She took the pot of water I was about to pour into the machine and poured it instead into a narrow but deep frying pan we had. “Next time, I will bring one of my Arabic coffee pots, the one with the long handle. That American coffee tastes like dirty water.”

After it had boiled, Mama stirred in sugar and cardamom, which she pulled from a plastic bag in her purse. She kept everything from peppermint candies to individual aspirin pills to mint leaves in plastic bags in her bag, because she had a phobia about being unprepared. She often called Ziploc bags the best invention of the twentieth century. We took our cups to the living room, leaving Aliyah alone so she could write. Mama sat on the armchair and I on a large, embroidered floor pillow that Aliyah’s mom, Aunt Lamis to her friends’ children, had stitched for the apartment.

“I know you like living here,” Mama said in Arabic, “and you and Aliyah must feel like you have so much freedom in your lives now.”

“That’s exactly how we feel,” I answered in English.

She noted my answer, but persisted in Arabic, her lips hissing around every letter. “Neither your Auntie Lamis nor I are happy with this arrangement. It’s just not right, Hanan.”

I didn’t want to continue the conversation, so I stayed quiet. That is my usual strategy, developed when I was a teenager and had to argue about every outfit or hair style I wanted to wear outside the house. We’d had this talk so often during the month before I moved out, I felt I could lecture myself.

“Hanan,” she continued, “it’s been three months now. Why don’t you come home? Your father misses you.”

“Don’t put Baba into this, Mama,” I warned. I should have anticipated this move.

I could tell by her face that she was hedging, envisioning her next approach. “And me, Hanan? I can’t stand what people are saying about you and Aliyah. I know it not true, but they poison people’s minds. And Lamis,” she added, lowering her voice, “already thinks you the one who convinced Aliyah to get her own apartment in the first place.”

“I don’t care what they’re saying. Just ignore it. I’m not going to spend my whole life worrying about what Lamis and everyone else thinks of me.”

“I know—I should tell them go tile the ocean. But it’s not so easy for me. You don’t care how people look at me. Old Mrs. Samara in the pharmacy last week ask me how you are. And such a look on her face! I grab your father’s medicine and leave so fast, without answering her.”