Free How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu Page A

the front, three on the rear, and one on each window, because a woman living alone could never be too safe, could never trust solely the kindness of strangers). The dust now was her responsibility. It was what she heard the other women at the church talk about: dust and stains and collars that never got clean. Sofas that were ruined by grape juice left to sit too long. Children’s pants stained with blood. All of that was supposed to be her charge now.
    She took a seat on the bed, and then after a few minutes laid back, allowing herself the luxury of placing her feet on the hand-me-down white duvet given to her by one of the women at the church. There was nothing she needed or had forgotten. She had come back here for purely selfish reasons. In those few minutes between opening the car door and taking her seat next to her husband, she had caught a glimpse of her life as it would have looked to her if she were standing outside of it: the poor woman with the cheap and overstuffed valise being more of a cliché than she was willing to bear. Unlike those stories, however, she was not running from but to, her suitcase packed not in defiance but in submission, with her in no particular rush at all. She should have expected more from herself, the voice she was trying to quell threatened to say. To which she would have agreed wholeheartedly.
    Coming back up to this room was just another one of the minor lies my mother told herself to get through each day. There was only this quiet, solitary repose that she sought, and if the world was a kinder and better place, I imagine sometimes, it would have stopped permanently right then and there exclusively for her. Everything else around her could have continued. Neighborhood children could have aged, graduated, and fallen into drugs and love and premature pregnancies. The old women at the church—Agnes, Harriet, and Jean—could have faded away into their deaths one at a time, like summer months ticked off so quickly they hardly seem to have ever happened. Life in general, in other words, need not have ended, just so long as my mother could be granted the small gift of lying endlessly on a bed on an early September afternoon staring at the ceiling while her husband sat parked in the driveway waiting for her. It could have made a picture-perfect scene, supposing the canvas was drawn wide enough to allow for a view of house, bedroom, trees, and car—a scene quiet enough to deserve the merit of being hung in a famous museum. People could have gazed at it in some future era and said to themselves, “So, this was life.”
     
     
     
     
    My mother lay on the bed and counted off the minutes in her head one second at a time. Today, she gave herself two hundred and twenty seconds, a record. On other days she needed only twenty or thirty to step back gracefully into life. That was enough time to compensate for a broken dish, for a day and evening of complete silence between her and her husband. The seconds themselves were nothing more than that. They were the smallest fragments of time that she knew how to account for, and she believed that if she could count and accept them, then she could believe again in the hours and days they made up. If she knew how to do it, she would have counted to the tenth or hundredth of each second. She would have gotten to the very bottom of time, and having arrived, stared at it directly and said, “Okay, I can do this. If this is all there is.”
    Until today the most she had ever needed was one hundred and eighty-four seconds. That had been enough time to make up for getting lost on an afternoon stroll and being told by a young white boy with bright red hair and freckles that if she knew what was good for her, she would turn around and get the fuck back to wherever she had come from. Most of what he said was lost on her, but she understood the intent of violence and threat in his voice, as we almost all always do. Long before we understand anything we know