“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.

Sabah and I left Sitti Wasfiyeh to her daily phone calls to her daughters, her Quran reading, and visits with the neighbors. We chatted in the kitchen while we put the food away and washed dishes. She hadn’t married the boy she loved, but a suitor who was a better practical match. Her family had been left penniless and unemployed, as we all had been when Kuwait kicked us out. Her marriage pulled them back from the brink of destitution.

“He’s very generous and kind,” Sabah said. They’d fallen in love after marriage, but she admitted it didn’t feel as gratifying as she thought it would.

“No man is ever as gratifying as we think he will be,” I quipped, and she laughed, the two of us standing shoulder to shoulder over the sink, she washing while I rinsed.