Um Radwan, our nosy next-door neighbor, is one of those women who is grieving over being forgotten. Her husband died when she was still young, with four sons and a daughter. The daughter works in Nablus and the sons all went to America. One of them married an American woman so the others could stay there. One died, one doesn’t want to come back, and the other two come only every once in a while. They haven’t forgotten her completely, though, and whenever someone else is coming home, they send suitcases full of presents, and I’m sure by now she has six or seven suitcases filled with comforters, sweaters, deodorant, soaps, aspirin, Kool-Aid, and laxatives. She’s one of those people who covers her emptiness with harsh words, so no one will feel sorry for her. She does it on purpose, makes herself hard so no one can find her grieving. In our house, though, her guard goes down. Words like hair sneak out from beneath her proper head scarf and hint at grief that was pickled so long ago.

I know everyone’s stories. I am my mother’s only child and she had been married many years before she had me. All the waiting gave her patience and generosity. My father says that it also gave her ears that can hear even the worst story without her slapping back with unkind or judgmental words. She says she has room to be generous because she has been so blessed—a husband who did not divorce her even though she was childless for years, and a helpful daughter. Because I was always by my mother’s side, people came to think of us as one, or as sisters, more than as mother and daughter, which is why women are not shy to pour out their troubles when I am in the room.

I think my mother has such listening power because what happened to her father was one of the worst stories the village knows. A big, powerful man with money and land and brains, killed by strangers, or by friends. No one ever found out. Slain on his own land, his young son, Uncle Haydar, a witness, but unable to identify the killers. Several years later two men who had had disputes with my grandfather were killed mysteriously. There were whispers that Haydar—the fastest runner Nawara has ever seen—had done it and then escaped to America on his brother’s—Uncle Hamdi’s—green card, but most people think the two killings were unrelated.

I think this background is what makes my mother pay attention to details and listen so well. So many women come spill their secrets and their joys and their agonies because they know my mother—and I—will keep them safe and do no more than stitch them into the fabric of our rozas.