Chapter 74

• Rakia awoke at three in the morning with a rumbling stomach. She gently pushed Dashtan’s arm around her belly and moved from the room to the kitchen. She paused at the granite countertop and yawned before resuming her steps to prepare food. He then opened the refrigerator and looked at what was inside. The clusters of red grapes tempted her to pull two grapes from the stalk and pop them into her mouth one at a time before she returned to looking at the other food. The frozen potatoes made her decide what to eat. Rakia left the four-door refrigerator open to get a plate, then picked up the frozen potato, still in its plastic wrapper, in the transparent drawer of the fridge. Sometimes, she arranged the contents of this refrigerator. Still, more often, Mrs. Hunt did it, thinking about going shopping and adding some of the food she needed. Since she was often hungry lately, she ate a lot.
• Before frying the potatoes, which were still half frozen, Rakia decided to have a warm drink. She made the milk she had been drinking lately. Then she took a medium-sized and rather tall glass jar filled with barbecue-flavored cassava chips and munched on the snack while sitting on the high chair of the granite table with her warm milk. The crunching sound she made as she chewed the chips could be heard in her lonely kitchen, accompanied by her erratic daydreams.
• She thought about her future. She wondered what would happen if Dashtan didn’t tell her he loved her, and she had to keep her mouth shut and not say to him about her pregnancy. The thought made her heart ache. But a deal was a deal. If it had to happen, he had to survive and go on living, even if the child he was carrying had to be born with the imperfect status of his parents. The thought that her child would have to live in a broken home again was enough to make her feel stressed and sick. Rakia immediately got off the high chair, ran to the sink, and threw up.