Nayla

There was sun and then there was more sun and more sun. You can't imagine loss when it's sunny. Everything reflects, the sides of buildings, dirty, dusty windows offer half a version of a sad tired face. You squint and rooms appear tilted, the sky unbearable, and then when—like a turtle, worm, or whatever it is that burrows—you wrap thick heavy blankets around the curtain bar, dust flies everywhere. So you sneeze and secure the blankets with giant paper clips, metallic tape, anything that feels like it will protect you from the brightness for a long time.

This is how I felt for the first few days of my twenty-first year. I was still in this camp in the desert, worming my way into acceptance while years—let's count them . . . something like 365 0 6 2 however many days—had gone by. By the end of the week, Mama pulled down the blankets and dragged me to my cousin Marwan's birthday party. He relished his legal ability to drink, although as I told him many times, legality did not matter here.

Mama spent most of the night in the living room with my aunts while Marwan and his friends entertained them by trying to dance the dabke with a group of terribly synchronized tabla drummers. Already tipsy by the time we got there, Marwan introduced us to his new girlfriend, Nayla. I noticed that everyone else seemed to approach her cautiously or envelop her in an airy swoop that simulated the grandeur of a hug without bodily contact. She didn't smell bad or look disheveled or unkempt. There were no obvious signs of repulsion. I asked my mom what was going on and she said: She's a young widow, in the hushed tone of a terrible fate or a shameful secret. I immediately thought of a spider and recoiled. So when Nayla sat next to me on the sticky linoleum kitchen floor and offered me the wobbly part of her spinach quiche, I hesitated. She insisted. I took a small chunk with my hands as if like sisters we had always shared food.

The music was loud in the kitchen, a mix of bootleg DJ Khaled and De La Soul. Nayla and I stayed on the floor, legs extended, bare feet against the cabinet, eating. I picked out the almonds from the rice and gave them to her. She whispered that they were a cheap substitute for pine nuts. We agreed that bread is the best utensil and that olives without pits were disgusting, as if manhandled by a machine. By the end of the night we were friends.

Nayla worked part-time as an engineer. She fixed boilers, heaters, and pipes. She made sure all the internal parts worked: the heart, the liver, the organs of a building. She spoke of codes like a spy. She had a clipboard with stacks of paper that she flipped through and wrote on only in pencil. I never saw her erasing. There were numbers and barely legible words along the margins. Her soundtrack was the scribbling scratch of the pencil. When she was surrounded by the rest of her crew, mostly men who liked to yell into the air rather than speak directly with one another, she seemed feminine, like a feline cartoon character who bats her eyelashes when she wants something. She wore short skirts or belted long shirts along with the white hard hat she carried looped around her gaudy large gold purse. She didn't wear heels but her shoes seemed demure, dignified, and actually, as I often told her, totally old-lady-like. The leather was never scuffed or dirty.

That summer, I practically lived in her apartment, a tiny place right above her late husband's family's house. I'd come over and we'd drink Prosecco (pretending we were in Italy) and invent recipes together. We traded food for the bubbly wine with Ahmad, the liquor store manager. We made him fish fattoush; lamb-stuffed eggplant; pistachio, orange, and cardamom cookies; and vegetarian kibbeh with extra pine nuts. Ahmad...