“Just let the men fix things,” he said, pleased with himself as he walked ahead. Bilal signaled pleadingly not to respond. I held my tongue, not because of Bilal, but because of what Ghassan said next.

“It was just an electrical fire, not an explosion. Jumana shouldn’t have left that hot plate on,” he said.

Jumana immediately put her arm around me, whispering, “I leave that stupid thing on all the time.” I realized at that moment what the firemen had told Jumana and then gone around telling everyone else in town. The only “hot plate” was the depilatory wax warming pot that I used for clients. I was the one who had left it on. The fire was my fault. Jumana hadn’t told me, or Ghassan. I turned to her, mortified by my mistake, but her eyes told me not to say anything.

I went to bed that night preoccupied with how I was going to apologize and repent. I think it was the first time I had felt such a thing.

Ghassan was correct that the fire hadn’t damaged the building, but it destroyed enough to keep the brothers working every evening for a week while Jumana and I cleaned, painted, and repaired what could be salvaged. If there was a silver lining to the fire, it was the trust that formed between Jumana and me. It was my turn to apologize, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“If I blame anyone, and I don’t, it’s my brothers for faulty wiring,” she said.

The hours we spent washing soot from the walls, ceilings, floors, fixtures, and furniture were passed in a redemptive sisterhood. When we had cleaned as much as we could, we painted the walls, the frames of the newly installed front window and the front door, wide open to the springtime air, the radio playing the pop music of Nancy Ajram, Hayfa Wahbe, ‘Amr Diab, Sherine, and Ragheb Alama.

“Since you’re feeling guilty and need to atone, you can thread my eyebrows later,” she said.

“I thread your eyebrows anyway.”

“Yeah, but not after a day’s worth of scrubbing, hauling, sweeping, and painting at the salon.”

“The way you say that makes me feel like I need a raise.”

“You said you were trying to atone!”

“I didn’t say anything about atoning. I was just apologizing.”

A smirk crept onto her face as she flicked her paintbrush, flinging blue paint onto me. Stunned, but fast in my reflexes, I used my roller to paint a blue line from the side of her face down past her waist before she could react, running away, laughing and screaming.

“You did not think this through, girl,” I yelled, chasing her with my paint roller. She got a few more swings of paint at me, but her little paintbrush was no match for the long reach of my roller.