The wipers are noisy. The right one leaves parallel lines on the windshield that remind Persa of the rainbows she drew in her grade school notebook during math. She wants to light a cigarette, but Peter hates how the car smells afterward—even though it’s her car he is driving tonight. Persa rubs her swollen feet. Going through customs at Kennedy Airport is always a trying experience, and she dreads the mail piles she will have to sort out and the upcoming meeting with a colleague. She wishes Peter would reach out and touch her. “So how was it,” he finally says. There is no question mark.

“It was…” she says, and then stops. How was what? Mama’s funeral, the trip, the flight? Customs?

She knows there is no food in the house. Most likely, he has had no time to have the dishwasher repaired. He will politely offer to get her anything she wants from the Chinese carryout.

She stretches her legs and leans on the headrest of her seat. She was not able to sleep on the plane. Instead, the endless chit-chat of two elderly ladies by her, the jingling of their many gold bracelets each time they giggled and cried out, mixing words from two languages, kept her awake, drowning in her thoughts. The whole nine hours of the flight. Without stop.

“Cursed is the one with dyo patrides, two homelands,” the one with the big ruby ring and the perfectly coiffed lavender hair had said. Cursed. Not to belong anywhere, to have to always look for the pieces of you left there, here, and in between, scattered. Always trying to connect them with what you have made while struggling to build a new life in a place that, at times, seems like galaxies away from what you once knew.

“A quilt of a life,” Persa mutters now, “A quilt of a life,” and somehow, that strikes her as funny, and she starts to laugh; “Cursed is the one with two homelands, indeed.”

“Excuse me?” Peter is concerned.

She straightens in her seat. I must look a fright, she thinks. “You look fine,” he will say without looking at her.

She is annoyed by the music and the announcers with the affected accents. How nice it would be if they kept driving until they sank in the endless mist of the never-ending horizon line. Until they disappeared from the map of their lives so carefully constructed with well-organized schedules and meetings and balanced checkbooks. Until they escaped airports, the house, the radio, and the broken dishwasher… Anonymous. Driving, just driving away into the night, staying in motels that look blue-gray in the morning mist of silent towns. Until they come face to face with the absurdity of their comfortable lives.

She turns to watch the rain outside the car window, squeezing the almost empty little bottle of her mother’s perfume, the only thing of hers Persa brought back to America. She kept it in her pocket and fingered it for the entire flight. Everyone came to the funeral, she thinks. But I wish they had stopped talking about what happened and questioning why Mama died so suddenly at sixty-two.

The rain has turned into a drizzle now. Still facing the unfolding treeline outside, Persa tries to suppress a sob, but her effort results in a funny noise that sounds like a prolonged burp. Her husband glances at her with a questioning look. Caring though he has always been, unlike the people from her homeland, he always froze when faced with raw emotion. She collects herself, swallows her tears, and remains silent.

Peter finally switches the radio off. Persa smiles at him. He is handsome, with regular features, even though his stomach has started to bulge under the button-down shirt. She never understood why he had always insisted on buttoning all his shirts up to the neck.

She reaches out and strokes the back of his head. He smiles. He is clean-shaven and meticulously manicured. He looks like he has just had a haircut. Between new important meetings, Persa thinks. The ones that always keep us preoccupied so we can afford to host lavish dinners and have drinks over the new kitchen island with polite people who discuss the merits of the stock market.

After they arrive at the house, Peter parks in the garage. He has remembered to turn on the yard lights, knowing how Persa likes to see the plants under the night sky when they come home from a night out. Once inside, he leaves her suitcase by the front door. “I am going to China Express to pick up dinner. Triple Delight then?” he asks softly. “You’re sure you’re gonna be alright?”

Persa nods yes. He is treating her like a child, and his overt civility is starting to bother her when all she wants is to lean on his chest and tell him stories about her mother who every morning washed her face with cold water and who dreamed of horses, wheat fields and water streams, and how Mama believed that if the water in the dream was clean and running free, it would be a good day and if it was muddy something terrible was going to happen. She wants to tell him about her mother’s funeral and the shock of her cold forehead when Persa bent over the coffin to kiss her. But she is too tired, and his hand is already on the door handle.

When he leaves, she hurries into the white sanctity of the bathroom, the one trimmed in imported Italian listello tile. Glad to be alone, she undresses slowly, freeing her body of its constraints, which require more and more support as the years and gravity have started to have their way with her. She fills the tub and arranges her clean robe and slippers next to it, doing it all with one hand since the other has refused to let go of the small bottle. Persa sinks into the scalding water that burns her skin. It feels like both punishment and salvation. Slowly, she opens her hand and stares at the little bottle, cut like a stylized flower. “Yasemi,” the curvy letters set against the faded golden background read on the front. “Yasemi,” Jasmin—the half-empty bottle of her mother’s treasured perfume.