Hannah loses her abayah in Taif. On Thursday, the first day of the Saudi weekend, her father drives the family out of the city, up a mountain, past a rock perched over the road, into a park of low, bushy evergreens. As they ascend, Hannah’s stomach somersaults and her mouth fills with saliva. Her father pulls over against the side of the mountain so she can spit into the dirt.

The park revives her. It smells like pine, like an Ohio hike, and oddly, that makes her happy to be here, in Saudi. The picnic area smells like a summer barbecue. Families have spread cloths along the sparsely grassy edges of the path that winds through the park. Though the late-October air is mild and breezy, people are dressed in layers, as though for a chilly fall day in Ohio. The fathers, wearing blazers or cardigan sweaters over their white thawbs, grill pungent lamb, and the mothers, draped in black, pour tea out of thermoses and set out trays of dates. Little girls of eight or ten, wearing black headscarves and colorful dresses under cardigans, cradle babies and run after toddlers. Older boys kick soccer balls on patches of dirt.

After lunch, Hannah, her father, and Lamees go for a walk, leaving the boys on a picnic blanket with Mary.

“I’ll stay with them,” Hannah says. The three boys might be a handful for Mary, she tells herself.

Muneer insists Hannah come along.

“It’s fine, Miss,” Mary says. “Go with your parents, please.” Mary has a small daughter at home in the Philippines, she told Hannah a few days ago, though she doesn’t seem much older than Hannah is. It’s not till now that Hannah wonders how hard it is for Mary to be separated from her own child.

Lamees wears white sneakers under her abayah, and Hannah’s father wears a blue polyester track suit he changed into when they arrived at the park. Once they pass the picnickers and there’s no one around, Lamees lifts her veil from her face and drapes it over the top of her head. One side of her mouth dimples when she smiles, and her front teeth jut toward her bottom lip. They walk up a rocky path that slopes gently. Beneath them, patchy terraced farmland is scrunched into a narrow valley.

Hannah keeps tripping over her abayah. It never wants to stay closed, and her scarf never stays put. She feels foreign to herself wearing them.

Underneath is the real her: jeans and a gray Gap T-shirt.

She wraps the one side of the abayah around the other side of her body and tucks the fabric tightly under her arm.