Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

admit to, and what has that pain done? Forever there will be unopened years and tales kept silent, but does that matter? She thought it did. But in the face of what’s happened, it’s boiled down to this: she loves all of him. The sum of his parts, the conclusions of his stories. Who he is now. And the idea that she might not be able to be with him—that eclipses all the rest.

“Tell me something good,” she says, because it’s too much, the thought of their loss. And so she listens to him tell of his grandmother making bread, naan i tandoor in a pot installed in the ground outside, the way flames were fed with oak and how his grandmother thinned the dough with a stick before slapping it against the blazing-hot walls, the dough baking almost instantly. All day his grandmother would bake bread with three other women until there was a four-foot-high towering stack of still-warm bread that would last them the next few months. You could smell it, that stack that was taller than we were. One whiff and they raced each other for the honey. She listens to the story and asks questions about the bread and never tells him that when she said Tell me something good, she just wanted to hear He’ll be home soon.

The fabric store is like a geode that’s been split open. The outside bland on a faded day but the inside bursting with color. Taffeta in all hues drapes on hangers suspended from the ceiling. Embroidered with shiny sequins, threaded with tinsel, or embellished with faux pearls or gems, the fabric gleams. Still in her bag, Olivia’s camera is like a child tugging on her arm. She didn’t want to bring it, with Delan still gone, but Soran insisted. “How would he feel if he knew you didn’t take photographs? Please do not make him feel that when he returns.”

The dresses call for a stage. To dance beneath spotlights, to twirl and leave trails of glimmer. Long vests of taffeta. Floor-length sleeves that billow open and are to be tied loosely behind a back. Everything reminds Olivia of Renaissance dresses. Magic and spells and promises.

“Kurds like color,” Soran explains with a shrug.

An older woman whose eyes are darkened almost wickedly with kohl looks at her kindly, almost sadly, and Olivia figures the woman has been apprised of the situation. She touches Olivia’s hair and peers into her eyes. Then, inspired, leads her to a bolt of olive-green taffeta embroidered with gold swirls of sequins. It’s beautiful, but the truth is Olivia doesn’t care. She can’t care. But choices are made. Even a gold headdress with a triangle-shaped net of gold coins. When Olivia tries it on, the tip of the triangle dips down to between her eyebrows.

“He will love this,” Soran says. He will love this. “You are all right? I need to go to the bakery. She will measure you.”

Four days, Olivia thinks.

The woman does her job, and as soon as she’s able, Olivia forces herself to take her camera from her bag. He will be back, she tells herself. And she’ll wish she’d taken the photos.

A raise of her eyebrows asks the question, May I? and the seamstress’s nod confirms. From the ground, Olivia shoots up into stunning bolts of fabric. Then she shoots out, at such an angle where there’s no flare from the outside, with focus that catches the brilliant blues and fiery oranges against the cement beige of the day.

When she’s done, Soran has still not returned. Olivia riffles through an album the seamstress has on a table, each photograph of women displaying cuts and designs and fabrics throughout the years. It takes her a bit to notice that many of the photos are of the same woman, a woman who stares with heavily made-up eyes into the camera as if relishing in a sort of safety, a seduction without consequence. At the youngest, she is maybe in her twenties, flushed with youth and risk and shine. In the most current photo, the one at the start of the book, she must be in her forties, around the same age as the seamstress, with dark hair that’s grayed at the temple like a current gathering its force. A repeat customer. Someone loyal throughout the years.

A bell chimes. The front door opens, and a young girl enters. Olivia catches the seamstress look up immediately only to look right back down, holding her hand to her head as if struck with disappointment, and it’s then Olivia has a thought. Just a guess, but when she leans back in to compare the images, she thinks she sees it: love. Sparked in the much-photographed woman’s eyes, pulling forward a shoulder, lifting a brow. Olivia glances back to the seamstress, who quietly folds fabric the color of honey, and wonders if she’s right, then wonders how many others have noticed this love kept secret but right in the open.

The power of a photograph.

Right now, in Olivia’s father’s old oak cabinet drawer, there are loose photos of her mother, at least a hundred in black and white or faded color, some on deckle-edged paper whose scalloped sides Olivia used to run her fingers along. Why is nothing in an album? a friend once asked in high school, and Olivia—whose world hinged on order—just shrugged. The truth was that it was her father’s doing and had been like this since the funeral, since he’d torn through albums to find pictures but never had the energy to return them. Instead he’d dumped the rest inside the drawer, and both he and Olivia had learned to love it because it was her mother’s jumbled life, and there was something beautiful about the chaos, something that felt whole and complete and circular from the very fact that a handful of images would fly through time and reveal Olivia’s mother at all ages, like a full life lived. Pregnant in a field of nodding