. It's fourteen miles and it's twenty-two minutes at that hour. Abdirahman has the van and he picks five of us up at 4:50 in the morning from the lot by the community center, and I'm in the middle of the second row because that's where I ended up the first week and nobody has moved since. My knees are into the seat in front of me. There's a worn spot on the ceiling above that seat.

The job is picking. You wear the scanner on your wrist and it tells you where to go. Ten-hour shifts, four days a week. I can reach the top rack without pulling the ladder over.

I've known him since the sixth grade. We were at Andersen the same two years and then he went to one high school and I went to a different one. In 2021 we both signed with the same unit and that wasn't planned. His cousin told him about the bonus and he told me.

We left in March of last year and we were in Kuwait until December. Nine months on the same base.

We prayed in the same tent. He was two mats over from me at Fajr for about six months, then they moved his section around and after that he was four mats over.

On the fourth of November there was a smoke deck behind the gym with a plywood bench on it, and everybody else had gone in, and it was past midnight. What happened took about ten minutes. Then he went in, and I stayed out there maybe twenty more, and then I went in too.

We had forty days left after that. I saw him every one of them. We never said anything about it, and then the forty days were over and we packed up. On the flight back he was a row behind me and across, and he slept most of it with his hood up.

We landed on the fourteenth of December. The buses took us to the armory and there were people out in the lot holding signs in ten degrees. My mother came with my sisters. His mother came. The two of them hugged each other before either one got to us.

That was nine months ago.

My mother has the small room. My sisters have the big one, and I'm on a mattress in the front room that goes up against the wall in the daytime. My feet hang off it. There's a footlocker at the end from the armory that my little sister keeps her schoolbooks on top of, and when the radiator comes on at five in the morning it knocks twice before it goes.

We're friendly. In February I helped him carry a couch up because his elevator was out and he's on the seventh of a nine-floor building. We play at the Coyle on Sunday nights with the same group of guys. If I pass him in the stairwell I say salaam and he says salaam and we talk about the Wolves or about the lot not getting plowed. He has never said a word about it. I haven't either.

Since about April my mother has been on the subject of a wife. It started with somebody's daughter being back from Columbus. Now Hodan's mother in the fourth building has taken it on as her own thing, and at a wedding in July she showed me a picture on her phone of a girl in Seattle who's finishing a nursing program. I said she looks nice. She does look nice. My mother has that picture now too, because they send them to each other.

That wedding was at a hall on Lake Street on the twenty-sixth of July. His mother was there. She's at everything. They ended up at the same table. I know because I carried a plate over to my mother and the two of them were laughing at something and my mother had her hand on her arm.

I went out to the cars after the food. It was hot in there. He was already out there leaning on a Camry that isn't his, with a cigarette. We talked about his brother's transmission and then about the drill coming up in September.

Then Abdiaziz came out with two other guys and he moved over on the fender to make room for them, and I went back inside and sat down next to my uncle.

At drill in September I ducked coming into the supply room and he was in there with a clipboard and he said watch your head. Neither of us said anything for a second. Then the staff sergeant came in and needed the room.

I've got his lighter. He handed it to me that night out there and I never gave it back and he never asked for it. It's in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus.

The van comes at 4:50 and pulls out of the lot past the fourth building and then past his. His kitchen window is on the side that faces the lot, seventh floor, same as mine one building over. From the middle seat I have to get my head down and turned to see up that high.