They applied. Muneer waited for news of his university applications and went to the shop daily. He thought about Saeedah, writing her name over and over in his mind. Envisioning the smudged kohl under her eyes. He started to regret applying to American universities. What if God meant something else for him? It so happened that Saeedah’s father had run a newspaper called al-Sharqiyah for more than a decade. Muneer could work for him, couldn’t he?

The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to go. One evening while he was drinking tea with his parents, Saeedah’s name fell out of his mouth.

“My sister’s daughter?” his mother said.

Muneer’s father looked up from behind the pink screen of his newspaper.

“It’s not a good idea to marry a relative so close.”

The sentiment was something of a newfangled idea, and Muneer watched for his mother’s reaction. She measured out seven spoons of sugar for Muneer’s father and poured Lipton tea into the small jars they used as their everyday tea glasses. The fat crystals danced in Baba’s glass as she stirred.

She handed the tea to Muneer’s father. “Why shouldn’t he marry my sister’s daughter?” she said. She was a woman who would never raise her voice at her husband, but would not always agree with him.

“Go to America,” Muneer’s father said. “When you come back, think about marriage. Why drag a wife along?”

“You trust young men over there by themselves?” Muneer’s mother asked, and when it became clear from her husband’s face that trust had nothing to do with anything, she turned to her son and said, “It will be lonely there. You don’t believe me, but it will be.”

Soon the letters came from America, battered and stained from crossing the ocean. Muneer and Jameel had gotten into programs in Cleveland. Bandar’s envelopes contained single pages telling him he had not been accepted.

“I won’t go without my brother,” Muneer said.

“By God you’ll go,” his father said. “If you don’t, people will think neither of you was smart enough to go to America.”

In the end, Bandar went to Dhahran to study petroleum engineering. Muneer and Jameel found an apartment in Cleveland through the uncle of a friend of a friend. They arrived in August. The muggy weather, though ten degrees Celsius cooler than at home, nonetheless felt familiar and welcoming. But soon chill crept into the air, the green of the grass and trees vanished like a mirage, and the sky was the dull gray of his mother’s old pots and pans. Everything felt strange. Not necessarily bad, but strange. The cold that burrowed into him, the houses with their aluminum siding and sloped roofs, the lawns, the deciduous trees reaching up to the sky with bare-naked limbs.