Aliyah opened the Venetian blinds and gazed down into the alley behind the house. In the early afternoon light, it did not seem so dingy, but rather like a labyrinthine tunnel that connected everyone’s backyards in a chain of square, cement links.

“Aliyah, let’s talk.” Baba’s deep voice came from behind her.

“I wasn’t trying to embarrass you.” Better to speak plainly and spare the drama. “I was only writing a good story. And people liked it.”

“I did not.”

“Well, guess what? The editor did. And he reads thousands of stories a year, but he liked mine.” She snapped the blinds shut and faced him. “He liked the ‘realistic details’.”

“I hate to discourage you, and I know that is what I am doing.” He sat on the bed. “I always encouraged you, right or wrong?”

“Right.”

“But I have to answer to the family when they start asking questions and getting upset, not you.”

Of course that was what it had come down to, the family and its dignity. She’d known that. “I’m sorry. Really.”

“Could you not have written about anything else? You had to use your uncle’s one moment of embarrassment. My God, he is my brother!”

“He’s done things like that a million times, Baba. Why didn’t the family get him some help sooner instead of worrying about a ten-page story?”

“It is not your story! It is his. Make up your own, for Christ’s sake!”

The subway ride home was quiet, disturbed only by the usual shifting of the car as it hugged the bends in the track. An elderly black woman and an Asian teenaged girl spoke softly about the new mayor, shaking their heads, while a heavy Italian man with a thick mustache watched the screen of the Gameboy his young son was intensely playing. Aliyah swayed with the force that wracked her brain with a mix of guilt and righteousness. For the next few days, she couldn’t write anything. Her apartment had never been so clean, her friends had never received so many chatty phone calls. Meanwhile, her pencils remained unsharpened, her legal tablet unscratched, her laptop unplugged.

One day, she finally boarded the subway and returned home to tell her father that all the stories in the world had to be hers, or else she would never find her own voice, never write from the heart.

Only her father’s car was parked outside. Her mother was probably at her friend Reema’s home, discussing her “stubborn husband” and her “inconsiderate daughter” while sipping coffee with Reema’s mother. Better like this anyway. There was no answer to her knock, so she let herself in with her own key. She heard the strong chords of the oud coming from the direction of the kitchen, in the back of the house. An elbow peeked out from the kitchen doorway, and a chair slightly pulled out from the table. She imagined the rest of her father, sitting straight in the chair, picking out his frustration on the strings, transforming it into an exhausting, consuming loveliness.