The son's work jacket had stayed folded in the low drawer of the dresser, under the heavy sheets that in Jabalia are of no use from March to November and that she had laid over it on purpose, not to hide it but to give it a weight that would hold it still, because a thing folded under something heavy is a thing one has decided not to look at, and the months had passed in which she had not looked at it, the months in which she had learned that trade no one teaches, the one that consists of saying a person's name in the past tense without the voice breaking, the name said to the neighbours, to the women in the water line, to the cousin come from Deir al Balah, always in the same way, with the cadence one uses for those who are gone. It was a trade. She had learned it well.

Because the house, all around, had already remade itself without him, in the way the houses of the living remake themselves around the dead: the place at the table removed not with a gesture but with the slow habit of setting it for one fewer, the father who from the chair with the single leg no longer asked for news because he had stopped waiting for it when it had stopped arriving, the two brothers who had gone out after him and had not come back at all, so that the son of the drawer, the first, the one from the summer of hunger, the one who had gone out with the other to fetch the flour when fetching the flour meant standing in line beneath a thing that could fall from the sky, had become in the household's reckoning the least recent of the griefs, the most settled, the one the stones had already grown over. The jacket still had, on its elbows, the dust of that summer. She knew it without opening it.

Of that summer she remembered above all the flour, which had become the thing one died for, because there was none, and to have it you had to stand in line at a point open toward the sea where the line itself was the danger, and the son had gone there with the other, the second, the one who then had not come back at all, and they had gone out early in the morning saying they would be away an hour, the time to fill two bags; and that hour had stretched into a day, and the day into a week, and the week into the months in which the house had learned to do without them one at a time, first the second son with a swift and cruel certainty, then the first, the one of the jacket, with the slowness of one who has no body to weep over and so weeps over a drawer. The father, who in the flight of that week had lost a leg beneath a fallen thing and now carried it wrapped to the knee, from his chair no longer named any of the three. He had stopped counting his sons as she had stopped setting the table for them.

Then someone at the door said a word that was his name in the present tense.

And she, who held the jacket in her hand because at that very moment, by one of those coincidences that cannot be explained and that afterward seem an order, she had opened the drawer to take out a sheet and move the jacket further back, where things go once it has been decided that winter no longer concerns them, stayed with the cloth between her fingers as the word came from the threshold; and she did not run, this is what no one understands about those who have learned that trade, she did not run, because to run would have been to believe before seeing, and she had believed and then undone the believing once, and the second time the hand wanted the proof. The proof came in at the door. It had a narrower face and the years upon it of one who has lived twice as many, but it was the proof.

Then she did the thing for which there was no reason, the thing that served no purpose while he was there in the flesh, alive, on the threshold, that is, instead of going to meet him she went to the nail behind the door, the nail where for years the jacket had hung when he came home from work, and she put the jacket back on it, opened it out by the shoulders and hung it, because to hang it on the nail, and not to leave it folded in the drawer, was the only way she knew to say a thing that the words in the present tense did not yet have the courage to say, that is, that from now on she counted him again among the living, that she was putting his things back into the round of things that are used, that she accepted, by hanging a jacket on a nail, that she would have to be able to lose him once again.

The nail held. The jacket took the shape of the empty shoulders and for an instant, against the door, there was the outline of him hung beside him standing, twice the same, the son and his shape.

He looked at the jacket on the nail and understood, in the way sons understand mothers without anything being said, that this was the greatest thing that had been done for him since he had gone out of the flour line a year before; and he did not say thank you, because thank you was small; and she did not ask him where he had been, did not ask him who had held him, did not ask him about the father who from his chair watched him still not trusting his eyes, did not ask him about the two brothers, whose name it was now she who had to say in the past tense for him. She asked him, in the voice of every day, the way one asks the simplest thing in the world of someone who has just come into the house: have you eaten?