At the base of Bisgrove Street, I halt the auto in front of the utility post I attached my notice to last evening and I use the wrecking bar to drive into the ground one of my new signs. I tell to myself I must return to draw an arrow upon it, one that points up the hill towards the bungalow, but this I will do after resting. Simply the effort of swinging the iron over my head has fatigued me further, and as I drive up the hill I am hoping—for this moment—that my wife is still in her room with her melancholy music and her self-pity, that Esmail has taken the BART train to visit his skateboarding friends in Berkeley, that I may lie upon the carpet in my office to sleep until I am rested. But Nadereh is not in her bedroom. She is outdoors, standing upon the step speaking with a woman whose back is to the road. The woman wears short pants and the bright blue T-shirt of a tourist, but I recognize her red automobile parked beside the woodland and I accelerate and swing my Buick loudly into the driveway. Both women turn their eyes to me, their faces masks, as if I have caught them openly discussing a precious secret. I stop the car so abruptly it rocks once forwards and backwards but my feet are already upon the ground as I approach my wife and this gendeh, this whore. Nadi says loudly, “Nakon, Behrani, don’t.” But I have put both hands upon Kathy Nicolo, squeezing her arms, pushing her back across the lawn, her face heavy with cheap cosmetics, her lips parted to speak. She attempts to pull away, and my voice comes through my teeth: “Do you think you can frighten me? Do you think you can frighten me with that stupid deputy? Coming here and telling lies?” I shake her, the hair falling into her face. We are nearly in the street and Nadi screams behind me to leave the girl alone, velashkon! But I shake the woman again, squeezing her bare arms with all my strength, pushing her backward. “Who do you think I am? Tell me that. Am I stupid? Do you think I am stupid?”

The woman is crying quietly, as if she cannot get enough air to breathe, her brown hair across her face. I want to break her, I want to push her against her automobile. Nadi’s screaming grows louder, and I hear her running into the street behind me, but I do not stop. I pull open the car door, and push the crying gendeh onto the driver’s seat. She bumps the back of her head upon the roof, and just after she pulls inside her bare leg I slam shut the door and lean into the window, my face only one or two centimeters from hers. I am breathing with difficulty. “In my country, you would not be worthy to raise your eyes to me. You are nothing. Nothing.”

Nadi begins screaming at my back, screaming in Farsi that I am a beast, leave her alone, velashkon! But my wife’s yelling is no louder than the blood in my head. I order the whore to ignite her engine and never return. “And you tell to your friend his superior officers know everything. You tell to him that.” I grasp the whore’s chin and force her to view me directly. There is fear in the moisture of her eyes, and Nadi begins to hit my back with her small fists but they are no more than the flap of a bird’s wings. “You tell to him that. This is our home. Our home.”

The gendeh pulls her head away, engages the gearshift, and speeds her auto to the top of the hill. She maneuvers around, and I push Nadi back as the woman passes closely by. She is looking directly ahead, both hands upon the steering wheel, a strand of her long hair sticking upon her face. My wife has become quiet. I hear only her breathing, and mine as well.

MY UPPER ARMS WERE BRUISED, THE BACK OF MY HEAD STUNG, AND I was so angry I started to cry, and I kept on in ragged spurts all the way through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge, through Sausalito and Marin City, past signs for Mill Valley, Corte Madera, and Larkspur. At Route 580, up in the hills, I could see the sandstone walls of San Quentin prison, just the beginning of a guard tower, and I cut east onto the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. San Pablo Bay lay stretched out under me in the sun. There were dozens of white sails, and the glare hurt my eyes. I wiped the stolen eyeliner off my cheeks, avoided looking in the mirror, and the bridge seemed to go on for miles.

In El Cerrito I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a box of tissues. I wanted bottled water too but didn’t see any with the soft drinks, and I didn’t want to ask, so I bought an ice cream sandwich. I knew I looked bad, but the Asian woman behind the counter was nice enough not to keep her eyes on my face. On the way back to the Bonneville I passed a pay phone bolted into the side of the building and before I knew it I was calling my brother Frank collect at his car dealership in Revere. It was almost one here, four o’clock there. Frank’s partner Rudy Capolupo answered, his voice always low and wheezy, like he was being forced to talk with someone stepping on his throat. He asked the operator to repeat my name twice, then he paused and accepted the charges.

“Sorry to call collect, Rudy.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll take it out of Frank’s wallet at lunch. Hey, how’s sunny California anyways? I might retire out there, you know. Marina Del Rey. You been down there yet?” Without waiting for my answer, he said: “Hold on, sweets, your brother will want to talk to you.”

It took a while for Frank to come to the phone. My hands shook as I opened the ice cream sandwich and took a bite. But I could hardly taste it and when it got to my empty stomach it was too cold and almost hurt. A bright purple jacked-up Chevy Malibu pulled up to the 7-Eleven. Three Chicano boys were inside. The driver went into the store, but the other two, both in flannel shirts buttoned up to their necks, one in a tight hair net, gave me the look from head to toe. I wanted to ask them what they thought they were staring at. Did they want their teeth kicked down their throat? But then Frank’s voice came on the line, and I turned my back to the boys and slouched over the phone.

“K? Is that you?” He sounded so much like himself, his voice deep and peppy, the Saugus accent stronger than ever, that I started crying even before I could talk. I dropped my ice cream, covered my mouth, and twisted the receiver away from my face.

“Kath?”

“Wait.” I pulled out a tissue and blew my nose, then got a fresh one, wiped under my eyes, and took a deep, shaky breath. “It’s me, Franky. I’m sorry.”

He said it was okay, no problem, but his voice wasn’t peppy anymore.

“What’s wrong, K? Is everything all right? Nick all right?”

I ran my finger over a number scratched into the phone. I began to turn from side to side.

“Kath?”

“Nick’s gone, Frank.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“He left.”

My brother was quiet a second. I pictured him standing in his office in a monogrammed dress shirt, Hugo Boss pants, Johnston & Murphy shoes, a bright pastel tie, his hand on his hip.

“When, K?” Now his voice sounded testy, and I heard everything in it: my whole life, his opinion of it, his opinion of my marriage, which he really thought was doomed from the beginning. And now I knew Nick hadn’t gone back home either, or else Frank would’ve heard.

“A while ago.”

“Did he take the Pontiac?”

“No he didn’t take the Pontiac. Christ, is that all you care about, Frank? The fucking car you gave us?”

“Hey, calm down, it was just a question.” My brother blew his breath out into the phone. I could picture him shaking his head and I wished I hadn’t called.

He was quiet a few seconds, then said: “Is this why you haven’t been calling Ma, K?”

His tone was gentle now, but why did he have to ask me this? “Yeah, that’s why. Frank, listen. I just—” The tears came with no warning. I saw again the colonel’s raging face as he pushed me across the yard, his breath bad, like meat left out in the sun, his eyes wide and brown, the whites yellowed as he spit his words at me and pushed me farther and farther away from my house, mine and Frank’s. “Frank?”