“She’s crafty,” he said with a smile. He had a lot of respect for my mother. When he’d been a student, new from Syria, she had invited him over to our house for dinner, cooking his favorite dishes, like warak dawali and magloubeh. But he also knew she was paranoid about me.

“She’s not there now,” he added, kissing me anyway. My front door opened behind us but, absorbed in our kiss, we failed to notice until my mother spoke.

“Nadia, I need to speak to you inside,” she said loudly.

Springing back, George mumbled, “Masel khair, Sitt Jundi,” as he straightened the collar of his shirt.

“Good evening? George, it’s two o’clock in the morning,” she replied brusquely. “And I need to speak to my daughter.”

Squeezing his arm, I followed Mama inside and immediately began apologizing. For what, I wasn’t sure, but I felt from her expression that I ought to be sorry.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Nadia, you’re too old for that—I don’t care what you do. I really do need to talk to you.” She headed upstairs to her bedroom and opened the window to let in some fresh, clean air. “Your aunt is having serious problems.” She took a pillow and laid it on the sill, then leaned her elbows on it and stared up into the city’s night sky. I joined her, anticipating a long talk, which we frequently had, sitting just like this on nights when neither one of us could sleep. We’d started almost immediately after my father had died, huddled in the window like a couple of crones, shoulders hunched as if bracing ourselves for another punch. The streets were quiet, and even our neighbors downstairs seemed to have understood that they should be silent tonight. When I was a child, there was a flower shop below us, but the owner had died and her daughter had quickly sold it. After many permutations, including a Vietnamese grocery store and a short-lived espresso café, it was now a used CD and record shop, with customers coming in and playing and listening to music until late at night. The Polish and Vietnamese families who lived on either side of us were quiet tonight as well, perhaps lulled to sleep by the crisp air that made you want to burrow under layers of blankets.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, leaning far out to try to glimpse George walking back up the street. But the night was too black, too opaque to be pierced by the street lamp’s feeble light.

“She wants to divorce Kevin.”

That stunned me back to attention. I turned to look at her and noticed how much older she seemed. Her brown eyes were rimmed with red and her dark hair fell limply, lifelessly around her shoulders. She wore one of my grandmother’s old housedresses, one from Jerusalem with the red and blue embroidered panel on the bust. Days after Siti’s funeral, my aunts and mother had divided up her clothes and jewelry among themselves. My aunts vied for her bracelets and necklaces, her silver brooch and her colorful scarves. My mother hoarded, almost obsessively, all of her housedresses and even her old leather house slippers. Mama used to wear colorful clothing, fashionable stuff, but lately all she wore were those shabby dresses. The thread’s once-bright, vibrant colors were faded now, and I suddenly realized that my mother resembled Siti in the last year of her life.