Nick is running late on Wednesday afternoon. The telephone periodically rings with updates on his excruciating progress, delayed by traffic on I-5 over East LA and a pile-up at the I-5/I-405 interchange in Orange County and finally a motorcade of National Guard vehicles winding into Camp Pendleton. His frustrated voice is almost lost in the music swelling in the background — Mclusky, Velvet Revolver, Rage Against the Machine. I can picture him perfectly, jaw a clenched line of impatience, staring a hole through the windshield, cranking music that resonates with the violence in his heart. He is not a man who likes to wait.

Meanwhile I’m sitting on the living room couch, the foot tucked underneath me a dead limb, glancing out the window at the driveway, finishing Post Office by Charles Bukowski. The pages are raw with language that could be describing my pointless hamster wheel of a life, the way I was holding down my marriage like Bukowski holds down his lousy postal service job. I’m closing the novel by the time Nick finally arrives in a soundtrack of brakes and protesting springs.

My expectations die a quiet little death when he unfolds himself from the Explorer, an imposing figure who manages to look muscular even through his — sigh — baggies. He didn’t exactly dress up to meet my sister and her family. His Kangol hat is pulled low over his eyes, gangsta-style. A pale yellow front-button shirt is tucked messily into his beltless chinos. He’s wearing skateboarder Vans with fat laces, just like half the kids in the neighborhood.

I watch him sling his backback over a shoulder and retrieve a big cardboard box with KODAK printed on it, then stride up the driveway. I hobble to the front door on my still-sleeping leg, calling out “Nick’s here!” The townhome rustles into motion behind me.

“Heya. Sorry I got so fucking delayed. I hope I didn’t screw up your day.” He hovers in the doorway, smiling tightly at me. At least he shaved, if only around his panhandle sideburns and the royale beneath his bottom lip.

Farid is the first to arrive in the foyer, a lumbering swarthy bear of a man with arms outstretched. “Here, let me take that for you,” he says, wrestling the cardboard box away from Nick. “Come in, come in.” Somehow he manages to balance the box on a fat uplifted thigh and shake hands.

Standing behind is Nasrin, aloof and disapproving. Her rib-knit dress flares in all the right places and her hijab is pulled back slightly, revealing a lustrous fringe of dark hair. She makes no attempt to introduce herself to Nick or even welcome him. My niece and nephew cling shyly to her legs.

In the guest bedroom where I live Nick is all business, pulling a laptop out of his backpack and extricating a scanner from the cardboard box. The laptop is a loaner from UCLA with a threatening orange security sticker on top. He mates it to the scanner, a flatbed with a big feeder tray attached. “This puppy does about 10 pages per minute,” he tells me, nodding at the laptop screen, showing me how documents fill in from top to bottom, one after another. Then he dumps several manuals on my bed and suggests I call the UCLA IT helpdesk if I need technical assistance.

I’m a couple steps behind, wondering about those 10 pages per minute. “If the archive has 100,000 documents in it, that means I’ll be done scanning everything within a couple months, right?” I start to get caught up in the math. “10 pages per minute is, um, 600 pages per hour, and if I’m working eight hours a day — ”

“Two things to keep in mind,” Nick interrupts. “First, there’s no way you’ll average 10 pages per minute. There’ll be paper jams, you’ll have to adjust the settings and re-scan documents, crap like that. I’m guessing it’ll take more like six months to get the archive digitized.”

“And what’s the second thing?”

“There’ll be lots of other projects. Other documents to digitize, grant applications to write for me, stuff I’ll want you to research. Enough to keep you busy all year, if you want.” He pauses for emphasis. “Of course, hopefully you’ll find something better in a couple months.”

We’ve had this conversation before. Nick keeps reminding me that I’m an independent contractor. My only commitment to him is as much — or as little — of my time as I want to give. Otherwise I’m free to quit, or get another job and keep working for him on the side. A girl can’t survive on his $9 an hour, not in costly southern California.

His stoic profile is glancing around the bedroom, taking in the empty walls, the bookshelf filled with books that don’t belong to me, the open closet with only a few outfits and pairs of shoes inside. “Home sweet home, huh?”

I don’t know what to say. “I guess so.”

“It’d be cheaper if you got a digital camera, you know. Instead of wasting film on that thing.”

He’s talking about my antique Polaroid camera. It sits on the floor in a corner, on top of the photo album that contains my adult life. A photo album suddenly bulging with snapshots. More has happened to me in one month with Nick than five years with Saman.

“I like that camera,” I say in quiet defiance. I bought it at the flea market in Kansas City, an impulse purchase when I felt sorry for a mournful woman selling junky trinkets like they were pieces of her life. Nick was the reason I was at the stupid flea market in the first place, tagging along with my mother-in-law so I could find a pay phone to call him, since Saman had canceled my cellphone.

He sits down next to me on the bed, almost tipping me into him. It’s not a very good mattress. His eyes are more bloodshot than icy, the toll of his tireless preparation for Mexico.

I grope underneath the pillow for the Christmas card I’m hiding from Nasrin, a tagboard snowman decorated with scraps of sewing materials — black felt stovepipe hat, plaid shred of a scarf, orphaned buttons trickling down his front. My voice tries to run away when I offer the card to Nick. “Here. I made you something for Christmas.”

He admires the card long enough to make me blush. “Wow. This is really cool. You make this yourself? I especially like the way you did his arms, like they’re twigs — that’s pipecleaner, right?” Then he flips it open, the snowman pivoting on velvet ribbon bindings. A smirk twists his handsome face. “I’m your buddy, huh?”

I try to reach over and close the card. “You can look at the outside some more if you want.”

“Oh no. I think I’m gonna read the inside again. Because I’m your ‘buddy’.” He says it making little quotation marks with his fingers, laughing at me.

“Nick…”

“Your best bud? Or just one buddy among many?”

“At least I didn’t call you my dawg.” Now he’s got me giggling too. “Seriously, what was I supposed to call you? My hiking guide? My boss?”

The labeling dilemma plunges Nick into silence. The obvious answer — we’re friends, nothing more and nothing less — doesn’t escape his pursed lips. Eventually he considers my card again, riding up and down on his pistoning knee. “Is this why Nasrin is pissed at me? Because you’re making me Christmas cards? Or is there more to it?”

I sag inside my skin. “Shhhh, not so loud.”

He glances at me sideways, lowering his voice. “Now I understand why you always wanted to meet at McDonald’s.”

“It’s not you. It’s me. My family kind of hates me right now.”

“Kind of?” Nick snorts in grim amusement. “Why do they kind of hate you? For leaving Saman?”

The conversation is making me paranoid. I can imagine Nasrin eavesdropping through the thin walls, through the vents, hating me more with every word. I turn on the only music I have — the clock radio, since my old boombox was abandoned back in Kansas City. The hyperventilating tones of a used-car commercial seep out of the speaker.

“Don’t worry,” Nick is saying, reading the distress in my face. “You’ll get out of here soon enough. There’s nothing like a little distance when it comes to family. Trust me.”

“I hope you’re right about that.” My gaze slides into my lap, where my hands are tightening around the calf tucked underneath me.

“Hey. I forgot something in my truck. A bunch of documents that I want you to scan. Don’t worry, I already made copies in case the scanner eats them.” His weight vanishes from the bed so suddenly that I almost tip over in the opposite direction.

He fixes a steely smile in place and walks through the door. Voices go silent in the family room with his passage, then start up again. I reach over and turn off the clock radio’s noise and stare at the foot of the bed, at the laptop in sleep mode and the scanner blinking, at the Christmas card I made for Nick without even really knowing why.

I reread what I wrote:

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year! Thanks for being my buddy, Nooshin

The words are vapid. Meaningless. Everything I didn’t want them to be.

I grab a pen and start scribbling on the blank half of the card’s interior, tiny lines that squish into the snowman’s body, an accidental stream-of-consciousness poem:

In the middle of the ocean
a girl found herself weary in the waves
and drowning, maybe
a sunset guttering behind her
and the horizon an empty and darkening arc

I wake into tears
and the dream hovers in emulsion
reflecting me back to myself
a plaintive upturned face
lost behind the rise of rhythmic swells
that flare crimson in the dusk
then ebb into darkness until she appears again

I’m not afraid of the night
or the ocean that may never end
or even drowning, because we all tire and sink

I’m not afraid