Mother-in-Law, 63, Bihać

My mother-in-law Zekija taught chemistry at the high school in Bihać for thirty years, and when she retired, she went on teaching at home. The shoes in the hallway stood in a row, heel to heel. Lunch was at two, not ten past two. Pita was rolled out by hand, because store-bought pastry sheets, in her opinion, were for women who respected neither themselves nor their guests. I have lived under her roof for seven years, ever since I married Elvis, and in seven years I never heard her praise anyone except her late husband, and him only on the anniversary.

I found out about the profile at the pharmacy, on my break. My coworker Enisa had divorced the year before, and since then every day at half past ten she opened an app called Second Spring, so that she could, as she put it, have a laugh. She scrolled through men holding carp and read me their descriptions out loud. "Oh look, there are women too," she said. "Zekija, sixty-three, Bihać. I like order, the Una, and people who are not late. I do not answer messages after ten." The picture showed a woman in a green headscarf, and along the edge of the photo you could see a shoulder in a dark suit. It was Elvis's shoulder. The picture had been cropped from my wedding.

"Do you know her?" Enisa asked. I said I did not and went back to the counter. That evening, at dinner, I watched my mother-in-law as if I were seeing her for the first time. Her phone lay beside her plate, screen down against the table, and it had never lain like that before. When she went to the bathroom, she took it with her. Elvis talked about some car payment and noticed nothing. Later, while he slept, I lay in the dark and remembered how my mother-in-law had told me, in the first year of my marriage, that a decent woman does not sit alone in cafés. Now, it seemed, she was sitting with someone.

On Thursday she announced physical therapy for her knee. She put on lipstick, the first time outside of Bajram since I had known her. My pharmacy looks out on the bank of the Una, and around half past four, when I went out to take some boxes to the storeroom, I saw her in the café garden across the street, under a linden tree, at a table with a tall man with a gray mustache. She was laughing. Not the short laugh she gave my cakes, but loudly, with her head thrown back, the way nobody in our house ever laughed.

In the evening Elvis asked where his mother had been all afternoon, because he had called the house and nobody had answered. My mother-in-law opened her mouth, but I got there first. "At physical therapy," I said. "I saw her coming out of the health center. She says her knee is better." It was my first lie in that house. My mother-in-law lowered her eyes to her plate and said nothing, but later, when I was washing the dishes, she picked up a towel and started drying the plates beside me, something she had not done once in seven years, because she believed I dried them the wrong way.

The next Saturday she needed to go to Ostrožac, and she told Elvis a friend from Cazin had invited her over. He offered to drive her. "I will," I said. "I have to get something in Cazin anyway." We drove in silence until Bihać was behind us, and then, looking out the window at the fields, she said, "You know." "I know." "Since when?" "Since last Wednesday." She was silent for a long time. "And what will you do now?" "Drive," I said.

Then she told me everything, the way she used to explain a lesson: in order, without a wasted word. His name is Husein, he is a retired surveyor, a widower from Cazin. He shows up half an hour early to every meeting and waits. She had made the profile herself, following instructions she read twice. She had used the wedding picture because it was the only one in which she was smiling. "I ruined all the others," she said. "When someone takes my picture, I remember I am supposed to look serious." I left her below the fortress in Ostrožac and spent two hours drinking coffee in the car, watching them walk along the walls and watching him carry her handbag.

That was how our alliance began. I covered for her twice more: once at a dentist she did not have, once at the house of our neighbor Hurija, who was at her daughter's in Germany that week. My mother-in-law stopped redoing the way I folded the towels. One evening, for no reason at all, she said that my store-bought pastry sheets made a perfectly good pita, and she left the kitchen at once, as if she were afraid I would ask her to say it again.

Then came the first Sunday of the month, and with it Aunt Đemka, the sister of Elvis's late father, who came to lunch on every first Sunday and left with news for the whole neighborhood. She waited until the pita. Then she put down her fork and said that her neighbor's daughter-in-law had seen Zekija in Ostrožac with some man, arm in arm. "And that is not all," she said, and took out her phone. "She is on the internet too. On one of those dating sites. With a picture from Elvis's wedding."

The table went as quiet as a classroom before a test. Elvis looked at the phone, then at his mother. "Mom?" My mother-in-law sat upright, a spoon in her hand, and for the first time since I had known her she had nothing to say. I saw her chin tremble. That was when I said something I had not planned. "I made her the profile." Everyone turned to me. "I chose the picture, I wrote the text, I set up her meetings, and I drove her. If someone should be ashamed, let them be ashamed of me."

"The daughter-in-law is marrying off the mother-in-law," said Aunt Đemka, as if she were reading a newspaper headline. "What will people say?" Elvis looked at me as if I were a woman he did not know. "You did this behind my back? With my mother?" I wanted to answer, but my mother-in-law set her spoon down on the table, slowly, the way she used to set down the chalk when a class had to fall silent.

"That is not true," she said. "Sit down, Samra. I made the profile. I read the instructions twice, like everything I have ever read. Samra only drove me and lied for me, and in seven years I never told a single lie for her, I only corrected her." She turned to the aunt. "Đemka, your brother died eleven years ago. I did not." Then to her son. "His name is Husein. He is coming for coffee on Thursday, at five. And do not be late from work, because he is never late."

Aunt Đemka left without coffee and without cake, something that had never happened in that house. Elvis went out to the riverbank and did not come back until after dark. He lay down beside me, stared at the ceiling for a long time, and then quietly asked what this Husein was like. "Punctual," I said. He thought about it for a moment. "Then they will get along," he said, and turned over onto his other side.

On Thursday, at twenty to five, my mother-in-law stood in front of the hallway mirror with two headscarves in her hands, a green one and a gray one. She turned to me and, for the first time in seven years, asked my opinion. "The green one," I said. She tied the green one. At five to five a gray car stopped outside the gate, and the man with the gray mustache stayed sitting in it, his hands on the wheel. My mother-in-law watched him through the curtain. "You see," she said, without turning around. "He came early, so he is waiting for it to be five." Elvis got up and went to open the gate.