Where did you get that from?
AnaBGR
Julia Child said it, obvs. You’ve never heard it before? It means take control of your domain and own your actions.
StanleyP
No, I’ve heard it before. I thought your family was in the tech business.
AnaBGR
Techies like to cook too.
StanleyP
I have to go.
Chapter Eighteen
Secret Family History. Family Fodder. Family Fandom.
I was wide awake after fajr and decided to drag myself and my laptop into the backyard to watch the sunrise. I had been trying to work on the story in my heart, as Big J had suggested. So far, typing possible titles for my possible podcast was as far as I had gotten. The backyard was quiet in the post-dawn hush, the sky lightening slowly.
The click of a lighter brought me back to the present, along with the sharp scent of tobacco. Kawkab Khala leaned back against the fence beside me, blowing smoke up into the pale morning sunlight.
“Second-hand smoke is almost as dangerous to bystanders as first-hand smoke is to smokers,” I said.
“Feel free to move. I won’t be offended.”
I edged my chair a few feet away as Kawkab watched with amusement. “Did you look me up on the internet?” she asked, shifting closer to me.
“Yes,” I said, irritated. I had searched up my aunt after looking up Wholistic Grill the previous night, with little success. I had tried every combination of my aunt’s full name, her family name, even“Billi Apa.” My search had yielded nothing.
“And did you ask Rashid about me?” There was a hint of a satisfaction in her voice.
I didn’t answer.
“Cats climb,” Kawkab Khala said, blowing more smoke into the air.
I coughed dramatically, waving a hand in front of my face. “As you said.”
In response, Kawkab took a deep drag before changing the subject. “Your sister married so young. Have your parents tried to marry you off as well?”
My hands stilled over the keyboard. “Fazeela and Fahim fell in love and decided to marry. I guess my parents assume I’ll do something similar. I’m only twenty-four, so there’s no rush.”
“Yet you have no suitor on the horizon. Unless you are interested in that vapid but undeniably handsome friend of yours, the grocer’s son. Or perhaps you would prefer to have a more comfortable life and have set your sights on Junaid’s son.”
“You implied that Aydin is just like his father,” I said. “Greedy and manipulative.”
My aunt smiled evilly. “Young women enjoy the bad boys and the beautiful boys,” she said.
“I’ll take neither, thank you,” I answered, and returned to my laptop. I googled “podcasts about family” and started reading. My aunt crept closer, and I could feel her looking over my shoulder. I snapped the cover closed and sighed deeply.
My irritation must have been highly entertaining for my aunt; she was regarding my face with a thinly masked grin. “In my day, twenty-four was ancient for a woman,” she said.
I scowled, but then the back of my neck prickled with suddenawareness. My aunt was trying to tell me something, I realized, in her eccentric Kawkab Khala way. “But you said you didn’t get married until you were in your forties.”
“For years my parents tried very hard to find me a husband, from my seventeenth birthday until the year I turned twenty-four.”
