“Why? Why don’t you want to see me anymore? Are you going to take care of another little girl?” Her forehead is all wrinkled up, just like when her mama fuss at her. Law, I feel like my heart’s gone bleed to death. I take her face in my hands, feeling the scary heat coming off her cheeks. 

“No, baby, that’s not the reason. I don’t want a leave you, but . . .” How do I put this? I can’t tell her I’m fired, I don’t want her to blame her mama and make it worse between em. “It’s time for me to retire. You my last little girl,” I say, because this is the truth, it just ain’t by my own choosing. I let her cry a minute on my chest and then I take her face into my hands again. I take a deep breath and I tell her to do the same. “Baby Girl,” I say. “I need you to remember everthing I told you. Do you remember what I told you?” She still crying steady, but the hiccups is gone. 

“To wipe my bottom good when I’m done?” 

“No, baby, the other. About what you are.” I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. A flash from the future. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full-grown woman. And then she say it, just like I need her to. 

“You is kind,” she say, “you is smart. You is important.” 

“Oh Law.” I hug her hot little body to me. I feel like she done just given me a gift. “Thank you, Baby Girl.”

“You’re welcome,” she say, like I taught her to. But then she lay her head on my shoulder and we cry like that awhile, until Miss Leefolt come into the kitchen.

Aibileen takes a long sip of her tea. Finally I look at her. “What you so quiet for? I know you got a opinion bout all this.”

“You gone accuse me a philosophizing.”

“Go ahead,” I say. “I ain’t afraid a no philosophy.”

“It ain’t true.”

“Say what?”

“You talking about something that don’t exist.”

I shake my head at my friend. “Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn.”

Aibileen shakes her head. “I used to believe in em. I don’t anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they

there. But they ain’t.”

“I know they there cause you get punished for crossing em,” I say. “Least I do.”

“Lot a folks think if you talk back to you husband, you crossed the line. And that justifies punishment. You believe in that line?”

I scowl down at the table. “You know I ain’t studying no line like that.”

“Cause that line ain’t there. Except in Leroy’s head. Lines between black and white ain’t there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And

that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too.”

Thinking about Miss Celia coming out with that fire poker when she could’ve hid behind the door, I don’t know. I get a twinge. I want her to understand how

it is with Miss Hilly. But how do you tell a fool like her?

“So you saying they ain’t no line between the help and the boss either?”

Aibileen shakes her head. “They’s just positions, like on a checkerboard. Who work for who don’t mean nothing.”

“So I ain’t crossing no line if I tell Miss Celia the truth, that she ain’t good enough for Hilly?” I pick my cup up. I’m trying hard to get this, but my cut’s

thumping against my brain. “But wait, if I tell her Miss Hilly’s out a her league . . . then ain’t I saying they is a line?”

Aibileen laughs. She pats my hand. “All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”

smooth skin just above her left jawline. She walked to a dull gray van two aisles 

away and puts the thermos inside. Her hair spilled to one side when she kneeled amid boxes of old records and paperbacks. 

"My daughter, Soraya jan," General Taheri said. He took a deep breath like a man eager to change the subject and checked his gold pocket watch. "Well, time to go and set up." He and Baba kissed on the cheek and he shook my hand with both of his." Best of luck with the writing." he said, looking me in the eye. His pale blue eyes revealed nothing of the thoughts behind them.

For the rest of that day, I fought the urge to look toward the gray van.

IT CAME TO ME on our way home. Taheri, I knew I'd heard that name before. 

"Wasn't there some story floating around about Taheri's daughter?" I said to Baba, trying to sound casual.

"You know me," Baba said, inching the bus along the queue exiting the flea market. "Talk turns to gossip and I walk away."

"But there was, wasn't there?" I said.

"Why do you ask?" He was looking at me coyly.

I shrugged and fought back a smile. " Just curious, Baba."

"Really? Is that all?" he said, his eyes playful, lingering on mine. "Has she made an impression on you?"

I rolled my eyes. "Please, Baba."

He smiled, and swung the bus out of the flea market. We headed for Highway 680. We drove in silence for a while. "All I've heard is that there was a man once and things... didn't go well." He said this gravely, like he'd disclosed to me that she had breast cancer.

"I hear that she is a decent girl, hardworking and kind. But no khastegars, no suitors, have knocked on the general’s door since.” Baba signed. “It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes not even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir,” he said. 

LYING AWAKE IN BED that night, I thought of Soraya Taheri’s sickle-shaped birthmark, her gently hooked nse, and the way her luminous eyes had fleetingly held mine. My heart stuttered at the thought of her. Soraya Taheri. My Swap Meet Princess.

Assef snickered. “He sounds like my mother, and she’s German; she should know better. But then they want you to believe that, don’t they? They don’t want you to know the truth.”

I didn’t know who “they” were, or what truth they were hiding, and I didn’t want to find out. I wished I hadn’t said anything. I wished again I’d look up and see Baba coming up the hill.

“But you have to read books they don’t give out in school,” Assef said. “I have. And my eyes have been opened. Now I have a vision, and I’m going to share it with our new president. Do you know what it is?

I shook my head. He’d tell me anyway; Assef always answered his own questions.

His blue eyes flicked to Hassan. “Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood.” He made a sweeping, grandiose gesture with his hands. “Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. That’s my vision.”

Assef shifted his gaze to me again. He looked like someone coming out of a good dream. “Too late for Hitler,” he said. “But not for us.”

He reached for something from the back pocket of his jeans. "I{ll ask the president to do what the king didn't have the quwat to do. To rid Afghanistan of all the dirty, Kasseef Hazaras."

"Just let us go, Assef," I said, hating the way my voice trembled. "We're not bothering you."

"Oh, you're bothering me," Assef said. And I saw with a sinking heart what he had fished out of his pocket. Of course. His stainless-steel brass knuckles sparkled in the sun. "You're bothering me very much. In fact, you bother me more than this Hazara here. How can you talk to him, play with him, let him touch you?" he said, his voice dripping with disgust. Wali and Kamal nodded and grunted in agreement. Assef narrowed his eyes. Shook his head. When he spoke again, he sounded as baffled as he looked. "How can you call him your 'friend'?"