This is my reward for everything I've endured. Instead, Nana grabbed Mariam by the wrists, pulled her close, and, through gritted teeth, said, "You are a clumsy little harami. Nana looked so mad that Mariam feared the jinn would enter her mother's body again.
When Nana saw the bowl, her face flushed red and her upper lip shivered, and her eyes, both the lazy one and the good, settled on Mariam in a flat, unblinking way. It was this last piece that slipped from Mariam's fingers, that fell to the wooden floorboards of the kolba and shattered. Nana cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot's spout, the hand-painted finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.
The tea set was the sole relic that Mariam's mother, Nana, had of her own mother, who had died when Nana was two. To pass the time until the moment that she would see him at last, crossing the knee-high grass in the clearing and waving, Mariam had climbed a chair and taken down her mother's Chinese tea set. It must have, because Mariam remembered that she had been restless and preoccupied that day, the way she was only on Thursdays, the day when Jalil visited her at the kolba.
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