In her uncle’s house—not an uncle by blood or even affection, merely by the habitual nature of his presence in her family’s life—there was a photograph from the 1970s of a neighborhood cricket team posing with a trophy; it was a photograph Isma had sometimes stopped to look at as a child, wondering at the contrast between the glorious, swaggering boys and the unprepossessing middle-aged men they’d grown into. It was really only the ones she knew as middle-aged men she paid much attention to, and so she’d never given particular thought to the unsmiling one in the badly fitting clothes until the day her grandmother stood in front of the picture and said, “Shameless!” poking her finger at the young man.
“Oh yes, the new MP,” the uncle said, coming to see what had drawn out a pronouncement of such uncharacteristic venom. “On the day of the final we were a player short and this one, Mr. Serious, was visiting his cousin, our wicketkeeper, so we said, Okay, you play for us, and gave him our injured batsman’s uniform. Did nothing all match except drop a catch, and then ended up holding the trophy in this official photograph, which went into the local newspaper. We were just being polite to offer it to him, since he was an outsider, and only because we were sure he’d have enough manners to say thanks but the captain—that was me—should be the one to hold it. We should have known then he would grow up to be a politician. Twenty pounds says he has it framed on his wall and tells everyone he was man-of-the-match.”
Later that day, Isma overheard her grandmother talking to her best friend and neighbor, Aunty Naseem, and learned the real reason for that “Shameless!” It was not the unsmiling one’s choice of career but a cruelty he’d recently shown to their family when it would have been easy for him to act otherwise. In the years after that, she’d paid close attention to him—the only one in the picture to grow up slim and sharp, bigger and brighter trophies forever in his sights. And now here he was, walking across the café floor—not the hated-admired figure he’d grown into but a slightly older version of the boy posing with the team, except his hair floppier and his expression more open. This must be, had to be, the son. She’d seen a photo that included him as well, but he’d ducked his head so that the floppy hair obscured his features—she’d wondered then whether that was by design. Eamonn, that was his name. How they’d laughed in Wembley when the newspaper article accompanying the family picture revealed this detail. An Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name—“Ayman” become “Eamonn” so that people would know the father had integrated. (His Irish-American wife was seen as another indicator of this integrationist posing rather than an explanation for the son’s name.)
The son was standing at the counter, in blue jeans and a quilted olive-green jacket, waiting.
She stood up, mug in hand, and walked over to him. “They only open up this counter when it’s busy.”
“Thanks. Kind of you to say. Where is—?” His vowels unashamedly posh where she had expected the more class-obscuring London accent of his father.
“Upstairs. I’ll show you. I mean, I’m sure you understand ‘upstairs.’ I should have said, I’m going there myself. Coffee’s cold.” Why so many words?
He took the mug from her hand with unexpected familiarity. “Allow me. As thanks for rescuing me from being the Englishman Who Stood at the Counter for All Eternity. Who you could be forgiven for confusing with the Englishman Who Gets Lost Going Upstairs.”
“I just want it heated up.”
“Right you are.” He sniffed the contents of the mug, another overfamiliar gesture. “Smells amazing. What is it? I wouldn’t know an Ethiopian from a Colombian if . . .” He stopped. “That sentence doesn’t know where to go from there.”
“Probably just as well. It’s the house brew.”
She stood where she was a moment, watching him walk up the stairs, which were bracketed on one side by potted ferns and on the other by a wall with ferns painted on it. When he glanced down toward her, mouthing “Not lost yet,” she pretended she had simply been preoccupied by her thoughts and returned to the little table in the alcove, angling her body so that her own shadow kept the sunlight from her computer screen. Slid her fingers over the wooden tabletop, its knots, its burns. Guess who, she started to type into her phone, then stopped and deleted it. She could too easily imagine the tone of Aneeka’s response: Ugh! she’d say, or Why did you even talk to him?
He didn’t return. She imagined him seeing a short line at the counter and placing her mug down with a shrug before walking out the upstairs exit; it left her both vindicated and disappointed. She went up to buy herself another coffee and found that the machine had broken down, so had to settle for hot water and a tea bag that leaked color into it. Returning downstairs, she saw a mug of fresh coffee at her table and a man folded into the chair next to it, legs thrown over the arm, reading a book in the shape of the gap in the bookshelf above his head.
“What is it?” he said, looking at the cup of tea she set down on an empty table. He examined the tag at the end of the tea bag. “Ruby Red. Not even pretending it’s a flavor.”
She held up the mug in thanks. The coffee wasn’t as hot as it could have been, but he must have had to carry it down the street. “How much do I owe you?”
“Five minutes of conversation. That’s what I spent standing in the queue. But after you’re finished with whatever you’re doing.”
“That could be a while.”
“Good. Gives me time to catch up on essential reading about . . .” He shut the book, looked at its cover. “The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Complete in One Volume. Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and Other Womanly Arts . . .”
One of the undergraduates looked up, glared.
Isma slung the laptop into her backpack, downed her coffee. “You can walk to the supermarket with me.”
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