The wedding is in May

My mother sends me for the meat on Fridays because I'm the one who knows how to ask for it. You can't just say goat. You have to say bone-in, and then you have to say cut small, about walnut size, or she can't do karahi with it. The big pieces just go dry. Twelve pounds. Fourteen when my khala's coming from Sugar Land. It's eight ninety-nine a pound and it's been eight ninety-nine since before he put the new awning up.

If you go at six on a Friday there's eleven or twelve people ahead of you and one guy on the counter until the evening man comes in at seven. So I don't go at six. I finish my shift at seven in the morning and I'm on Hillcroft by twenty past.

I'm in the pharmacy at the hospital, nights, in the basement under the garage. Seven to seven, four nights, five if somebody calls out. It's mostly batching for the morning pass and loading the tubes. Around four it goes quiet and you're just sitting there waiting for something to come down.

The shop's shut at that hour but he's in from six doing the case. Truck comes Tuesday and Thursday. Fridays he's only pricing and pulling whatever's gone brown at the edges. The side door by the dumpster he keeps on the latch and the front stays locked till nine-thirty.

It started over his wife's blood pressure pills. She was on lisinopril and she'd had that cough about six weeks, and he asked me about it at the counter with four people behind him. I told him it's the pill in maybe one in ten, and there's another one in the same family that doesn't do it, and to say losartan to her doctor and see what he says. He wrote it on the back of a receipt. Two weeks later the cough was gone and he came round the counter and shook my hand with both of his.

After that he'd ask me things. His own sugar. His mother's list, which is nine items and two of them are the same drug under different names, which happens when you've got two doctors who don't talk to each other.

There's a room behind the office with a cot in it and the water heater and the boxes of paper bags. That's where we go. It'll be two years in April.

I lost my hair at twenty-six. Not thinning, gone, in about eight months, so I grew the beard, because a bald head with a bare face on it looks like a thumb. My mother tells people I grew it because I've become serious about my deen. She said that at the engagement in front of everybody and then she thanked me in front of everybody.

The engagement was February. Her people and ours know each other from the masjid on Synott, going way back. She's twenty-four. She does billing at a clinic out in Katy. She sends me a message at eleven at night when I'm going in and one at seven-thirty when I'm coming out.

The hall in Stafford took thirty-five hundred in February and after thirty days none of that comes back. Decorator's twelve hundred. The caterer wants half by the first of April. My mother's got all of it in a notebook with the front cover gone off it, and every evening it's her and three of my aunts on speaker going down the page. The ninth of May. They picked it off when the cousins can fly in.

Same call, they start on my sister. There's a family in Sugar Land with a son at Schlumberger. She's twenty-one. Year left at U of H. She sits at the table with her laptop and she doesn't look up.

My mother and his wife have known each other eleven years, since my sister was small and they were both at the school on Wilcrest for the pickup. They talk two or three times a week.

Last Friday his wife sent food home with me for my mother. Chicken and potatoes in a Pyrex with a rubber band round the lid. It was still hot and I drove with my hand on it at the lights so it wouldn't slide off the seat. My mother called her that night and they were on for an hour and ten minutes, and then she came in and told me what his wife had said about me, that I'm respectful, that I don't keep people waiting.

This Friday I trimmed the beard in the car mirror before I went in, because after a night it goes flat on the one side. He was at the back with the clipboard and he asked me about his older girl. She's eighteen. She finishes in May and she's been saying pharmacy.

He wanted me to talk to her, so she came through and sat on the flour bags with her phone out taking notes, and I gave her all of it. Where to park at the Medical Center so you're not paying for it. The PTCB's two fifty-nine to sit it and you get two hundred questions and two hours. The hospital pays over retail but it's nights the first couple of years and you don't see the sun much. And you can tech in Texas without the certificate, I told her that after, but nobody decent will take you, so just sit it. Twenty-five minutes. She wrote every bit of it down and read it back to me.

He stood in the doorway with his arms folded the whole time. When she'd gone back out front he said she listens to you. He moved the flour bags back against the wall.

Then he walked me out to the car and told me the supplier's putting the goat up in June, sixty cents, and he'll hold mine at eight ninety-nine. I said okay. I said thanks. I got in and did the drive home.

The Pyrex has been in my trunk since Saturday. I washed it twice. The first time I didn't get the corners properly and there was still masala in the seam, so I did it again.

My mother's asked me twice now when I'm taking it round.

If I go in the morning he'll take it off me and put it in the back and she'll never know what day it came home. She's on the register Friday evenings. She'll ask after my mother and then she'll ask about the hall.

Eleven minutes. Twelve with the light at Bissonnet.