Faizah’s eyes were hard as date pits. Mama looked away, as quickly as she might jerk her hand from the sting of a jellyfish. She brought her eyes to the bride sitting alone on the kosha platform. The pain in her mouth became too much. Clutching her jaw, she left quickly so she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone on her way out. She was barely able to tell the doorman to fetch Muneer. As she waited at the door in her abayah and tarhah, Faizah came toward her carrying her purse.

“So rude of me not to say hello,” Faizah said, moving in to kiss Mama. “You’re leaving already?”

Mama had to kiss back and accept her purse from this sister she hated.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?”

“My tooth.” Mama moved her jaw as minutely as possible as she said the words.

The doorman called Mama’s name, and she slipped outside to where Muneer waited to walk her to the hotel room.

She tells him everything later, after he’s rushed her to the emergency room and they’re back in Jidda, having missed the appointment to meet the young bride-to-be.

She’s angry at how everything has turned out, though she knows it’s God’s will.

“It was rude not to go. I told the mother we would come.”

“Mama, you were in pain. It’s good we came back so Jameel could fix your tooth. That girl was too young for me.”

The words gush out of him like Zamzam water from the spring in Makkah. He wants someone who will understand heartbreak, sorrow. Not a callow adolescent girl. Sadness springs forth with his words, and he feels like Hagar trying to stop the water from coming as she carries her infant son Ishmael between two desert mountains: “Zam! Zam! Stop! Stop!”

The water was a blessing for Hagar, of course, and no one but God can end our sadness.

“We rely on God,” Mama says. “Pray to him.”

“There’s a woman at the newspaper, a female journalist.”

“You chose a bride for love last time,” she says weakly. “Why would you do that again?”

TOLEDO

1975

From Cedar Point, we drove an hour to Toledo, where we stayed in the spare bedroom of Weronika, your friend from English as a Second Language classes. W, she liked to be called. Her thick Eastern European accent made her sound like she was gargling some delicious, thick liquid—chocolate syrup or caramel sauce. Her cluttered house had light blue walls and deep blue shag in most rooms, including the bathrooms. She had bought the house that way, she told us, and she would sit in one of her green-and-peach wing chairs, her feet resting on a stack of magazines on the marble coffee table, and say, “I work hard. I don’t have time to change anything.”