Cover

Dedication

for Amal

and for the Abu Saud Sawaid family

Make It Delicious

Make It Delicious

You are late today.

Please do not be angry that I have taken so long, you write.

Don’t rush.

Tell your news the way they tell their stories: slow and tasty ... no rushing. Make it delicious like the olives, black and bursting with sweetness and sourness.

Remember the bottles of olive oil Um Saud gave you, and how you could drink a cup like a shot of whiskey, only without the burn, the white balls of cheese, sour with the bitterness of another land spread on bread so thick you could sleep under it.

Remember coming back from school, kicking dirt and passing dusty children up up up a road to the house where a meal and a family waited for you with loud kisses and steaming plates and many stories that you gobbled up or packed in your suitcases.

Stillness in dusty streets comes back when the sun shines, oceans and miles away.

That house told stories of courage and sadness and joy in every season, and now they come back to you at the wrong time, at the right time, at times that make you hate where you live, or love it more than you can make your words describe.

Cross the ocean, Abu Saud whispered, and take with you what you have learned, who you have seen, and the tastes that have nourished you, and please, do not forget us.

Now you sit in your sweet house with the desert outside and hostility all around you, thankful you have not forgotten altogether but wishing the memory could walk away a little further.

Please do not be angry I have taken so long, you write again, and soon a page is filled with news, congratulations for a baby’s birth, and words of longing you cannot soften, you cannot hide.

As with every letter you have written since the dark night you left just over a dozen years ago, you write Be careful and know that you are always with me. God keep you safe.

You are late today, but try to remember the wisdoms you unpacked that lie scattered around your living room.

Don’t rush ... make it delicious.

L.H.

Tucson, 2003

PART ONE

PART ONE

1 HALA Going Home

1HALAGoing Home

My gray, ankle-length dress scratches me everywhere, no matter how I shift in my regular-class, no-frills seat. It tickles my bottom and has a scooped back and scooped front, so people can peek from all angles. I thought the dress would give me confidence—mostly covering me, but pretty—but instead I fold myself, hunch, and calculate whether a tiny airplane bathroom is big enough to hold me as I change my clothes.