Abu Salwan and the two men nod, perhaps so used to foreigners that they can approve of our exploration even though it isn’t proper, and I feel ashamed. This is not my father. I don’t want him to be offended. Perhaps I have stretched the limits of his hospitality. (If only he knew what we did at the top of the mountain!) The entire drive home and into the night, we talk of the blue lizard, the old woman, and the sky we stood in.

It is the next evening, and like every night I spend with them, Abu Salwan tells a story. This one, however, is about my mother, “when she was about the same age that you are now.”

“Even though it was many years ago, rarely a day passes that I don’t think of your mother,” he says. “It is because of her that I gave my son the biggest beating of his life.” He is silent for a moment and I hear the hum of too many families on top of one another.

It was so many years ago and your father had just dropped your mother to spend the weekend with us. My daughter, may God have mercy on her, was still alive. It was afternoon, blue sky like that lizard on the rocks in Petra, hot like wanting to be inside a watermelon, and Friday like peaceful after prayers, after eating, everybody wanting to rest.

Everybody except Salwan, Huda, and Saara, my daughter.

Salwan is twelve and Saara is fourteen. Huda is nineteen.

I had visitors that day. “Out of the sitting room, out of the hallway, cover your hair, girl,” I shout. Even Salwan shouldn’t come in.

The children saw them coming down the road toward our house and somehow knew they were coming to see me, so they ran inside to tell me.

“Yaba,” they shouted in my ears, though they are old enough to know better. “Yaba, two men with knives and guns are here.”

The four of us got to the window just in time to see the two men reaching the gate to our house. I looked across the alley to the apartment building and I saw some of our neighbors envying our important visitors, especially that old Indian lady who is Christian and thinks she is better than us even though she lives in the same stinky alley as we do.

“Yaba, why are they dressed like that?” All in black, so serious with their weapons, just like the pictures we have in the sitting room from when I was young, when men were noble.

“My dear,” I tell Saara, putting my hand on her head to stop her thoughts from running out her mouth like a snake, “these men are guards, Bedouin guards from Petra.”