What Changes Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

trailing him—but with men, maybe a dozen. Odd; he wondered about it for a moment. Outside the enclosed marketplace, crowds were rare. Fear of suicide bombers always rumbled in the subconscious, and beyond that, of course, a group of any size drew the unwelcome attention of passing troops, whether Afghan or foreign.
           He quickly dismissed his worry as paranoia—this was ice cream he was talking about— and joined the back of the line. He raised a hand to the two men dressed in long white over-shirts and loose pants who dished the ice cream into cups on a table topped with a bright red, plastic sheet. By this time, the vendors knew Todd by sight and generally greeted him with big smiles. Sometimes he ate his ice cream right there in front of the stand, chatting with simple words, pretending for a moment he belonged and could linger casually. Now, though, they were too busy to acknowledge Todd, if they even saw him.
           He turned his attention to the bakery next door. In a room not much larger than a closet, three men tossed and patted dough and then submerged it in an open fire-pit to make bolani an d nani Afghani. S weat beaded at their temples. Their bodies moved as if in hypnotic dance.
           Something about the scene, though exotic, evoked home. He thought, then, of Clarissa; her name came into his mind and immediately he felt a tightening in his chest. He thought of her neck, and her long waist. He thought of her voice floating from the bathroom, the door open, but she unseen, bent over the sink or patting dry her face, telling him a story from her day. He always found that to be the most intimate of moments—to be with a woman in early evening, lying on a bed, listening to her voice coming from within the bathroom as she brushed or washed away the soil of the hours before. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and saw a fleeting image of his wife. Clari, Clari, Clari.
           How had this amazing thing even happened to him, sharing a home again with a wife? He still wasn‟t sure. He‟d been widowed 22 years ago, losing Mariana when Ruby was only six. He‟d never planned to marry again, first throwing all his energy into being a single parent, and then into his work. They‟d met at a party. Clarissa was an urban historian teaching at Columbia. Whoever casually introduced them—he couldn‟t remember that detail—noted that she‟d recently finished a paper on historic housing patterns in Manhattan. He hadn‟t been sure what that meant, but he‟d immediately liked her smile, so he blundered forward, saying he‟d noticed from his work with refugees how people arranged their living spaces even among war rubble, when you‟d think shelter would be their only concern. A hierarchy developed, he‟d gone on. Desirable housing locations arose in ways indiscernible to average outsiders, based on issues like position relative to the main entrance and the water supply as well as proximity to certain families once considered more powerful. Some tents, he said, were erected a few inches further from their neighbors than others; this sign of status was noted—and accepted—by the camp inhabitants. It all happened without any apparent discussion, so that even when no one had any money worth mentioning, socio-economic groupings occurred.
           As he was saying all this, talking almost without breathing just to keep her from walking away, he was really noticing her energy, her way of standing, the look in her eyes, her hair and, again, her smile.
           Less than a year later, they married. It felt crazy, unexpected and right. When they met, he was in the middle of the three-months-in/three-months-out rotations to Kabul and Islamabad. At first she‟d been fine with it, but last year she‟d offered—as if cupping her words in her hands and holding them out for him to see—that she wanted him to stop. She was careful so he knew it was still his choice. But he