The first night she appeared, she said, “I’m sorry that I didn’t wait for you.”

“Mama’s still upset,” I replied. We had to hurry to the hospital when the nurse called, but Siti had died before we reached her room. I could tell immediately upon entering the cold room that we were too late, from her closed eyes and the way her mouth drooped open. Mama looked as if she’d been betrayed.

“You have to help her, habibti,” Siti said, touching my lips with her fingers. I could taste the salt on her skin and see the green stains from the leaves on her cuticles, outlining her wide, square nails. I also recognized the added acidic taste of the lemon that she used to scrub out the stains. I liked when she called me habibti, “my love” in Arabic. I’m the only grandchild she said that to, maybe because I was the oldest and resembled her the most.

“OK, but come back,” I said. She grinned and left, and I didn’t cry two days later when we buried her, even though all my aunts beat their foreheads and wailed and my uncles sobbed into their hands like children. They had flown in from Jerusalem for the funeral, arguing that their mother should be buried back home. But Mama, exhausted from crying and lack of sleep, had hysterically insisted that Siti be buried here, in Philadelphia, because she’d come with Aunt Nadia to live with us when Baba died. “She wouldn’t want to leave us now.”

As we wearily watched them lower her coffin into the cold ground, Mama was amazed at my calmness. “It’s OK to cry,” she told me, holding me tightly. “We all miss her—it’s OK to cry.” I nodded, not knowing how to tell her that she had misunderstood.

I was named after my youngest aunt, Nadia, who was only eleven when my mother married my father. My father always liked the name because, in Arabic, it meant “the dew on the flower’s petal,” and he loved that image. “Only the Arabs give their kids names that are pictures,” he would boast, half-seriously, half-jokingly. So I became “little Nadia” in the extended circle of the family. After Baba died, Nadia the Elder, who’d been in her twenties and the only one still unmarried, moved with Siti to the States to live with us.

At thirty, she had married a “non-Arab,” as he became known among the family, who also referred to him simply as “Nadia’s husband,” or more often, “al-Amerikani.” But his real name was Kevin and he was an Irish-American, tall and blond and handsome. When I say “tall,” I mean 6 feet 4 inches, not what Arabs refer to as tall, which could be anything from 5 feet 8 inches and above. He had a large, welcoming smile and bright blue eyes that he passed on to their son, Patrick. With those eyes, Patrick could charm anything out of any member of the family of dark-eyed Arab-Americans who adored him but were wary of his father.