Sahar, hiding her own grief today, comes and rests her body on the other side of their mother. They let her be for a while, but when a lively song begins to play, they shake her to the beat of the music. Hennaed orange hair sneaks from beneath the gypsy scarf. “Come on, dance,” they say, and push and turn her, but the eyes are still stuck on the floor, and then the window, and maybe far beyond.

Later in the day, more visitors and children drift in and out. Omar Diyab is still singing and the television is also on. A neighbor has a video camera so that the visiting sister will have something to take back besides memories.

“Look, Amti, look at the camera,” he says, and a boy in an orange shirt stands behind Maziuna and twists her gypsied head toward the camera. Her eyes don’t meet the lens, but the man behind the camera is satisfied and turns to focus on the children in front of the television. Shahira serves too sweet tea, though she is the visitor, and then goes to sit on the bed next to her mother. This time she does not say anything to her and does nothing to get her attention.

The walls of this house are as thick as a married woman’s waist and in the summer, when people come to visit, it is cool inside, floating memories of a livelier time.

Sahar, a cheerful woman in spite of her hardships, flops on the bed on the other side of Maziuna. “How are you, Ma?”

Maziuna turns to her and splits her lips apart to smile, showing her teeth, some gold, some missing. “Hello, chickie!” she shouts with sharpness that makes the two boys in front of the television turn around.

“Did you hear that?” shouts Sahar across their mother to Shahira.

Sahar, the eldest living daughter, is now a widow. She is living once again in her mother’s house because her late husband’s brothers kicked her out of the house she shared with her husband, the house in which she had lived for all of her adult life. They told her that she and her only daughter had no right to it.

“Did you hear that, sister Shahira? My mother is still calling me ‘chickie’!” Laughter clatters around the room, but Shahira’s eyes do not dance like her sister’s eyes. “Chickie” was once reserved for her.

Maziuna is silent again and stares at the television with the same stare as the two little boys. Conversation comes in shouts over the electronics that dot the room until the nephew turns off the tape player.

“How do you find America?” Um Radwan asks Shahira, whose hand rests on her mother’s knee.