Chapter 8 Arezoo
AREZOO
The Saturday morning rush at the Pearl was in full swing, and the checkout line was long. Arezoo stood behind the register, scanning items and making small talk with customers, but her mind was churning with the conversation she'd been trying to gather the courage for.
Amanda had said she could pull together a beautiful wedding in just two weeks, and she could even commission a custom wedding dress for Arezoo that would be ready in time.
Not that Arezoo could afford anything custom.
She was perfectly fine with ordering a dress from a catalogue and making the alterations herself.
Ruvon would probably offer to pay for the wedding and the dress, but she didn't want him to do it.
She had no choice but to accept his offer to pay for the party but buying her the dress seemed like going too far.
Still, those were all negligible issues compared to the big elephant in the room, which was telling her mother that she didn't want to wait.
Arezoo suppressed a sigh as she handed a bag of pastries to Magnus, sent her regards to his wife, and wished him a good day.
Telling her mother was going to be a nightmare. She could imagine the hysterics, complete with hyperventilating and probably fainting.
Behind her, Parisa was restocking the prepared food section, muttering under her breath as she rearranged containers of dolmeh and koofteh.
"We can't keep up with the demand. These immortals keep buying the ready-to-eat things because they can't cook for themselves.
What's so difficult about cooking? You put ingredients in a pot, put it on the stove, and when it's ready, you eat. "
"And tomorrow we are catering the welcome party for Areana and the others from the island," Parisa added. "Most of the village will be there, and we still have mountains of prep work to do."
"Stop complaining," Yasmin said from where she was rearranging apples in neat piles. "Business is good, and we make more money on the prepared stuff than on anything else."
"I'm not complaining. I'm observing." Parisa shoved a container of ghormeh sabzi onto the shelf.
"It's just that no matter how much we make, it flies off the shelves.
Soon we will have to hire help in the kitchen, and you know how difficult it is to find anyone in the village who wants to do things of this nature. "
"After tomorrow, we can worry about hiring," Yasmin said. "Right now, we need to focus on the welcome party.”
"I'm waiting for those robots everyone is talking about to be ready so we can buy one." Arezoo's mother walked in with a new batch of baklava. "I'm even willing to take out a loan to buy a couple of those. They would do all the work for us."
"Can they make robots that replace husbands?" Rana sighed. "I would love to have one that is on when I need him and off when I want peace and quiet."
Parisa chuckled. "If they make them handsome and lifelike, no woman will ever agree to marry a real man again."
"What about children?" Yasmin asked.
"Well," Rana said. "There are solutions for that."
"Ladies," Soraya admonished. "You shouldn't be talking like that in front of a young maiden."
Arezoo rolled her eyes as her fingers flew over the register. She had no time for her family's silliness while a line of customers was waiting to be checked out.
The store was doing so well that it was becoming too small for their growing needs. A new, larger store was being built on the other side of the office building that would give them space to expand, and the debates about its completion timelines were a daily occurrence.
Her mother and her aunts loved to stop by the construction site and watch the progress.
To them, it was more than a dream come true; it was a lease on a new life, and they had gotten so invested in it that they all seemed to have forgotten about the need to find immortal males who could induce their transition.
They weren't getting any younger, and the older they got, the more difficult the transition to immortality would be, but none of them seemed to be ready for a new relationship.
They needed a matchmaker.
"Our new store will take at least another three months to be ready," Parisa said. "They are running behind schedule. I talked to one of the workers yesterday, and he said they're waiting on some special equipment."
"Since when do you speak Chinese?" Rana asked.
The construction crew was from China, and other than the supervisor, none of the men spoke anything other than Chinese.
They also didn't like women visiting the building site, but her aunts and mother were used to being dismissed because of their gender, and they ignored the nasty looks and murmured comments that they couldn't understand but could easily infer.
Parisa looked down her nose at Rana. "Don't you know that our phones can translate speech? You record something in your language and then replay it in any language you want. You can also record a conversation and then translate it."
"I think it's going to be ready in six weeks," her mother said.
The door chimed as another customer entered, and Arezoo pasted on her customer service smile, but her heart wasn't in it. It was too busy racing with anxiety over the conversation she needed to have with her mother.
She'd been putting it off for days. Every morning, she told herself that today would be the day. And every evening, she went to bed having failed to summon the courage.
But she couldn't keep waiting.
She wanted to be immortal. She wanted to spend eternity with Ruvon. And the only way to achieve both of those things was to have a very uncomfortable conversation with her mother.
"Next, please," she said automatically, then blinked when she realized there was no one in line. The morning rush had finally ebbed, leaving the store in a rare moment of calm.
It was now or never.
Arezoo took a deep breath. "Aunt Parisa, can you take over the register for a few minutes?"
Her aunt looked up from the shelf she was organizing. "Why? Where are you going?"
"I need to talk to Maman. In private."
Something in her tone must have conveyed the seriousness of the request, because Parisa's eyebrows rose. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine. I just need a moment."
Parisa exchanged a look with Yasmin, who had drifted closer, but she nodded and moved toward the register. "Go ahead. I've got it."
Arezoo found her mother in the converted walk-in closet that served as her office. She was so focused, so competent, so utterly intimidating despite being nearly a head shorter than her, and Arezoo's courage wavered.
But she'd come this far. She couldn't back down now.
"Maman, do you have a moment?" She wished the closet had a door she could close, but it had been removed because her mother hadn't wanted it. "I need to talk to you about something."
Her mother didn't look up from the tablet. "Can it wait until we get home this evening? The store is busy, and I need to start preparing things for the party tomorrow."
"The store isn't that busy right now, and Parisa is covering the register.
I just need a couple of minutes." Arezoo swallowed hard.
"I've been trying to gather the courage to have this conversation for days, and if I wait any longer, I'm going to lose my nerve completely. Please, Maman. It's important."
That got her mother's attention. She looked up, her dark eyes searching Arezoo's face. "Gathering courage? Am I that scary that you are afraid to talk to me?"
"Yes," Arezoo admitted. "You are."
Her mother's expression shifted to something that might have been hurt, quickly masked. She set the tablet down. "Very well. Let's talk."
"Not here. Can you come with me to the storage room? We'll have more privacy there."
Now her mother looked worried, but she nodded and got up from her chair. They walked into the storage room, weaving between boxes of dried goods and crates of produce. The space was cramped, but it smelled good, the familiar scents bringing back childhood memories.
Her mother closed the door behind them and crossed her arms. "What is this about?"
Arezoo's mouth went dry. She'd rehearsed this conversation a hundred times in her head, but now that the moment had arrived, all her carefully prepared words were nowhere to be found.
"I want to get married," she blurted out.
Her mother's eyebrows rose. "You're already engaged. The wedding is planned for—"
"I want to get married sooner. Much sooner." Arezoo forced herself to meet her mother's eyes. "I talked to Amanda, and she said she can put together a beautiful ceremony in just two weeks."
"Two weeks?" Her mother's voice rose an octave. "That's impossible. A proper wedding takes months to plan. The dress alone—"
"I don't need a fancy dress. I don't need anything elaborate. I just want to marry Ruvon as soon as possible."
Her mother stared at her, and Arezoo could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. The calculations. The suspicions.
"Why the rush?" Her mother asked in a tone that indicated she already suspected the answer. "What aren't you telling me?"
Here it came. The question Arezoo had been dreading.
"I'm not pregnant, Maman," she said quickly, before her mother could voice the accusation. "I know that's what you're thinking, and I'm not. Ruvon and I are waiting for the wedding."
Her mother's eyes narrowed. "If you're not pregnant, why do you need to get married in two weeks? Are you that eager to discover the pleasures of the flesh that you cannot wait?"
Arezoo hadn't expected her prim and proper mother to be so blunt.
Not with her, anyway, and her cheeks caught fire.
"It's not that." It was a big part of that.
"I just want to become immortal as soon as I can, and the only way to do that is to—" She felt her face flush.
"You know what's needed to induce the transition, and I would rather be married before that happens. "
The silence that followed was deafening.