At night, lying on a thin mattress next to his brother with the book-hard pillows he wasn’t used to anymore, Muneer wanted to put his hand into his chest and pull his whole heart out. He tried. He placed his fingers against his sternum and pressed harder and harder until it hurt and his fingers seized up and he had to go outside to stretch them out and moan with pain and grief because he might wake up his brother if he stayed inside.

Oh, but that was a lie, to let the family think he wasn’t angry that they had not told him and sent for him immediately.

Muneer’s mother wore mourning white and never left the house, as was the custom for four months and ten days after a husband’s death. She kept her hair covered, though only her children and sisters surrounded her. Until his last week at home, Muneer never saw her alone. One evening he found her sitting in the formal salon, pouring tea.

“Sit with me,” she said.

“I’m not going back to America.”

She mixed his tea with sugar, the way she would have mixed his father’s tea. Muneer winced at the sweetness of it.

“God keep you for me and protect you,” she said.

The next day she told his brothers he had decided to stay in Jidda.

They had come to their father’s formal sitting room, where they sat on low cushions around the perimeter, to decide how they could best care for their mother. There were also two sisters to marry off. It would not be hard to find families willing to marry them. And there was Lujayn, the littlest, to take care of.

“You have to go back to America,” they told Muneer. “For Baba and for Mama. She needs us to support her, so you need a good degree from over there.”

“And let you lie to me again when someone else dies?”

“God forbid,” said Salem, the oldest.

“God knows what will happen, and we’ll do what’s best, with His guidance,” said Sameer.

Bandar came up with the idea that Muneer take a semester off and help out in his father’s store. If he had not stayed those extra months, he might not have married Saeedah.

‘UQBALAK