“Abu Nabeel!” I said, standing up and putting on my shoes. “Abu Nabeel!”

He paused, his hand suspended over the strings, and looked at me expectantly.

“I’m going back to see Siham for a few minutes. Your boys are in the basement and your daughter is reading in her room.”

He nodded as if in a daze and returned immediately to his playing.

I strode to Siham’s, covering the four blocks in only a few minutes. I wasn’t sure what I would say to her. Perhaps I would tell her she had forgotten where we all came from, had forgotten that we had landed with one bag each and an endless supply of miserable memories. And that our common bond was our only salve. I didn’t know, but I would do something.

She saw me from the basement window of the flower shop, tapped on the screen, and yelled up, “The door is open. Come in. I’m just taking down the clothes.” The owner had allowed them access to the basement to do laundry.

I walked in and sat down at her kitchen table. Besides the sink, next to the glorious dishwasher, was a little bowl filled with several rings and two gold bracelets. They were made of Arabic gold, with its 21 karat bright yellow color. I imagined suddenly what Samira’s mother back in Lebanon must have looked like—her hands bejeweled with large rings, her neck encircled with chains of gold, her hair dyed a deep red henna and her heavily mascaraed eyes watching the news about a skirmish in the refugee camps. She would turn to her husband and exclaim, “C’est impossible how these Palestinians are ruining us!”

My father could have been wealthy also—he had owned half the farmland in the village! God knows what it was worth now, especially in a prime location like Jerusalem’s outskirts. But now, in Philadelphia, we shared even our walls with our neighbors. I counted pennies painstakingly, because I had four children who eventually would need college money, and I rarely bought new dresses or fancy clothes—and here was Siham with a fancy, expensive new machine, to remind me of what had been lost!

I walked over to the dishwasher and opened its door. The pink dishes from this afternoon were still stacked inside, but they hadn’t been washed. Perhaps she was waiting to put her dinner dishes in there as well. I pulled out my cup, and saw again the little windows that Huda had pointed out to me. I hoped it was true. Then I pulled out Siham’s cup, and stared at the dizzying ovals again. They suddenly looked like little teardrops to me. I glanced above her stove, where a blue stone hung above the range. Siham had blue stones hanging all over her house—above the door, above the stove, in every window and every bedroom. But, as I heard her coming up the basement steps, lugging a basket, I closed the dishwasher door and then … and then I said a curse anyway, against her fancy dishwasher and her modernity. The words formed in the blackest corner of my heart and were purged from my lips, hanging like dark clouds in Siham’s kitchen.