We still eat dinner on Fridays

It's Friday, so forgive me, I'll be looking at the clock. We eat at six. If I'm not through the gate by ten past, Farideh calls the house phone, which nobody has called since 2015, and if I don't pick that up she calls my son.

You want the street first. That's right.

I came in '78, fifteen years old, and my uncle had a place on Sherman Way that sold vacuum cleaners and repaired them, and I swept that floor for two years. Then a Greek man in Canoga Park taught me carpet. Pad, tack strip, seam iron, knee kicker. You know what a knee kicker is? You brace it here and you hit it with your knee, and after thirty years the knee is finished. Then the hip. The surgeon at Northridge Hospital told me in 2023 that the two things have nothing to do with each other. The surgeon is wrong. He's a nice boy and he's wrong, and I still walk the block every evening because he told me to.

I had my own trucks by '89. Shaw and Mohawk mostly, commercial, apartment buildings. Then January of '94, four thirty in the morning. The apartments down on Reseda came down on people. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it was bad for my business. It was three years of work and it paid for this house.

Masoud bought the house behind me that September. The people who had it wouldn't fix the chimney and they went to Bakersfield, and he got it for a price you can't say out loud now. He was at the DWP, the Van Nuys yard, thirty-one years, retired in '18. His wife's people and my wife's people were from the same part of Tehran, more or less the same few streets, and within a month Farideh had a key to my back door. I don't know when Roya got theirs. She just had one.

The kids knocked a board out of the fence in '96, chasing a ball. So I cut a proper gate in it. Four-by-four posts, and a real latch from the hardware store on Devonshire. Roya painted it green because she said a gate should be green. It's still green. I oil that latch every spring.

Thirty-two years. Their daughter did Roya's hair for my son's wedding. Same cabin in Big Bear two weeks every August, both families, since 2004. My grandchildren, Leyla is nine and Arman is six, they come through that gate without knocking and they call him Amoo. Anyway.

Roya died four years ago in March. Pancreas. Eleven weeks from the day they told us, and if anybody says there's a good way, that's the fast way, and it isn't good either.

Four months after, Masoud stayed to help me with the dishes.

So. It was a Thursday, not a Friday. I have a dishwasher, a Bosch, a good one, and we washed by hand because the plates with the gold don't go in it. He washed and I dried. Then he put his hand flat on my back, between the shoulders, and left it there, and I didn't move away from it. We were on the kitchen floor, which I laid myself, and it didn't take long. In the morning at seven he brought my cans up from the curb the way he does, and he said something about the water bill, and I said something back.

We're old men. He's sixty-eight. That's all.

The next Friday Farideh sent him over to bring me for dinner, and I've been going every Friday since. Two years. She cooks. You don't arrive empty-handed, so I bring the bread, and I get it from the bakery on Reseda where the oven is the real kind, the stones, and you have to carry it home flat and not folded or it steams itself and goes to rubber. I tell her every time not to make the ghormeh sabzi for me and every time she makes it, and I say no I couldn't, and she says of course you could, and I say no honestly, and then I eat. That's how it's done. If she gave up on the second no I'd know something was wrong in that house.

She always gives me the tahdig, the crust from the bottom of the rice. Always. The children scream about it and she gives it to me anyway, on the plate, before anyone sits down, and Masoud says nothing about it and never has.

It hasn't happened again. Not once, not close to once, and neither of us has said one word about it in two years, not one. We watch the Turkish show on the satellite after dinner, the one dubbed into Persian, and he falls asleep in the chair by nine and Farideh puts a blanket on him and we all agree he's watching it.

Now. Tuesday I was out at the trash cans and she was on her side of the fence with the hose running and she said she's going down to Irvine Sunday. Their daughter's having the baby in October. I said October's a ways off, and she said the daughter wants her there for the, and then a word I didn't catch, something to do with the house, the room, I don't know, and she didn't say it again. Three weeks. Maybe more, she'd have to see.

She said, don't let him have cereal for dinner like an animal. She said she's putting things in the freezer.

I said of course. I said don't worry about anything, and she said she wasn't worried, and she turned the hose off.

So that's four Fridays. In one of those two kitchens, and afterwards there's dishes.

We're old men. What is anybody imagining. I'm sixty-three with a titanium hip and he takes a pill for his blood pressure that makes him cough.

It's twenty to six. The bread's on the counter and it's still hot enough that the paper is damp underneath, which means I should have left the house already.

I'll go through the gate. It's the shortest way, and if I went around by the street they'd both come out to see what happened to me.

Leyla left her shoes in my hallway again, both of them, one of them right in front of the door. I move it over with my foot.