I’ll never forget her reaction. Her lips widened more than seemed possible, expanding over large teeth with a prominent gap that was off center from her nose, and she laughed—a frightening, high-pitched cackle. “Oh, darling! A whole part of Kuwait comes alive only after midnight,” she said. I must have recoiled, because she closed her enormous mouth and stopped laughing.

“Here, take my pager number in case you change your mind.” She handed me a card. It surprised me she had a pager. Only doctors and businesspeople used them. I thought maybe she was someone important, and that changed my attitude. I accepted the card with gratitude and gave her my home number.

“Why’s an old woman giving you her pager number? It’s weird,” Sabah said, watching Um Buraq walk away.

Going to that wedding got me out of the house and finally helped me create a new rhythm in my life. Or rather, I just reverted to the way things were before my brief marriage, as if it had never happened. I stayed in our marital apartment as long as I could, pretending Mhammad was away on business whenever the landlord came to collect the rent, trying to hold out as long as I could in case he decided to return, or at least send money. After two months the landlord’s wife told me the whole building knew my husband had walked out on me and said I had better pay up or be hauled out by the police.

Mama and I went with Um Naseem, Mhammad’s aunt, to withdraw money from the joint account they had set up for our wedding, only to find that Mhammad had emptied it months ago. He left me nothing. Um Naseem was deeply apologetic and gave me a few hundred dinars, which I knew she couldn’t afford. Then Hajjeh Um Mhammad, my mother-in-law, called me from Palestine. She cried through the phone and promised to help me however she could. I know it broke her heart too. I wouldn’t accept her money, because I knew she had already sold so much of her inheritance to pay legal fees and Israeli fines just to keep her home. She was a widow living alone, and I wasn’t going to add to her burdens. She sent a thousand dinars anyway, and Um Naseem insisted I take it. I didn’t tell Mama at first because she would have made me use the money to pay back rent. But I was being evicted and didn’t want to stay in that apartment anyway. I didn’t share Mama’s moral sensibilities and was happy to rip off the landlord. I even broke the handle on the bathroom fixture on purpose.

Jehad and Mama helped me move in the middle of the night. Mama made me leave the furniture in lieu of rent. She wouldn’t accept that I could just skip out on paying, because “stealing is haram.” She said God would punish me eventually for it, as if being an abandoned bride when I was barely twenty wasn’t punishment enough. It turned out that my nice appliances weren’t even mine. Mhammad had been renting them from the landlord. I’d have to go back to hand-washing the dishes and using the semimanual washing machine. But I took comfort in imagining the landlord’s face when he saw the broken bathroom fixture.