Jameel says of course they have prayer rugs, and goes to find one. Muneer wishes he’d brought one in his suitcase. He tries to determine which way he should face when he prays. Where was the sun when he was in the cab?

No one answers Lulu’s question about where they’re going.

When Jameel shows up with two prayer rugs, Diane says, “You’re praying?”

“Five times a day!” he says.

After Diane and Lulu leave, the men pray with Muneer leading because he is a few months older, and afterward Jameel makes Turkish coffee in the French country kitchen.

“If Diane hadn’t made me quit, I’d want a cigarette,” Jameel says. “Because I’m nervous for you, friend.”

He tells Muneer he hasn’t smoked this summer, but Diane will be pissed if she finds out Summer spent June and July sleeping and watching videos while Jameel was at work. He knew his daughter was lying when she said she’d studied, because Roseanna, their maid, told him what she was up to. In the evenings, he drilled Summer on the Hadeeths she had to memorize, and she stumbled through them. Afterward, he took her out for shawarmas and strawberry juice and long sessions watching Egyptian soap operas and professional wrestling at his parents’ house.

Summer begged not to have to go to her grandparents’.

“‘You’re home all day. You have to get out,’ I told her.” But if he had to sit around while she moped, he’d rather do it with company, he says. And the way he sees it, making her sit with her grandparents was as big a part of her punishment as having to stay in Jidda most of the summer and review her religion textbook.

“Girls!” Jameel says, in Arabic. And in English, “Teenagers!”

The words carry everything Muneer has lost.

Jameel seems to have forgotten his earlier urgency. But though Muneer has come across the world to find Hanadi, he doesn’t want to be rude. He drinks the coffee down to the sludge.

This is Diane’s mother’s place. She lends it to Diane and Jameel in summer when her student tenants leave. The living room is furnished with white leather couches and glass coffee tables.

“Diane says this stuff is terribly impractical for a rental, but I love it,” Jameel says. “When I crank the central air the leather gets cool, and my mother-in-law complains about the bill.”

To offer someone your generosity and then be stingy about it is foreign to the two men. It’s very American, but neither of them says so out loud.

Jameel says, “We should go?”

Muneer wants nothing more than to leave this living room, but staying here delays disappointment. He uses the sofa’s armrest to push himself up slowly.

“We should go.”