Pouring the tea, I said, “Mama, you have to stop her. She’s awful.” “Sometimes I want to take her to Amman to live with her daughters, but it’s not right.” She lit the cigarette and sucked, closed her eyes, and lifted her chin with satisfaction, releasing a cloud of smoke from her mouth. “Your father, may God rest his soul, made me promise to care for his mother, no matter what.” Promises to the dead were sacrosanct.

My mother would stand up to Sitti Wasfiyeh when she wanted, but most of the time she just let things be. Unlike me, Mama was never one for drama, unless it involved someone hurting her children, which was why she once threatened her mother-in-law with a kitchen knife. I was maybe seven years old and had just come in to eat before going back out to play, but Mama insisted I stay in. “Besides,” she teased, “I think you might be getting too old to play with boys. They might think you’re sweet on them.”

I didn’t hear what Sitti Wasfiyeh said, but my mother went to the kitchen and came back with a knife. “By God and His Prophet, I will cut your tongue if you ever utter such a thing again.”

Later I asked her what Sitti Wasfiyeh had said. Mama shooed me away. “Mind your business and don’t meddle in grown-up affairs,” she said.

I stayed indoors that day thinking loud arguments would explode when my father returned from work, but when he arrived, Mama sent me to the neighbor’s next door. Whatever was going on, it had to do with me. There was something that I, in particular, could not know. Of course, knowing what I do now, Sitti Wasfiyeh probably brought up the rumor of my birth and said something like “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or worse.

According to Mama, Baba wasn’t much for housework. “I’m a man! What do you expect?” he’d say. But I know he wiped down our glass coffee table with Windex, which was fancier than using dish soap and indicated we were middle-class in the slums of Kuwait. “Yalla”—he’d motion for me to join him—“sing what you learned.”

I’d begin the Fattooma song by Ghawwar el-Tousheh. On weekend mornings when Mama went to the neighbor’s house for coffee, he’d teach me a few more lines of the lyrics, and I’d sing while he wiped down the coffee table. The Windex would form a rainbow across the glass, which amazed me. Baba said it was the magic of Windex. It only happened twice, but memory has somehow stretched it to the whole of my childhood, as if he and I sang and cleaned every day.

I wasn’t allowed to sing the Fattooma song around Mama.

“Why?” I asked Baba.

“She really hates this song, and we’d both be in trouble if she knew you sing it.”

I was torn between love for my father and loyalty to my mother. But I kept my mouth shut because that’s the kind of person I am. I also knew, without knowing that I knew, that Fattooma was probably his new girlfriend’s name, and that Mama knew it too.