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Is-Pal
or
Pal-Is,
to make everybody happy.”
    Rafik said, “Huh?”
    “But hardly anybody there has been pals yet.”
    “Are you going crazy?”
    “And Pal-Is sounds like palace—but they don’t even have a king. Do you think they would have been better off with kings?”
    Later when the guard at the customs gate pointed at Rafik and asked Liyana weirdly, “Is this your brother?” as if he might be a stranger she’d just picked up in the air, she was moved to say, “He
is
my
pal
,” and they both started giggling, which made Poppy glare at them worriedly.
    The guard sighed. He couldn’t find any reason to detain them further. He shoved the passports back at Poppy. “You may go on.”

W ELCOME
    She opened her mouth and a siren came out.
    At the hotel in Jerusalem, Liyana sat on the lumpy couch staring at her blue passport.
Given name, nationality, date of birth
… she turned herself upside down. She had braided her dark brown hair the day she got the picture taken. Now she wished she hadn’t. One braid was fatter than the other. She thought her large eyes looked too hopeful, like the eyes of a dog.
    Rank bounded into the room with two glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade in his hands. His long, checkered shirttail was hanging out of his pants. “You should see it down there!” he babbled excitedly. “There’s a real live sheep tied up right outside the back door of this hotel! I touched its head and it went
baaa-aaa!
Then I saw mysterious carving in a stone on the floor by the restaurant! It looks like a code! Was this place here when Jesus was?”
    “Goofball!” Liyana said. They downed their lemonades in three great gulps each.
    Poppy kept talking a mile a minute as theywaited for Sitti and the family to appear. He unpacked his travel kit and sprayed on fresh cologne. He combed his thick hair back from his forehead and stared into a mirror, probably for the first time in weeks. Then he turned to them and placed his hands together.
    “Remember, Sitti comes from a different world. She’s very—earthy. She doesn’t wear anything but old-fashioned long clothes and she never did. She may seem strange to you. You won’t understand her. I’ll translate whatever you need, since she knows absolutely nothing in English—”
    Liyana interrupted—“As little as we know in Arabic?”—and her mother hushed her.
    Poppy continued without blinking, “They’ll want us to come out to the village tonight to eat, but look, it’s a twenty-eight-mile drive one way and it’s four P.M. already. I’ll say you’re tired from the long flight. All right? If we go to the village, a hundred people will be pouring into the house to see us. It’s too much for tonight. Is everyone okay?”
    Liyana said, “We used to be okay, till you started making us so nervous!” She whispered to Rafik, “Does he think they won’t like us? Does he think we won’t like them?”
    Rafik lay on the bed, sighing happily. He said, “Have you felt these pillows? They’re the deepest pillows in the world!”
    Liyana lay down on the next bed. Her head sank into the soft feathers and she said, “You’re right.” Then she got up again and changed from her blue corduroy pants to her pleated black skirt. She was thinking how amazing it was that people could get on an airplane and step off again in a different universe.
    After Poppy had peeked out the window twenty times at taxis veering by with honking horns and squealing tires and their mother had combed and recombed her hair, applying a new dash of perky red lipstick, everyone finally arrived. Their babbling echoes filled the lobby before they got on the elevator. Poppy stepped outside the door to greet them.
    Then a huge crowd of relatives burst into the room, bustling, hugging, pinching cheeks, and jabbering loudly. They were smoky smelling, not like cigarette smoke but the deeper smoke of a campfire that goes into clothes and stays there after the fire’s out.
    Indeed, they