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black man, it’s mentioned in the first breath: “An African American man was arrested today …” But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he’s of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.
    Then Zeitoun would quote the Qur’an.
    Be one who is staunch in equity,
witnesses for God
even against yourselves
or ones who are your parents or nearest of kin;
whether rich or poor,
for God is closer to both than you are;
so follow not your desires
that you become unbalanced;
and if you distort or turn aside,
then truly God is aware of what you do
.
    Kathy was astonished at how well he knew the book, and how quickly he could quote a passage appropriate for any occasion. Still, though, these monologues at dinner? It was good for the kids to have some awareness of such prejudices, but to see Zeitoun disappointed, to get him so worked up after a long day—it wasn’t worth it. In the end, though, Zeitoun could laugh this kind of thing off, but the one thing he could not abide was a client raising their voice to Kathy.
    There had been one client, a young woman married to a doctor. She was thin, pretty, immaculately put together. She had not set off any alarm bells when Zeitoun had provided an estimate and begun work on painting her stairway and guest bedroom. She told him that she and her husband were expecting houseguests, and she wanted the stairway and guest room painted in five days’ time. Zeitoun said the timetable would be tight, but would present no problems on his end. She was thrilled. No other painter had been able to commit to such a deadline.
    Zeitoun sent a crew of three over the next day. The client, seeing the quick and efficient work Zeitoun’s team was doing, asked him if they could paint her husband’s office and her daughter’s bedroom, too. He saidthey could. He sent more painters to the house, and she continued to add rooms and jobs—including re-tiling and painting a bathroom—and Zeitoun’s men continued to execute the work quickly.
    But not quickly enough. On the third day, Kathy phoned Zeitoun, near tears. The woman had called Kathy four times in rapid succession, cursing and carrying on. The house wasn’t ready, the client had screamed, and her guests were coming in less than two days. Kathy had told her that Zeitoun’s crew had finished the original work on the guest room in plenty of time. But this wasn’t what the client wanted. She wanted everything—all seven rooms and their myriad tasks—done in five days. She wanted three times the work done in the same amount of time.
    Kathy had tried to reason with her. She and Zeitoun had never promised that he could finish all of the additional work in five days. That schedule was irrational; no one, not even Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC, could complete the work on that timetable. But the client was beyond reason. She barked at Kathy, hanging up, calling again, hanging up. She was loud, condescending, and cruel.
    Kathy, in tears, reached Zeitoun on his cell phone while he was driving to a job on the other side of the city. Even before they hung up, he had turned his truck around and was barreling to the client’s house as fast as was legal. When he got there, he walked calmly into the house and told his crew they were leaving. In the space of ten minutes, they packed their paint, ladders, brushes, and tarps, and loaded them into the bed of Zeitoun’s truck.
    As Zeitoun was backing out, the client’s husband ran out to the truck. What’s wrong? he asked. What happened? Zeitoun was so angry he could barely think of the words in English. It was better, in fact, that he did not speak. He waited a few seconds to say only that no one talkedthat way to his wife, that he was leaving the job, that this was over and good luck.
    When he arrived at the tangerine-bathroom house, he called Kathy to run through the prices for the materials they’d need. Looking around the