“What do you think?” He stalked away, toward the kitchen.

“I made some lunch. Let’s all sit down and eat,” her mother said, ushering Aliyah into the kitchen as well. The table was spread with the traditional mezzeh: yogurt, cheese cubes, cucumber salad, hummus, and hot pita bread. Aliyah glanced furtively at her subdued father throughout the meal, while her mother spoke casually and nonchalantly about Uncle Moussa’s new house in the suburbs and Cousin Deena’s upcoming wedding. “It’s costing your uncle $40,000—can you imagine?”

After he’d taken his last bite of hummus, swiveling his bread around the dish (“Clean your plates. Never waste food”—the mantra of her childhood), her father sat up straight, shoulders pulled back, and cleared his throat. He spoke and his voice was like the deepest chord of the oud. She remembered how he would pluck a string, letting it reverberate through the hollow, wooden body of the instrument. America’s intolerance of accents and Palestine’s intolerance of stability had destroyed any chance he’d had to become a famous musician, singing the songs he composed and copied carefully into Aliyah’s old composition notebooks, whose used pages he had simply ripped out: “Why buy new ones? These ones are fine.” He’d become a grocery shopowner, trading the quaver of the oud for the healthy bang of a cash register, but Aliyah’s best childhood memories were of waking up soon after dawn to the music of the lute wafting through the house.

“You are supposed to be a writer, no? And a writer uses her imagination to create characters and … situations. Right or wrong?”

“Right.”

“So where is your imagination in this story? You create nothing. You only take an embarrassing family story and tell it to the world, like those Home Funniest Videos.”

“Funniest Home Videos.”

“It does not matter. You do not even disguise your relatives—just a little mask, like a different name. How will your uncle feel? He didn’t mean to ruin your cousin’s wedding. He wishes that everyone will forget it. He doesn’t even drink anymore. But now …”

“I doubt that he’ll even read it, Baba.”

“Of course he will.” His fingers tugged anxiously at his mustache. “I gave almost everyone a copy of the magazine.”

“Really?”

“We ordered twenty copies of it,” her mother explained, standing up to collect the dirty dishes. “We even sent one to your grandfather back home.”

“But he doesn’t even read English,” Aliyah protested.

“So?” her father muttered. “He’ll be happy to show people your name on the cover. Soon, the whole village will know that his granddaughter is a writer.”

If only he knew what you were writing. It hung between them, unspoken, suspended in the air like a raised fist.

She stood in her old bedroom, which looked unchanged despite the six-year vacancy. Lilac walls, the purple and white blanket on the bed, and then the only other piece of furniture that the tiny room could accommodate: her wooden desk, swiped from a garage sale for $5, stripped, sanded, and revarnished by her father over a series of Sunday afternoons. Its polished, unmarred surface shone like amber and Aliyah leaned over like Narcissus to scrutinize her blurry reflection. The day he had finished varnishing it, her father forbade her from carving her initials into the wood. “Don’t junk it up,” he’d said. “Leave it beautiful.”