Chapter 1 — It’s Fine

Before seven in the morning, the words it’s fine have already left my mouth nine times.

I count them with my thumb, one knuckle joint at a time. It is an old habit from my office days. Whenever there is too much to manage at once, count something small so your head has something solid to hold on to.

One. At five-twenty, Leo’s mattress is wet, and he stands beside the bed wearing the face of a prisoner awaiting sentencing. “It’s fine, sweetheart. Little kids have accidents.”

Two. Nina loses her left sock. She looks under the sofa, inside her shoes, and in places where a sock could never possibly exist, then stares at me as though I hid it myself. “Just wear the white pair. It’s fine.”

Three. Mother is already sitting at the dining table before I finish loading the wet bedsheets into the washing machine. Mother is Adam’s mother, sixty-six years old, who has lived in the back bedroom ever since Father passed away five years ago. She holds her spoon the way a detective holds a piece of forensic evidence. “Last night’s sauce wasn’t sour enough, Sel.”

“It’s fine, Mom. I’ll squeeze more lime into it later.”

Four. Adam hunts for his car keys while swallowing a piece of toast. He is a good man. I need to write that down early, before anyone gets the wrong idea. Adam is good. “I fell straight asleep last night and didn’t help you clean up. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.”

Five, six. Leo knocks his milk glass over onto Nina’s school communication book, and Nina shrieks as if the roof is on fire. I blot the pages with kitchen paper towels, blow on the damp ink, and tell both of them that it’s fine. Nina refuses to go to school with a warped notebook. Her teacher will understand, I tell her. Whether her teacher will actually understand, nobody knows. All I know is that those two words can quiet two children at the same time.

Seven. At six-fifteen, Adam kisses the side of my forehead with his work bag already slung over his shoulder. “Get some rest today if you have time.”

If I have time. As if rest is a peddler’s cart that occasionally rolls past the house, and my only job is to stand by the front gate at the right minute.

“Sure. It’s fine.”

Eight, nine. Mr. Omar, the traveling vegetable vendor who stops his cart outside our gate at six-forty, announces that chili prices have climbed again. My head nods. He asks whether I still want a hundred grams. It’s fine, just a hundred grams.

Standing by the iron gate with a small plastic bag of chilies in my hand, I realize for the first time that I didn’t say a single one of those nine sentences because anything was actually fine.

I simply don’t have another sentence to use.

At seven-twenty, I drive Nina and Leo to school in our small hatchback, whose left passenger door only opens if you bump it with your knee. Leo hops out at kindergarten at seven-thirty, and Nina gets dropped off at elementary school at seven-forty. Outside the school gates, the mothers stand in small clusters. I can tell each woman apart by the way she holds her child’s backpack. Tightly, loosely, half-distracted, or without noticing she is holding it at all.

My name here is Nina’s Mom. In the Class 3B parents’ chat group, my name is saved that way too. There are forty-seven members in the group, and I am the one who answers questions most often, from which page today’s math homework is on to how much the workbook fee costs. I don’t mind doing it. I am genuinely good at keeping track of details. Years ago I worked in the accounting department of a distribution company, and eleven years ago a manager called me the most reliable person on this floor. I still keep that sentence folded inside my head like an old receipt.

At eight-ten, I get back home. Wash the breakfast dishes. Hang the laundry out in the sun. Iron four of Adam’s work shirts. Mother watches her morning drama in the living room with the television volume turned up loud enough that I can follow the plot from the ironing board without looking at the screen. Cook lunch at eleven. Mop the tile floors at one. Pick up Leo at three and answer twenty-seven questions on the drive home. Pick up Nina at four and listen to a detailed report about a classmate who owns a hamster. Bathe both kids at five. Warm up the side dishes at six. At seven, Leo bursts into tears because he refuses to eat his carrots, and I tell him alright, it’s fine, leave the carrots on the plate.

Adam gets home at seven-forty in the evening. His face is slate grey, the exact shade of the warehouse walls where he supervises twenty-two men moving cardboard boxes from one steel rack to another. He takes off his shoes by the front door, greets Mother, ruffles Leo’s hair, and sits down at the dining table with his phone in his hand.

“Exhausted today,” he says.

“Eat first.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I’ll eat in a bit.”

He nods and starts eating. He tells me about a broken forklift and a regional manager who changed the shipping schedule without warning. I listen, the way I always do. Every few minutes I ask which manager it was, whether Adam managed to eat lunch on time, whether his lower back is still acting up. The questions come out on their own without needing to be summoned.

When he last asked me a question back whose answer wasn’t yes or no, I cannot remember.

That isn’t an accusation. I am simply noting it down.

At nine-forty at night, the kitchen finally goes quiet.

The children are asleep. Mother has gone into the back bedroom and pulled her door shut with a soft click, her nightly signal that she is finished with the day. Adam is stretched out on the living room sofa watching a soccer match through half-closed eyelids. I have wiped down the stove and stacked the dry plates on the rack. Only one chore remains, scrubbing the inner pot of the rice cooker.

I lift the aluminum pot out. Wait, the appliance is still plugged in, with a tiny orange indicator light glowing on the front panel. Underneath the bulb, the printed letters have faded at the edges. Warm.

I stand there holding the sponge.

I don’t know how long I stand like that. A minute, maybe longer. That small orange light glows steadily without asking for anything. It never gets tired. It never waits to be thanked. It simply keeps the rice warm for people who might get hungry again later.

Then I start crying.

The tears come quietly. There is no reason for them. No bad news in the mail, no one raising a voice at me, no call from a hospital. Tears simply drop onto the dishcloth in my hand, one, two, and then too many to count on my thumb. I squeeze my eyes shut and search for the cause, the exact way I searched for Nina’s missing sock this morning. Under the sofa, inside the shoes, in all the places where reasons are supposed to be kept.

There is nothing there.

Adam is a good husband. Mother, on most days, means well. The kids are healthy. This house has a tight roof, working electricity, and a mortgage that gets paid on time every month. Nothing is wrong. And precisely because nothing is wrong, I have no opening line. If something were broken, I could point to it. He did this. They said that. How do you explain to another adult that you are standing in the kitchen crying over a rice cooker because its indicator light looks too much like your own life? Warm, switched on, and permanently ready.

With wet cheeks, I wash the inner pot, dry it with a clean towel, and set it back inside the machine. The orange light is still glowing, and I can’t even bring myself to resent it.

The bathroom is the only room in this house with a working lock.

I pull the door shut, turn the thumb latch, and twist the sink faucet open until the water rushes loudly into the basin. It is an old trick. Whenever Nina gets caught crying, she does the exact same thing, and I pretend not to notice. I sit down on the rim of the bathtub with my phone in my hand.

WhatsApp has a feature that lets you send messages to your own number. Up until tonight, I have only used it for grocery lists, package tracking numbers, and photos of the pediatrician’s dosage notes. Never once for a voice note.

I press down on the microphone icon and slide it up so it locks in place and leaves my hands free. The little red dot blinks. The seconds begin counting up.

“Hello,” I say. My voice sounds strange bouncing off the bathroom tiles. “It’s me.”

A pause.

“I didn’t know who else to talk to, so I’m talking to this thing. A minute ago I was crying in front of the rice cooker. Nothing happened. The rice was done, the light was on Warm, and I just started crying. Weird, right?”

The faucet keeps running.

“Adam is good to me. Mother is fine too, mostly. The kids are healthy. Nothing is wrong. That’s the whole problem. If something were wrong, I could say it out loud. I miss… I don’t even know who I miss. Myself, maybe. God, that sounds ridiculous. Delete this, delete it.”

My laugh breaks in the middle.

“Anyway, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

I tap the stop button. The audio waveform is fifty-two seconds long. I haven’t decided yet whether to play it back or trash it. Both options feel embarrassing. Maybe it makes more sense to leave it there until tomorrow morning, when I can laugh at myself in daylight.

Right then, my phone vibrates in my palm. A new message arrives in another chat, and the conversation list on the screen shifts down by one row.

My thumb taps the send arrow.

The exact same thumb that counted nine it’s fines before seven this morning taps send inside a window I thought was my own private chat.

A tiny sound plays from the speaker. Swoosh, followed by a checkmark.

I lower the phone closer to my face and read the banner across the top of the screen.

Class 3B Parents Group (47).

Right at the bottom sits a grey audio bubble holding fifty-two seconds of my life.

The sink faucet is still running.