Siham heard nothing about the blonde woman for the next month. Nader’s workdays grew longer, and he often came home with sagging shoulders but more bills in his wallet. “We’re getting a lot of business because of the nice weather. Everyone wants to come out and buy lunch and get out of their offices.” She could tell he was grateful for the work, because he sighed less heavily when he wrote checks for the bills at the beginning of the month. To pass the time, she began English classes at the community college. Her professor told her that she was one of the most advanced students in the class. She’d better be, she thought, after all her own self-tutoring.

By October the leaves on the occasional tree in South Philadelphia began to change colors. The trees in Jerusalem were mostly olive trees and they didn’t change colors, as she tried to explain to Carla, who didn’t seem to care. Their leaves just curled up like shrimp and died, pulled away from the branches by the harsh wind that whipped through and wrapped around the hills. But here, the leaves retained their shape, became muscular in texture and turned red, orange and gold. One autumn afternoon she slipped two leaves, a yellow one and a red one, into an envelope and mailed them to her youngest sister, Nadia, who lived at home. She also described Halloween to her, how goblins, witches, and boys with bizarre black and white face paint, claiming to be rock stars, came to the flower shop and the other stores along the Market for candy.

In November she found a way to help Nader pay the bills. She invited Carla and Mrs. Donato up to the apartment for tea one evening after they closed the shop. They praised her embroidery skills. It was not a rare talent for Palestinian women—Siham had been taught by her grandmothers—but Carla and her mother, deeply impressed, made a proposal. Siham gave them a pair of sofa pillowcases that she had stashed away in a chest to put for sale in the shop. They sold the next day, and the Donatos took orders for three more sets. “You make ‘em, we’ll sell ‘em,” said Carla, handing her thirty dollars that evening. “I’ll just take a 10 percent cut. People snap them up when you say that they’re hand-made.” Siham requested only that they hide her work from Nader when he passed through the shop on his way up to the apartment after work. She wanted to save the money and surprise him with a gift.

The extra bedroom on the second level of the apartment became Siham’s embroidery and study room. The floor was covered with yards of cloth and dozens of spools of thread: tightly-wound ribbons of red, wrapped rivers of yellow, and coils of green. They were rainbows in her hand that she could unfurl at will. Her English books were stacked in a corner underneath the sole window in the room. A lonely stuffed chair sat in the middle of the room, next to a halogen lamp. Her only desk was her lap. This room would be a nursery one day. They had decided to start trying soon. She had already lined all the Barbie dolls Nader had bought her over the past year—the doctor, the nurse, the singer, the horse jockey—on a small shelf, hoping it would bring them a girl.