She did marry again, married a service driver who died of a disease three years and two more babies after they were wed. A disease with a name that does not translate, the doctor told her, as she stumbled hopelessly over the English pronunciation. What does it matter if I can pronounce it? If he were murdered, would I go around all day whispering the name of his killer?

A blackened widow back in her parents’ house, with four giant mouths to feed and a father who said, “You will marry again,” with the same frequency he recited the first chapter of the Quran, and a mother who wouldn’t say more than “God willing.”

The car rattled with every bump in the road.

“Were you visiting relatives in Jordan?” asked the young woman.

Farah turned to look at her, surprised by how Arab her features were in contrast to her short curly hair and her western clothes. “My daughter and her husband live there,” she said, winking at the little girl who was leaning on her mother’s lap, at the same time pushing the ache back behind her breast.

“Let it be God’s will that they have many healthy children,” the woman said, and Farah smiled but turned toward the window again.

“I’ve forgotten how beautiful it is,” said the woman.

Farah guessed that she had been in the United States.

“Puerto Rico,” she said, and when Farah raised her eyebrows she smiled and began to talk in a loud but not offensive voice. “You’d be surprised how many Arabs go to Puerto Rico. It’s beautiful too, if you can close your eyes to the crime and the lack of morality.” The woman rubbed her hands together in her lap and Farah looked down at the shiny red nails. “That’s why I came back. How can I let my children grow up in a place where girls are women at eleven years old and boys shoot real guns at each other at twelve?”

Farah didn’t say anything, but one of the men in the front seat turned around. “I lived in Puerto Rico for fourteen years and it is incredible. I even had a Puerto Rican wife and three children by her, but one morning I woke up and felt I was lying in the Devil’s bed, so I came back. I asked my wife to come with me but she refused. She asked me how I expected her to let my children grow up with petróleos, which is what they call Arabs, as if we Palestinians have anything to do with oil. That’s when I knew I had made the right decision to leave.”

The driver and the other man nodded and no one spoke for a few minutes, letting the man’s words marinate.

And you came home and married a virgin in the name of God, Farah thought to herself.