“Sure, I’m fine,” she replied. But that didn’t stop the inquiries until Mama confronted her one Saturday morning, when it was her father’s turn to conveniently be out of the house.

She stood in the kitchen, her face resolute, but her fingers busy snapping and unsnapping the top button of her housedress. “Hanan,” she said, “I know I’m not a too good mother, but I hope you do not do things because you cannot ask me.”

Hanan paused from her dishwashing and turned off the faucet. “What are you talking about?” Of course this was about the phone call, but what the hell had her mother mentally conjured up?

“I want to say to you that no matter what you do, I am your mother. I will never be ashamed of what you do or what happens to you. You see?” Mama released her button and spread her fingers out to her sides, palms up, as if to hold up something to Hanan’s face. “You are a good daughter. Crazy sometimes, but it’s OK. You just have too much energy.”

“Thanks.” Hanan laughed, and tossed the sponge back into the sink. “But if you’re thinking about the phone call from the clinic, that wasn’t for me. I was helping a friend of mine out, and she didn’t want her parents to know about it.”

“Ah, nushkur Allah!” But it was a matter of seconds before Mama switched from praising God to asking more questions. “Who was it? I know her?” Mama’s eyes flashed curiously, shinier than the metallic buttons on her pink housedress. “Did she come here?”

“Nope, just a girl I work with. You don’t know her.”

“Well, thank God it was not you. You scare me, Hanan!” Mama still stood in the center of the kitchen, hands outspread. “I think you are feeling alone, and I think is my fault. I know I am too much, but when you really make me mad, and … how can I speak the words, Hanan?”

“Yes, yes, I know, Mama.” Then, just to keep her mother quiet, to keep the words from coming, Hanan walked over and lifted her in a bear hug, spinning her around the kitchen.

“Crazy girl!” Her mother shrieked, slapping Hanan’s back, her plastic slippers sliding off her feet and smacking onto the kitchen floor’s tiles. “You are crazy, crazy!” But she did not mention the subject again.

Hanan spent that evening at home, watching CNN with her father and smiling and nodding when he talked animatedly, sometimes to her, sometimes to himself, about the Intifada and Arafat and the refugees still waiting to come home. “How much longer do they have to wait? They are barely holding on to their hopes!” he raged, slamming his fist into the plush armrest of the couch, where it landed without any sound at all. If she did leave, she would miss these oddly distant, but richly familiar moments with him, with this house, even with Mama. In bed that night, she stared at the yellow tape remnants that she couldn’t see but that she knew were there. When the sky outside her bedroom window melted from black into a charcoal gray and then slowly into blue, Hanan felt her eyelids falling heavily. The last thing she saw was the tape, still clinging.