I’m digitizing an archive. How cool and unique is that? An experience that only a few people will ever have. The kind I couldn’t even imagine when I was just a wife whose dreams stopped at the kitchen stove, piles of laundry, the dirty toilet bowl. It gets even better when I say it in Spanish — “Yo estoy convertir un archivo a digital.” Mexicans light up and thank me for preserving their patria, whatever that means. I need to remember to ask Nick for a translation. Anyway, for the first time in my life I’m remarkable to strangers in a good way, not because of my ungainly height and board-flat chest and crooked wandering eye. I’m a research assistant who’s digitizing an archive.

I just wish it wasn’t so boring. All I do is load a stack of yellowing pages into the scanner’s sheet feeder, press the SCAN button, and listen for the hissssssssss KA-CHUNK of another page scanned, another page loaded. Wash, rinse, repeat. I almost welcome paper jams and the occasional need to burn data to a DVD-ROM. Anything for a break from the monotony.

The best is whenever Nick calls to check in. His voice passes through me like an electric current. He updates me on the interviews he’s taping into an oral history of the Korea Textile maquiladora. He describes the view from his truck, so vividly that I feel like I’m seeing with his eyes. He talks lazily of kids with smiling faces and pickpocketing fingers, powerlines that sag with illegal hookups, vehicular near-disasters. “Only in Mexico, man!” he keeps laughing.

But this time it isn’t Nick ringing my cellphone. The number on the caller ID makes my heart stop. It’s a number that was mine until five years ago. The number I never gave to boys, since I wasn’t allowed to date. My parents’ number in East Los Angeles. “He–hello?” I manage to stammer.

“Nooshin. My daughter. I’ve missed you so.” Dad’s voice, as washed-out as the ghost he’s become. I haven’t spoken to him since the failed negotiations between our family and my in-laws, since Saman broke my nose and tried to kidnap me back to Kansas City. Maybe that’s why he chooses our mother tongue, speaking to me in Farsi. “Remember when I said that if Saman didn’t change his ways, he would prove he isn’t a faithful Muslim and you could divorce him?”

“I remember,” I say warily.

“That time has come. Not every marriage can last, as even God recognizes. Especially not when the husband abuses the wife.” His pause is full of remorse. “But this isn’t the way to end it. Come home and live under our roof. Before the scandal gets any worse.”

“What scandal? How I’m independent and living on my own?”

“You’re not independent and you’re not living on your own. That’s the scandal I’m talking about.” Dad sharpens with irritation. “You’re writing our good name in shit. And your reputation, too. How do you expect to remarry?”

“Remarry.” I blink at the documents materializing on the laptop’s screen. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I’m being serious. Making sure you’re married is part of my responsibility as a father. Marriage is the destiny of any godly woman, just as it’s the destiny of any godly man. And I can’t ensure your remarriage prospects unless you come home and live under our roof.”

“You already had your chance.”

“What do you mean?”

My anger can only be expressed in English. “You bought and sold me, Dad. My whole future for a $35,000 mahr. I’ll never forgive you for that!”

“You’ll address your father with proper respect!” he booms, and I hear him creak in his recliner. “Listen to me, Nooshin. You don’t understand the burdens of being responsible for the family. Your aunt Kohinoor had more medical bills than she could ever pay, and your sister needed to move into a new house — ”

“And Saman needed entry into America and a green card. It worked out for everyone except me!”

Suddenly my rage becomes an impossibly heavy thing in my head, blotting out thought, and I keel over. But there’s no danger in it, hardly any open floorspace to hit. I bounce into stillness on the queen-sized bed that doubles as a couch. My cellphone lays open in close proximity to a lingering wet spot from this morning. A minuscule voice is bleeding from the speaker. I prefer my father this way, shrunken into a harmless tinny noise.

Eventually he bellows loud enough to hear. “Nooshin! I said answer me!”

I scoop up the phone. “What?”

“I made the best match for you and the family that I could.” There’s a grasping tone to the words, as if my father is trying to hang onto his self-conviction. “You had a good marriage. Saman, he was a good husband.”

“He beat me up. And tried to kidnap me back to Kansas City,” I say with odd detachment. That happened to a long-ago Nooshin, the girl who inhabits the first of my photo albums.

“Saman wasn’t like that when he married you. America, it changed him. This country changes all of us.”

For a while there are only more recliner noises. He’s trying to find a comfortable position. I can picture him from childhood memories, a taciturn balding spindle of a man. He roiled in the Laz-E-Boy between the two jobs he worked, watching TV with eyes that seemed shut from the inside. Grandfather worried that his soul had gotten lost on the journey from Iran.

“This country has stolen you from me,” my father finally mumbles. “Even when you were little, I could see it happening.”

I can understand his words. Or the sentiment behind them, at least. Over the years it’s become a refrain where my family is concerned. But underneath is something that’s always been there, something I sense rather than understand. The sad chasm between us grew from it.

“But it’s not too late. The Qu’ran promises that it’s never too late. You can come back to me. To all of us,” he continues. “All you need to do is come home and live under our roof. Your mother and I are waiting for you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Listen to me. You’re living in mortal sin. You fornicate while still married — and with an infidel! This isn’t just a scandal against our family, this is a scandal against our religion. You’re choosing to offend God and every one of his 99 names!”

“I’m choosing to be me.” I test the dampness of the lingering wet spot with a fingertip. “I want you to know that I’m happy now. With Nick, here in Mexico.”

My father’s silence is stony.

I poke at him with my happiness, trying to provoke a reaction. “I’m working as his research assistant, digitizing an archive. We live in this tiny house by the border fence that I fixed up for us. A casita you call it in Spanish. He takes me all over Tijuana. There’s so much to see and experience here — ”

“Jendeh dagoori! Jendeh dagoori a koss-paareh!”

The epithet hits me worse than Saman’s fist to my face. My father just called me a cheap whore. A cheap whore with a torn pussy. Reeling, I listen to a torrent of vulgarities, the blistering condemnation of a stranger. Because my own father wouldn’t call me those things. He loves me, he’s always loved me, even if I speak crappy Farsi and crave my own paycheck and would rather visit Mexico than Iran. When I finally snap the cellphone shut, there’s another wet spot on the bed, caused by tears soaking into the mattress.