“I have friends I can borrow from,” he said dismissively. “How will you pay them back?”
“Things will turn around. They always do. Look, he likes it. See?”
Most days, Laila was deprived of her son. Rasheed took him to the shop, let him crawl around under his crowded workbench,
play with old rubber soles and spare scraps of leather.
Rasheed drove in his iron nails and turned the sandpaper wheel, and kept a watchful eye on him.
If Zalmai toppled a rack of shoes, Rasheed scolded him gently, in a calm, half-smiling way.
If he did it again, Rasheed put down his hammer, sat him up on his desk, and talked to him softly.
His patience with Zalmai was a well that ran deep and never dried.
They came home together in the evening, Zalmai's head bouncing on Rasheed's shoulder, both of them smelling of glue and leather.
They grinned the way people who share a secret do, slyly,
like they'd sat in that dim shoe shop all day not making shoes at all but devising secret plots.
Zalmai liked to sit beside his father at dinner, where they played private games, as Mariam, Laila, and Aziza set plates on the sojrah.
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