Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.

When they asked what she would miss most about New York, she said the ubiquity of art, how it could be found on the streets and in museums, in the people and the ways they chose to live. She knew this was the answer they were seeking, the one that assuaged the precarious matter of continuing in New York, which was brought into question every time another person chose to leave. Art was what she loved about the city, what everyone loved, but it wasn’t what she would miss. She would miss the drugstores that punctuated every block, some of them converted from beautiful old buildings, giving them that stumbleupon quality she’d have to do without in a place like Nashville, where people drove cars and drugstores were treated more respectfully as destinations. After work, or before a night ended, the rows of products provided a sense of order, filled with latent possibility. The colors—condoms, toothpaste, Zyrtec, folic acid—were brighter, more abrasive under white overhead lights. She loved going in and discovering a need she hadn’t known was there. It felt good going home not empty-handed.

In August, shortly after the start of the fall term, he came home to a dome on the table, the color and translucence of urine. Lettuce and small tomatoes make a wreath around the perimeter. Inside the dome, sliced radishes and shredded cabbage were suspended in space.”The food is trapped?” he’d asked, wondering if this was a joke or a game. “How do I get to it?” “You eat the whole thing,” Ailian said, looking pleased with herself. “It’s lemon-flavored. They call it Jell-O.”

Whatever group of friends I told, what always fascinated people was not the boy’s dying but this image, this juxtaposition of school and cemetery, side by side, and a hill cutting them off from the ward. It was as if they thought that, away from our parents, we kids fraternized with the dead. There would often be one person who thought that I was embellishing, that I was making up these details for the benefit of a story, to create some sort of meaning. That skeptic seemed to assume that the hill—which I now knew to be just a hillock—the school, the cemetery were symbolic of something that I had overcome, something I had escaped. But the Botalaote cemetery was separated from Motalaote Lekhutile Primary School by only a narrow dirt road, and behind them the hillock cut them off from Botalaote Ward. Those were the facts.

Every winter, Mrs. Botho Kennekae’s husband took time off from his driving job in the city and spent three weeks at the cattlepost, where he did whatever men did there—presumably offer the softness they withheld from everyone to their cattle, for the cattle were the great loves of their lives, so beloved the men called them wet-nosed gods, so beloved the men agreed: without cattle, a man pined and lost his sleep; still, having cattle, a man fretted and lost his sleep.

As Phetso dried herself, the old woman unfolded clothes from a plastic bag.

“Your uncles in Serowe have bought you these clothes,” the old woman said with formal solemnity, “to show the end of your affliction.” Then the woman handed Phetso the clothes, one by one, saying as she did:

“Receive this, panties.

“Receive this, a bra.

“Receive this, a skirt.

“Receive this, a shirt.

“Receive this, socks.

“Receive this, shoes.”

Phetso put each item on: sky-blue cotton panties; a brown cotton bra, slightly big on her; a German-print skirt that fell below her knees; a white long-sleeved T-shirt; sky-blue socks; and a white version of her midnight-blue canvas takkies. She put them on, one after the other, like a child learning to dress for the first time.

By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.

“Hello, my name is,” my uncle coached. “Try it,” said our aunt. “Quickly now,” said our mother. Under the table, I pressed my leg against Ji-ho’s, communicating a tense warning if he dared laugh.

“Hello, my name is So-hyun.”

“Hello, my name is Ji-ho.”

“More louder,” our uncle said. “With confidence.” Row-der. Con-pi-densh. Suddenly, I was caught unprepared by the thought of our father. How he could do all the accents, use all the slang, say things like “shit” and “cash” and “I should be so lucky” with a touch of insolence.

I desperately wished that he, our father, could continue to be a silence, an absence, or even a faithless promise for some future time. But there he was. What would he do? What would he say? My brother, Ji-ho, wondered too. I could sense it in his quick, light, audible breathing. Our father took a step forward. He looked toward our mother. “Ja-gi-ya,” he said to her. This is a thing that Korean men call their wives. It is sometimes translated as “honey” or “sweetie.” But what it literally means is “you-yourself,” and behind that is still another meaning: “my-own-self.” And then he told her to move aside.

The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.

When Intisar was small, she imagined that Sister Rose made her home in a mist of clouds enveloped all day in ethereal rays of light. She thought so because of the way Sister Rose seemed to float underneath her long abayas across the Musallah floor to the spot where she and five or so other little girls would gather for her Sunday school lessons. What else could explain her litheness, her sunset-peach skin, the way her irises sent threads of gold bounding out from the pupils like a million solar flares?

Qadirah considered what he wrote and folded her arms. Until that moment, there wasn’t a single person she’d met on the platform that interested her, though a few keystrokes was all it had taken to feel drawn to this new presence. It must have been his adherence to the etiquette, not pushing her to violate the rules of modesty and video chat like all of the others, in addition to his unwillingness to be swayed or fooled—traits that reminded her of herself. In this recognition, she felt a likeness that warranted more forthrightness than she had previously shown.

“It’s Qadirah,” she replied finally. “That is my real name, if you must know.”

“Qadirah! The Capable! The Powerful,” he wrote back. “A very nice name, al-Hamdulillah. I understand why you wouldn’t tell me outright.”