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once, something inside me crumbled. My throat swelled. My face contracted. Up bubbled searing tears.
    Mina took me in her arms and held me. I released, crying into her shoulder. The comfort of her embrace felt like nothing I could remember.
    When the tears stopped, Mina used her sleeves to wipe my face dry.
    “Better?”
    I nodded. I did feel better.
    “If you hold it in, it stays in. And then all sorts of bad things can happen to you.”
    “Like what?”
    “The worst thing that can happen? If you hold on to the pain for too long, you start to think you are this pain.” Mina studied me for a moment. “Do you understand, behta? ”
    I nodded. What she was saying made sense to me.
    “And if you think you are this pain, it means you start to think that what you deserve is pain. Quran always says Allah is al-Rahim . Do you know what ‘ al-Rahim’ means?”
    I shook my head. For though I’d heard the words on Mother’s lips countless times, she’d never explained to me what they meant.
    “It means Allah is forgiving. He forgives us. And it means that we don’t deserve that pain we keep inside us. Allah loves us. He wants us to let it go…”
    I was losing the logic, and she could tell. She wiped again at my face with her sleeve, speaking now with a sudden bright tone: “Isn’t there something you want to do…other than watch me read my book?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Think about it.”
    “Think about what?”
    “If there’s something you want to do right now…”
    “I don’t know.”
    “When you don’t know what you want, there’s an easy way to find out.”
    “How?”
    “You make the small voice inside you speak.”
    I was perplexed.
    “I’ll show you. Close your eyes…”
    I did.
    “What are you hearing now?”
    “Your voice.”
    “What else?”
    I listened. There was the muffled hum of a car passing along the road outside. “A car outside,” I said.
    “What else?”
    I turned my head to one side, listening more deeply.
    “Do you hear something else?”
    “No.”
    “Your own breath, behta? Do you hear that?”
    I kept listening. I could hear it. Gentle and steady. Going in and out of me. I nodded.
    “Keep listening to your breath,” she said softly.
    I paid close attention, listening. I thought I heard something hollow inside me filling and emptying with a soft, dark sound.
    “Do you hear the silence, behta? ”
    “Silence?”
    “At the end of your breath. When you get to the end.”
    I breathed and listened. She was right. At the end of each inhale, each exhale, there was quiet. I nodded.
    “When you hear that silence, behta, just stay there. And then ask the question ‘What do I want to do?’ Just say that to yourself in the silence: ‘What do I want to do?’ ”
    I inhaled and exhaled, waiting for the silence at the end of my breath. It was a glowing quiet, bright and pulsing, alive.
    What do I want to do? I whispered to myself.
    And then I saw something: my red Schwinn Typhoon one-speed. Its bars were gleaming, clean as the day my parents had brought it home.
    My eyes shot open. “I want to wash my bike!” I exclaimed.
    “Good, behta. Go. Go and clean it. And then go for a ride. Enjoy yourself.”
    I bolted out the door and into the garage. I pulled my bike onto the driveway and filled a bucket with soap and water. I lathered down the bars and wheels, then doused it all with water from our garden hose. When I was done, my bike looked exactly as it had in my mind’s eye: red, bright, glistening.
    I hopped on and pedaled off. I was rapt. I’d completely forgotten about the ice cream social. And if the ride around the subdivision that followed was anything but routine, it wasn’t because of some new and remarkable encounter along the way, but because the satisfaction I’d felt cleaning my bike now developed as I rode. I was taken with the plainest pleasures: the blur of the speckled macadam passing beneath my wheels; the breeze in my face; the pressure of the pedals