I had not understood until then how humiliated my mother had felt by her life. The simple dignity of a “desk job,” as she called it, had transformed her. I should have said it again, that her embroidery was more special than any “desk job” could be; that she was an artist; that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured. Instead, I just congratulated her. She added, “They’re also training me to use a computer soon. Can you believe it?”

Sabah came the next morning, bearing gifts of food—dates, mangoes, pomegranates, and vegetables that she raised in pots on her balcony. “Look how red it is. Wait until you taste it. I got the seeds from family in Palestine,” she said, holding up a tomato. “Let’s make breakfast. There’s so much to catch up on.” She removed her hijab in the kitchen and started peeling cucumbers. I put on the kettle and got a pan to fry eggs.

“You still don’t use enough oil, girl,” Sabah said, shaking her head. “And you know you shouldn’t waste good olive oil on frying.”

“You want me to use that American Mazola piss?”

Sabah laughed. “A few months in Palestine and you’re sounding like an old peasant.”

We set out a tray of food for ourselves and Sitti Wasfiyeh, who had awoken hours before me to perform the dawn salat and had been reading the Quran in her usual spot on a floor cushion. She hated sofas and refused to sit on them. “Frangie stupidity,” she would say about most things Western. Our sofas were basically backrests for our floor cushions.

Sabah and I laid out the eggs, warmed bread, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, za’atar, olive oil, labneh, pomegranate, and scalding-hot sweet tea with sage, which we sipped loudly, with exaggerated care, from Arab demitasses.

“I like tea with sage in the winter. Mint in summer,” Sitti said. “This is good tea.”

“May you drink it in health and joy, Hajjeh,” Sabah said.

And Sitti responded, “May God bring enduring joy to you and your child. And may He bring my granddaughter a husband as good as yours.”

“There’s my grandmother!” I said, glad for the familiarity of her insinuations.

“What?” she protested. “I’m just praying for you to get a husband. I don’t know if it’s even possible anymore at your age. Shame you didn’t even have a child.”

I had learned what Mama knew: to be defensive with Sitti Wasfiyeh was silly, because she wasn’t actually trying to be mean. It’s just who she was. “Take a bite from my hand, my beloved grandmother,” I said, extending a bit of bread with labneh and za’atar.

“May God never deny me these sweet hands of my granddaughter,” she said, eating from my hand.