Besides, she’d spent the last twenty-one years watching her parents, her mother constantly screaming at her father, him trying to drown her out with his cardiology work, fellowships, books. He loved his wife, but he certainly couldn’t connect with her, not with a mind like his. Laila wouldn’t let that happen, she would never be like her mother, cleaning and cooking and using her kids as leverage against her husband, forcing them to take her side, a decision they would regret once they were older and able to think for themselves. No, she would never repeat her mother’s mistakes, and she certainly wouldn’t let herself be beholden to a man. She planned to get a master’s degree, and eventually a PhD. “The thing about education,” her father said to her the day of her college graduation, which coincided with a sharp increase in Israeli settlement construction on confiscated land in the West Bank, “is that no one can take it away from you. Everything else can be stolen. Everything else can be lost.”

When her parents moved to Chicago, where her father had just accepted a position as head cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Laila decided she would stay with them and apply to master’s programs in the States. At her goodbye party before leaving Amman, she met Talal.

Talal was also from Nablus. He’d grown up poor, one of nine brothers and sisters. At the time that he met Laila, he was also on his way to the States: to California, where he would attend business school. He wasn’t suave or especially handsome, but he was determined, and he pursued her relentlessly. Every week he sent a letter to Chicago from L.A., and he eventually traveled to Illinois to visit her, flying into O’Hare and renting a flashy red Mustang that he hoped would impress her. Laila’s three brothers all made fun of him for it. Her father had been skeptical of the match from the beginning and saw the car as further evidence of how ill-suited the man was for his daughter. “Anyone who rents a red convertible must have an inferiority complex!” he said, and told Laila not to date him because of it.

Laila and Talal spent most of their time together in the red car, since it was one of the few places where they could be alone. Before he left Chicago, he proposed to her in it, and a few months later they were married in Bridgeview. Grad school applications had been replaced by wedding plans. After a brief honeymoon on Lake Superior, the only destination Talal could afford, she returned with him to California.