Chapter Thirty Seven
The Winter When the Crates Came Back Fuller
Winter came to Beirut with wind off the sea and rain that found every crack in every roof, and Mariam watched the sky each dawn and read it the way other people read newspapers. This winter was different, and she knew it from the first cold morning, because the crates came back fuller than they had ever come before.
The fuller crates began at the dawn market, where Mariam had bought her vegetables for thirty years from growers who knew her name and her tin cup. In other winters she had bought a little and hoped it would be enough. This winter the growers, who had read Layla's story or heard it from their children, set aside the best of their stock before she even asked. The potatoes were large and clean. The onions were firm and dry. The leeks stood straight and green. The leafy greens were bright. The tomatoes, even in winter, were red and heavy.
Mariam did not take the fuller crates as luck. She took them as a trust. She paid fairly, counted her coins twice, and thanked each grower by name, and she loaded the crates onto the cart that had once been Youssef's and that Rami now pulled with care. The cart squeaked on the cold road. Rami laughed at the squeak. Mariam told him the squeak had been there for twenty years and was part of the family now, like his grandfather's laugh, and Rami laughed harder and pulled faster.
The second table was Rami's idea. He had seen how customers crowded around a single row of crates and how the greens got bruised when too many hands reached at once. "One more table," he said, "and the tomatoes can have a table of their own, and Nour can stand at the second table and be in charge of the change." Mariam looked at the yard, where Youssef's old workbench stood under a cover, and she nodded. Rami and Sami spent a Sunday afternoon building the table from the workbench boards, while Nour handed them nails and told them they were doing it wrong.
On Monday morning the second table stood beside the first, and the stall looked, for the first time, like a small shop in the open air. The potatoes and onions filled the first table. The leeks and leafy greens filled the second, with the tomatoes in a shallow crate at the front where the sun could find them. Mariam stood between the two tables like a captain between two decks, and customers came in a steady stream, and the tin cup filled faster than it ever had in winter before.
Rami helped every morning before classes, and the help mattered more than the extra hands. He arrived in the dark with a lantern, unloaded the cart, set out the crates in the order Mariam liked, and stayed until the first rush was over and his grandmother waved him off toward the university with a tomato in his pocket. He ran for the bus with the tomato in his pocket, thinking about his grandmother's hands arranging leeks in the cold, and feeling rich.
The fuller crates brought new customers. A teacher from a school two streets away came every Wednesday for greens. A cook from a small restaurant came every Thursday for potatoes and onions, in quantities that made Mariam blink and then smile and count twice.
Winter also brought the cold that got into Mariam's knees and made her walk more slowly, and Doctor Lina Azar, passing on her way to the clinic, stopped and told her, again, to rest. Mariam smiled politely and promised to rest, and rested for one afternoon, sitting by her heater with a blanket over her knees, before she was back at the crates at dawn, because the crates did not rest and neither, she said, did the rent.
The rain came in the middle of winter, hard rain that drummed on the new stall roof, and for one long afternoon Mariam thought the roof would fail. Rami and Sami climbed up in the rain with tools and tarpaulin and fixed the loose boards while Mariam held the lantern and shouted directions neither of them could quite hear. The roof held. The crates stayed dry. The customers came anyway, under umbrellas, buying potatoes and greens as if the rain were a rumor.
By the end of winter the second table was part of the stall, as much a part of it as the tin cup and the chalk pitch line. The growers kept setting aside the best stock. And Mariam, counting her coins on a cold clear evening, found enough for the rent and the medicine and a little left over, which she put into a cloth bag for Nour's school books.
On the last cold morning, when the wind dropped and the sun came out early, Karim stopped at the stall and bought tomatoes for his mother, and he smelled one, out of habit, and smiled. "Fuller crates," he said. "You have a second table. You have a crowd. The street suits you, Mariam."
"The street suits all of us," Mariam said, and handed him his change. Behind her, Rami was already loading the cart for tomorrow, and Nour was practicing counting change at the second table, and the winter was going out with sunlight on the pavement and a stall that stood fuller than ever before.
Chapter Thirty Eight
The Scholarship Letter Addressed to Rami Haddad