Mama gently put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s sit outside and talk, habibti,” she said. That’s how it was with us. An argument or a whupping was over in seconds, and we were back to habibti and other love words.

“You have to understand. We’re all she has in the world. Somewhere deep inside her, she knows what you say is true. That’s why she’s in there crying. But if she can pretend that I’m the reason her daughters don’t answer her calls, or why they don’t visit or ask her to live with them, then she never has to face the truth that her children have thrown her away. That’s a terrible fate.”

I listened, realizing I was hearing something from the silent depths of my mother. We were a family with secrets, things that lurked in the corners of our lives, unseen, unspoken, but felt in the texture of arguments, the extra length of a pause, the focus of a stare. For example, I didn’t know until many years later that I was probably conceived before my parents married; my father asked for Mama’s hand to avoid scandal and shame. I don’t know if the rumor was true. But it might have been the reason we barely knew her family.

I met them when my maternal grandmother died in Syria, and we traveled to their refugee camp in Yarmouk for the funeral. Everyone was nice to me, my brother, and Mama. But I could tell, from the warmth and love they exchanged with each other but not with Mama, that she had somehow always been on the margins of her family. She didn’t say, but I thought it was because of me or because her father, who died when they were all kids, had loved her most.

“I need a cigarette, habibti. Go inside. Open the third drawer. In the very back, there’s a pack rolled up in socks.”

Mama was always between a pack-a-day habit and “trying to quit” periods. I was the only girl among my friends who wasn’t trying to sneak a smoke at that age. I had read in a comic book how Western companies were using tobacco to kill us slowly and take all our money and resources in the process. Refusing to smoke was an act of rebellion, and I liked to lecture others about the Western conspiracy, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment with Mama, so I dutifully fetched her Marlboro stash as the tea boiled in the kitchen.

“May God bless you for all your days, my daughter,” she said when I returned with the hot pot, two cups, a cut of fresh mint, sugar, and her stale pack of Marlboros. Normally we could see kids playing in the narrow street below our balcony, but it was laundry day, and our clothes hanging to dry obstructed the view. As Mama had taught me, I had hung my brother’s jeans and shirts on the outer lines facing the street, then Mama’s dishdashas. My pants, dresses, and shirts were on the middle lines, hidden from the lustful eyes of adolescent passersby, and finally, on the inner lines close to the edge of the balcony, we hung our underwear. Instead of looking out at the goings-on in the street, all I could see were our panties fluttering in the wind under a blue sky.