Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Page A

masgouf here.”
    “Okay, and—” I started but he interrupted me.
    “Are you a critic? I can make you masgouf. You want masgouf? Do you have funding?”
    “No,” I said. “Sorry.”
    He said, “I’m sorry too. Have a happy holiday.”
    It wasn’t a holiday as far as I knew but he hung up before I could ask him about it.
    Chowhound turned up nothing on masgouf. Neither did MenuPages. I searched through Indian and Turkish restaurants. I called the Syrian guy back and asked him if he knew of any Iraqi restaurants in Manhattan and he said, “First, you want Iraqi dish. Now you want Iraqi restaurant. We’re Syrian! What can we do about it?”
    I said sorry and hung up for the second time.
    I went back into the apartment.
    Lou walked into the living room with her blouse on inside out. I was about to tell her when she put a finger over her lips, telling me to shush. She pointed to my sleeping mother. She put on her coat and rustled her keys. On her way out, she let the door slam. She opened it again.
    “Sorry, Nance,” she half whispered and blew my mother a kiss.
    Oh, and T.G.I.F.,
she mouthed to me before it occurred to her that I hadn’t left for school, and then she remembered what had happened yesterday. When she did, she threw her hands up as if to say that we’d once been on the same team and I’d deserted her. But we hadn’t been. Ever.
     
    I learned online that the previous month, the restaurant in Baghdad with the best masgouf had been blown up by a car bomb. It killed thirty-five people. There was a photo of a little boy crouching next to a corpse. His knees were wide, like he was about to jump up for leapfrog. His hair was still parted perfectly like little boys’ hair can be only when their mothers spend extra time. His hands were wrapped around the dead man’s feet, covered in blood like water-soaked oven mitts.
    I closed the screen.
    I couldn’t look at other people’s blood. Only mine.
     
    It was nearly noon when I decided I’d done all the research that I could possibly do at home—and I was no closer to finding the masgouf. For a moment, I wondered if somehow my mother was tricking me, trying to distract me. There might be no restaurant at all, no sacred recipe. This was all just to keep me busy and out of her way until I was sent to boarding school. You could never be sure with my mother. I wouldn’t give up so easily.
    I put my hair up and down and up and down four times before I managed to get out the door and to the bookstore. I wasn’t usually so fussy, but I was thinking of Blot. Finally, I braided it tight the way that my dad used to like and then took it out a short while later so it was crimpy. I brushed my teeth and flossed and used the tongue scraper even though it wasn’t like I was planning on kissing him. Not even a little.
    Before I left, I told my mother I was going out. She was lying on her back on the couch and she flipped her head toward me. It was like an oven opening, the sudden gush of flushed light. Ever since I was a child, I’d wanted to savor that exact moment when I was leaving, the brief second in which she looked at me, acknowledging that tiny bit of mystery in my departure,
my
leaving
her,
for a change, the possibility that I might not come back. It had always seemed to me that I might never see her again—even when I was with her, it felt constantly like she was just coming or going.
     
    Of course, I’d probably do better at the library, find out more, but Blot didn’t work at a library.
    At the bookstore, I collected three books: one on Middle Eastern cuisine, one on favorite fish dishes of Manhattan, and one with two hundred applications for watercress. My mother loved watercress.
    It was quieter than usual even for a Friday. There was a reading going on in the children’s section. The mothers were bouncing their legs. Strollers were positioned in a line. I slunk around the store as if I might get in trouble for being school age and not in