If only I had known my mother was dying, then I would not have spent the last year of her life away. But perhaps if I never left, she would not have died in peace.

I see him before he sees me, and while I knew he would be alone, I wish he had brought Jalal, or even Latifa. As soon as he sees me coming down the escalator he sends a man to carry my bags.

My father looks old. His skin is dark, like fava beans, only more wrinkled, like raisins.

We embrace and he kisses me twice on both cheeks. “Thank God for your safe return, my daughter.”

Odd to hear this kind voice after two years of silence. “And may God keep you safe,” I reply.

Passing colorful people with their shouts and hugs and loud kisses and through the automatic doors, we walk into the evening that smells of diesel and toward a large black Mercedes parked under a sign that reads “No Parking.”

“It’s fatter than the last one,” I say.

“I am?” he asks.

“No, the car.”

“It’s safer that way,” he says and hands a folded bill to the wrinkled man who’s put my bags in the trunk. We get in the car. “You look skinny,” he says. “They don’t feed you well, do they? Lazy goats.”

I lean back in the soft leather. I can’t erase the picture of my last visit, my mother’s funeral, and then of the huge fight. The memory comes in my eyes, burning like the sun that’s setting, but I keep my silence as we drive into the desert.

“How is your health?” I ask.

“Thank God for my good health. Even my doctor says he can’t believe it.” He lights a cigarette with the windows up and we drive in smoky silence.

We race the dust down the new highway on the way home to the outskirts of Amman.

“I loved your mother,” he announces, perhaps seeing my memory. “God have mercy on her. Not a day passes that I don’t think of her.” He says this as though it’s an apology.

I am silent. I do not want his stories or drunken, smoky lovesongs tossed in my lap. I want my mother back so much it aches. I want to hear her stories about her village, her words in my ears, her fingers stroking my hair.

2 MAWAL Nawara

2MAWALNawara

Lots of places have special marks, while other places are just daytime normal with an occasional scary night, too thick silence, or a shrill scream to jazz them out of dusty boring.