Rosewater and Soda Bread Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned into a feat of Sisyphean determination—the better part of the morning given to transporting the injured mermaid from the inlet to the backseat of her rickety Honda.
    Then there was that whole hour spent hauling her from the car, up the cottage's gravelly drive, and into the four-poster bed.
    By the time Estelle had undressed the mermaid, changing her into a pair of Luigi's stripy cotton pajamas, and washed and chopped all the vegetables for her life-affirming minestrone soup, she had been too tired to blink, let alone tune in to one of her favorite weekend activities: roaming the vast and comic world of Irish radio stations.
    Estelle returned her gaze to the window. Not even a good reel could lighten her mood now. Not after finding the poor darling mermaid.
    A drop of water, a vestige from an earlier shower, trickled down the windowpane. It joined earlier drops, pooling in one corner of the frame like a sacrificial cup faced toward heaven.
    To Estelle it seemed as though the rainwater mirrored her own tears, the crying that had not stopped since she had found the girl, naked and half dead.
    The whole earth was crying for the shame.

CHAPTER II

    “ SO THAT'S IT? You're not going to do it? You're not going to write to Gloria for me?”
    Layla's question ran through Marjan's mind as she stepped out of the café later that evening. She hadn't had much time to think of anything else, really. The shock of hearing her sister talking so candidly about such grown-up matters was compounded by her own mixed feelings, the confusion that had been brought to the surface by Layla's effortless confidence. It wasn't an easy decision—certainly not one she had prepared herself for making.
    You'll just have to be patient, she had told a pouting Layla. I promise I'll be fair in my answer.
    At least, she hoped she would be fair. The truth was she had no idea what to do about her youngest sister's request; she felt a thoroughly incompetent judge of it all. Her own romances were certainly not much to go by; her past dating experiences werelimited, a fact she was sometimes embarrassed to admit, even to herself.
    Not that she hadn't had her chances. There had been no shortage of lovely lads coming through the doors of Aioli, the restaurant where she had worked alongside Gloria Delmonico in London. With her accent and Italianate looks, she could pass as Gloria's cousin, a ploy that had often bought them a pint or two at the local tavern. But whereas her friend's bravado enabled her to flirt and frolic with many an Englishman, Marjan had always shied away from any serious commitment. It was a reticence born not from prudery but from too much experience, too many memories.
    Keeping the two trays of chickpea cookies balanced in her arms, Marjan tilted back her head and looked up. The sun was quickly sinking behind Croagh Patrick, filling the autumn air with a rose-tinged mark. Bonfire Night was set to spark with twilight precisely twenty-three minutes from now.
    Sunsets, whether voluptuous and pulsing or thin with the whisper of winter rain, held a special place in her heart. It was under another western sky, in an East over a decade ago, that Ali, her beloved Ali, had proclaimed his love for her. That was the night he had given her a beautiful brass jewelry box, a simple little chest etched with desert roses, with the promise that it would be the first of many keepsakes. It was a promise he had not kept, one he had no way of keeping, she realized, now that she looked back on it.
    Back then, back when they had been seventeen and in the midst of the free-loving seventies, it had seemed as though they would have an eternity to plan and play out their dreams. Funny, thought Marjan, how she and Ali had only held hands when they started dating, their passions manifesting solely in long and languorous kisses.
    While their school friends had taken full advantage of Tehran's heady modernism, a moment of amnesia for the traditionally staid capital, she