Julia looked pained. “I don’t believe it.”
“Did you know anything about Ali’s involvement with the woman?” I asked. “Did you know that he was still seeing her?”
“You know I didn’t.” She looked hurt. “I would never hide something so duplicitous.”
In my experience, Julia wasn’t a liar, but I had no idea who or what to believe anymore.
Julia came over to embrace me. “Whatever the truth is, for sure Ali should have had zero contact with that woman after he married you. I’m so sorry. I just can’t believe it.”
I hugged her back, feeling for the first time that Julia might finally be on my side, at least a little.
“Yalla.Come on.” My mother-in-law poked her head out of the kitchen. “Julia. It’s time for the cake.”
We all gathered in the family room with my father-in-law comfortably centered in his old leather recliner. When Julia brought the cake out, we sang “Happy Birthday” in English and then in Arabic before my father-in-law blew out the candles with help from his youngest grandchildren.
“Happy birthday,Ummi.” I kissed him on each deeply grooved cheek and uttered the customary birthday greeting in Arabic. “Meet senna inshallah.” May you live a hundred years, God willing.
I felt a stab of anguish that Ali would never be an old man. As disillusioned as I was with my husband, sorrow throbbed through me to know he wouldn’t celebrate a single birthday surrounded by his children’s offspring. He would never know his future grandchildren. And they wouldn’t know him. As monumental as Ali had been in our lives, to his grandchildren, he’d only ever be a smiling stranger in old pictures and videos, so distant and abstract that he might as well have lived in another century.
But then again, despite having lived with Ali for more than half my life, I now wondered if I ever knew who he really was.
Samantha Elizabeth Martins Price.
“Let’s find out who you are.” The following morning, I typed Lizzie’s full name into the search window, trying different variations of all her names until I found a Samantha Elizabeth Martins in an old obituary for her father.
Lawrence Robert Martins, age fifty-two, of Vienna, Virginia, died unexpectedly, leaving behind a wife, Martha Martins; a son, William Warren Martins; and a daughter, Samantha Elizabeth Martins. I calculated the dates. Lizzie’s father died when she was in high school. There was little else online about Lizzie or her family members.
I called Nasser. He answered immediately. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Did you know Lizzie Martins’s family?”
“No, I only met Lizzie a couple of times before college.”
“Wait. What?” Had I heard right? “You knew Lizzie before college? I thought she and Ali met in college.”
“No,” he said. “They went to high school together.”
“They were a thing in both high schoolandcollege?” The revelation shook me. Their relationship was even more long standing than I’d thought. Here was yet another thing that Ali had never disclosed to me. “Why did I not know this?”
“I thought you did.”
“They dated in high school and college?”
“I’m not sure they dated in high school. I had the impression that she had a crush on him and pursued him once they got to college. Ali was pretty sure she chose to attend JMU because that’s where he was going.”
“I guess she was determined to get her man.”
“It always looked to me like Lizzie was way more into Ali than he was into her.”
“If he wasn’t that into her, why did he date her for so long?” It didn’t add up. “He told me once that they went out for years.”
I heard the shrug in Nasser’s voice. “Ali was a nice guy. He didn’t want to hurt Lizzie’s feelings by dumping her. She was very dependent on him.”
“In what way?”
“She always seemed very fragile. Like she could break at any time. She had the wounded-bird thing going on.”
“Maybe because her father died when she was young, in high school?”
